The Border, DEI, Trump, Islam, BLM & the Misinterpretation of Data | Sam Harris

Welcome back to Impact Theory! As we dive into part two, Sam Harris and I confront the urgent matters of systemic racism, Trump, the problem with the right, and rehash an old beef he had with me and Constantine. Let’s get back into it.

Um, so the border, I think, is something that we can end up over-focusing on. I think the border is a symptom of something larger. For me, it is a few different ideas that people are in the grips of.

So, thing number one is that for, call it the last 50-ish years, there's been a march through the institutions with a radical Marxist viewpoint that has come out to DEI. And I think what DEI is designed to do is break institutions by hijacking people's compassion circuitry. The real thing that makes that stick is that everybody wants to do something incredibly meaningful for the world. So you have people that have a pretty cynical desire— they're driven by a will to power. Their cynical desire is: “Oh, I can break this institution. I can tear it down. I can do my good thing in the world by convincing people to make their contribution to the world by just absolutely obliterating power dynamics.”

Ultimately, this is a game of power being played. But the ground troops, I think, oftentimes really do have wonderful motives. They are motivated by compassion. They really want to help. Does that feel accurate, or do you think I’m oversimplifying or missing something?

Yeah, I agree with that. I think— certainly most people, most of the time— have reasonably good intentions. I mean, incentives are a lot. People can be relied upon to get pushed around by what's in their self-interest. If you're going to make windfall profits going down one path, even if that path seems ethically suspect, it’s going to take a very high-integrity person to resist those incentives.

So, the larger solve here is we want systems of incentives that make it easier and easier for even selfish people to behave more ethically, and more, even more and more like saints. If you have the right system of incentives, you can even have sociopaths effectively behaving like saints because they’re just appropriately incentivized to do that. Whereas if you have the wrong incentives, you can have people who are nearly saints behaving like sociopaths because the incentives are just overwhelmingly aimed in the wrong direction.

But I agree with you that compassion has been misdirected and just informed by bad information. I mean, most people who think to take something like "defund the police," for instance— that’s the worst political slogan ever passed. The people who were in favor of defunding the police— I'm sure 100% of them genuinely thought, and probably still think, that there is an epidemic of racist police violence aimed at the black community, and that the way to address that compassionately is to have fewer cops on the streets.

The real risk to young black men is that they're going to get killed by cops. That’s just not true. The real risk to young black men is other young black men. This is just established beyond any possibility of doubt by the actual statistics on crime and violence in American society.

What you have in the black community are bad policing failures. Murders don’t get solved, right? Petty crime— you have a history of the War on Drugs which was disproportionately targeted toward minorities. That has been terrible and has created a cycle of incarceration that has been a genuine source of misery and unfairness in our society. The War on Drugs is its own problem. What it did to our justice system is certainly worth analyzing, and we shouldn’t make those mistakes again.

But when you look at the reality of murder in America, it is overwhelmingly a story of young black men killing other young black men in the black community and ineffective policing of those crimes.

But even on that— and this is one of the areas where I feel like people aren’t having the right argument at the right level. I don’t think anything you said is untrue— though people will certainly debate that. Compassion is going to follow you here as well. So when you say, "Cops just really aren't the problem," the stats bear that out.

Immediately, they’re going to have an emotional reaction. They— being activists that are trying to make life better for young black men. They look at that and say, "Okay, Sam, it sounds like you're trying to say that there isn't a problem." Even if Sam, well, I am literally saying there isn't. The problem they think exists simply does not exist to the best of our knowledge.

I'm not saying there are no racist cops out there. I mean, yes, but that is a rounding error on the problem of lethal violence against black men. Let me land the plane about what happens to this part of the audience when they hear you. What they're thinking in their minds is: "Sure, but the reason that black-on-black violence is the real concern—even if I concede that point—is that they've grown up in a racist system, so of course that's going to be a problem.”

What I’m saying is, you said earlier, it’s very hard to convince people to change their mind. I think the reason for that is what I call "frame of reference." When somebody has a frame of reference, they're wearing what I call "whole life beer goggles." It just distorts wildly everything that you see. But you’re actually seeing it. So you’re looking at it. You actually see that this is a problem of systemic racism.

That’s why my neighborhood is terrible. That’s why black-on-black violence is there. So anybody who denies that is just part of the systemic racist problem, which is why I don’t even necessarily think they’re being manipulative when they say, “Anyone who denies this is just racist—plain and simple.”

There’s the whole concept of, “I don’t need another black face; I need another black voice.” Right? So that even if somebody who is black is saying, “This isn't true; the stats don’t bear it out,” they’re going to get attacked as well because what they’re not addressing is the worldview that says, “This isn’t their fault.”

Anyone being oppressed— poverty is just such an easy way to see someone being crushed by some unseen hand. You just go, “Anyone being crushed isn't their fault, and therefore I’m looking for an external problem.” I am not saying, “Hey, even though this isn't your fault that you're growing up in poverty”— clearly, it's not your fault; you were just born into it. Bad luck— but only you can do something about it.

That’s where the collision has to happen. It's like, I get it— this isn't their fault. Poverty is a cycle that people are just born into, but the only way out is for that individual to do a thing.

Well, they may need help. I think it’s—we simply don’t know what the perfect social policy is to eradicate inequality in our society. I think we should— I think both things are true simultaneously: It’s foolish to imagine there will be no inequality, and it’s even foolish to imagine we want a society with zero inequality. There’s something about inequality that is probably useful in a variety of ways.

But you’ve already moved on.

But no, but just let me— on the point, a certain degree of inequality should be in our right to play on our compassion circuits. It should be intolerable to us if we have people starving to death in America. That’s just— a level of dysfunction we have to figure out somehow to correct.

We don’t have people starving to death in America. And that’s one measure of how much better life is in a society like ours than it is elsewhere in the world. But we want the floor to keep— as we produce more and more wealth, we want some of that wealth to continue to raise the floor beneath which no one is going to fall in our society.

Even the poorest person in our society is much less poor than they are in sub-Saharan Africa and much less poor than anyone was 100 years ago. And that’s good. That’s progress. I think we do not want to live in a society where you have a Gini coefficient like in Brazil, where it becomes just rational for rich people to live with, you know, gated compounds with razor wire across the top because there’s just so much crime out on the sidewalk for obvious reasons.

Because people are desperately poor and they’re not figuring out anything else creative to do with their lives but to rob people richer than themselves.

Well, so this gets to the thing that I’m really trying to drag people to. And there’s something about the way that I approach this. I am not able to get people in my lane here. The reason the Gini coefficient matters is a true thing about human psychology, which is that poverty isn't a problem— poverty next to wealth is a problem.

Because it triggers the— I mean, you know the capuchin monkey thing? Give a capuchin monkey a cucumber for doing a thing and it’s perfectly happy to take it, but it prefers grapes. So if you give its neighbor a grape for the same task, the capuchin monkey getting the cucumber goes ballistic, yanking on their cage and throwing the cucumber back at the person. I mean, it’s absolutely just funny, if I’m honest, just watching it happen because you recognize the truth of that in yourself as a human.

And so where I’m trying to get people to go is, because it all started with, is the West committing suicide? And if it is committing suicide, how do we defend the West? If it is worth defending, I think you’ve already made a good case that the West is worth defending. But the line that people need to draw is, it’s worth defending because it yielded better outcomes.

Now that our current system is beginning to yield a Gini coefficient that is bad, we can say, “Okay, something is starting to break down.” Now we need to address that; it is currently yielding an ever-increasing Gini coefficient. If we know that leads to violence, and our north star is human flourishing, and humans don’t flourish in violence, we now have a system that is no longer outputting the thing it needs to output.

To me, the West is predicated on one simple fact: some ideas yield better outcomes than others. You must put those ideas out into a marketplace and let them compete. So we let people have free speech; we let people have private property; we let people generate wealth by creating things that other people want.

And hey, even though it’s a trade-off, it is definitely not a perfect system that you can track based on results. Now, what I see breaking down is an assault on results-based systems full stop because they yield inequality.

Going back to you have cynical actors driven by will to power hijacking the compassion of people to get them to stop looking at outcomes. And now you have Thomas Sowell's quote: “The last 30 years have been marked by exchanging what works”— meaning it yields an outcome— “with what sounds good.”

So, from what I can see, the only way to defend the West is to get people to buy into “some ideas yield better outcomes” and that we must judge every social program, every potential way that we solve a problem, through the outcome it generates.

Yeah, I just—I mean, there’s— you have to have the right intentions. I mean, if you have bad intentions, then you’re going to seek bad outcomes. So we don’t want to discount the role of intention. But yeah, we want to know whether the goods we’re attempting to achieve in the world are actually achievable, and if we’re producing harms that we don’t want, we should be aware of that and we should error-correct.

Insofar as we don’t have systems that are responsive, or incentives that are responsive to that, that’s clearly a problem. But we should recognize that there are consequences to just failing to coordinate. If you take American society as a whole, if you have— let’s say, I’m not saying we have good remedies for homelessness in California, but let's say we did.

Let’s say we just had the most compassionate and well-intended, and in fact wise policies with respect to homelessness in California and what to do about it. In neighboring states, they just had a draconian “get off my lawn” policy. Well then, California is going to attract all of the nation's homeless— or all of the homeless from the surrounding states even with a good policy and be overrun.

To some degree, I think that’s probably happened in California. Doesn’t that to you automatically mean it isn't a good policy?

Well, no, but I’m saying idiot compassion can have bad consequences that way, where you just, if you're just, essentially subsidizing fentanyl addiction on your sidewalks, that’s obviously stupid, even locally. But it’s going to have this global consequence of drawing more of the drug addicted and homeless to you. But I’m saying that even if we had a good policy, which is better than just funding drug addiction on our sidewalks, if no other neighboring states have good policies, then we’re still going to be pulling more than our fair share and it could break our system too.

So we need— we have a coordination problem that we have to solve as a nation and arguably as a global civilization. I think there are problems that we can’t solve as a nation. I mean, you know, climate change is not something any one nation can address, and a global pandemic is not something that any one nation can address, right?

So we need coordinated efforts even at a global scale, and we should recognize this even from a position— I mean, you don’t have to be a saint or even to be especially motivated by compassion to want these goods to be shared broadly. You just have to be wisely selfish. You just have to recognize— no matter how selfish you are as a billionaire in Silicon Valley, no matter how much you are taken in by the illusion that you are completely self-made and that nobody gave you any help at all, even though you can’t account for any of the abilities and contexts that allowed you to do the work you did, right?

But be as resolutely selfish as you want— then ask yourself the question: how many homeless people do you want to have to step over on the sidewalk leaving your compound? Right? Do you want to feel unsafe at a restaurant because there are so many people panhandling at the tables in the cafe? Do you want to be able to sit outside in a restaurant, or is that going to be unthinkable now because there’s so much chaos on the street?

Just what sort of society do you want to be in? Do you want to be surrounded by desperate, envious people, or do you want to be surrounded by creative, self-actualized, happy people who can be your customers and who are going to celebrate your success when you do something visibly successful? Or are you going to want to be surrounded by people who are thinking maybe it's time to get the pitchforks and murder you?

Even just a psychopathic commitment to self should bear at least some modium of altruism— for self-preservation alone, you should want life to be minimally good for everyone around you.

So we don’t need widespread sainthood to agree on policies that would make life better for more and more people and solve a problem like homelessness. What do you need then?

I mean, we need to cancel dumb ideas, right? I mean, they’re obvious. They’re so, for instance, our default is in America that in public space, we’ve got freedom of assembly, right? You should be able to— you are free to be on the sidewalk, right? It’s a public space— you’re not trespassing, it’s not a private space.

Our default sense is that someone should be free to live out the chaos of their mental illness or their drug addiction or their violence in front of us and even die in front of us on the sidewalk. That compassion, the better part of compassion, is allowing that to happen— allowing the autonomy to just live out their dysregulation in front of others.

It's somehow unseemly or bigoted or otherwise selfish to point out the obvious social cost of having to live with this dysfunction in our midst, right? So like that— having to cross the street with your children so as to avoid the obviously insane or obviously drug-addicted person on this side of the street—that's a social cost, right?

There are businesses that aren’t opening or that will soon be closing because of all this chaos here. There are parts of town that you’re not going to want to go to or have your kids go to. Those restaurants will close, right? This is all a spiral, and we all have an interest in figuring out how to help that person and figuring out how that help is best delivered in a way that doesn’t make this particular part of the city uninhabitable— in some cases, even some of the nicest parts of town.

We need policies that— so in this specific case, we need a policy that allows you to take someone off the sidewalk. We need a recognition that the really compassionate thing to do is to intrude into their lives and get them the help they need at a place where it can be delivered—not on the sidewalk in front of a department store.

Yes, there are people who need to be taken out of society and institutionalized in some sense, whether it’s just delivering rehabilitation with respect to drug addiction or whether it’s mental health treatment or getting them on appropriate medication. There are better and worse ways to do this— there’s no perfect way to do any of this.

But why don’t we get these policies? Well, because at the first cut, you have people who have a very confused notion of compassion, which is, it is to intrude upon this person, to not move them off the sidewalk, to move them out of your nice neighborhood— to be concerned in the first place about your nice neighborhood.

For you, rich guy, to care about crossing the street with your kids, right? All of that is white privilege and gentrification and completely uninteresting from an ethical perspective. That is some species of selfish evil. Does that like a trick that has been played on people or is that just accidental? Did that come from a good place? How did that narrative get started?

Well, it’s easy to see how if you have a class-based view of everything, and you resent certain areas of town becoming gentrified and rents going up, and it becoming harder to live in those areas because rents have gotten higher, like if all that process seems dystopian to you in principle, then you’re going to say all of this is a consequence of the rich people getting what they want and extracting it from this part of society, right?

We wouldn’t have this homelessness problem in the first place if housing was just more affordable. That may be true in a few cases. In some cases, some percentage of instances, it’s not true across the board. So much of the homeless problem is a problem of substance abuse and mental illness.

It’s not just that rents are too high. But in so far as building more housing and affordable housing is the remedy, we should do that. We have to recognize it’s not the remedy across the board, and we can’t— in California— become a sanctuary for the entire country’s homeless problem.

Again, it requires a coordinated effort across states, but you have to dissect that each moment of moral confusion that is a blocker to an actually compassionate and effective policy. The first one here is people have a right— that person who’s lying in his own vomit in front of the J. Crew store on the mall has just as much a right to be there as you do to go shopping there, right?

If you own J. Crew, well, you’re just some rich guy who is worried about your retail business. And that’s a completely superficial concern compared to the real human emergency of this person’s life on the sidewalk. And it stops there, right? You’re some species of bigot to not want to have to step over that person in order to go into a store, and you’re some species of bigot, if you’re a store owner, noticing your business being destroyed by the chaos and dysfunction on the sidewalk.

All of that class-based resentment toward the rich people who are trying to figure out how this, this what used to be a nice neighborhood got so ugly— that has to be dissected and realigned with a really compassionate policy, which is you are not doing this person any favors. Letting them bake in the sun on fentanyl on a sidewalk, right?

That is not the freedom you should want them to be exercising. You should have to figure out a policy by which you can intrude upon their lives and move them to a place where they can actually get help.

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Do you think simply explaining to people what the moral math ought to be will actually make this happen, or do things have to get so bad that pain and suffering, plus having heard somewhere on a podcast at one time Sam Harris walks me through the moral math, swings us back in the opposite direction?

Well, I don’t think there are that many minds that have to be changed. I think, you know, the people in charge, the people who are on our city councils and in the mayor’s offices, and the governor, etc.— those are the minds that have to be changed if we’re going to get new policies.

So far as people have to vote for initiatives, all of that— there’s a war of ideas that has to be won, but I don’t think it’s hard to win, and certainly there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit here.

I think, again, to come back to where we started with this conversation, there’s a distortion that social media has created for us where you have a very small percentage of activists who are seriously confused about right and wrong and good and evil, who are so loud on social media that they cow everyone into silence.

It’s just so painful to become the target of people who have way too much time on their hands on social media that people step away from it. But it is a minority.

We just have a very distorted sense of just how many people are— I mean, to take an issue we haven’t touched here but around which there’s a ton of activism— like just what percentage of people in the trans community are actually trans activists who are making people’s lives hell online? Right?

It’s probably a small percentage even of the trans community, and the trans community is the tiniest percentage of any society. And so you have not a lot of people just going scorched Earth, you know, online. And it’s such that it becomes a national political priority if you’re a Democrat to figure out just what’s your policy on the whole trans thing, as though it’s like it’s right up there with, like, a civilizational collision with China and Russia and Iran.

It’s like we got that here, and then pretty much at the same level we’ve got, you know, trans athletes and trans baths. And, you know, maybe have to give equal time to those things, right?

Even if you’re Biden, you know, I mean, it’s insane what he has done to his own political prospects just on that issue. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be compassionate around the trans issue and that we shouldn’t have political equality for trans people. All of that’s real and worth talking about.

But the idea that Biden has used the amount of political capital that he barely had on that issue the way he has— I mean, it’s just a pure distortion based largely on what activists have managed to do on social media.

There’s a concept in finance about debt cycles and that there’s no escaping the debt cycle. They don’t take the exact amount of time, but there are six stages that people move through. You start by reshuffling all the debt, usually through just blood, death, and turmoil.

You start building from the ground up in this really great society that has not tripped into over-accumulating debt yet, has not had the inflationary practice of printing money. You just basically march your way towards the sixth phase, which is total collapse because you’ve overprinted the money; you get hyperinflation.

Your debt is just unimaginably high. The only way to discharge that is through bloodletting. People war and fight, and they just say, “Okay, we’re just going to let go of the old debt and start anew.”

And that’s your cycle. You go over and over. I don’t want the following statement to be true but I worry that it might be that the good men—hard times, like that whole cycle is just a cycle, and we have to go through it.

My earlier statement about there just has to be enough pain where your daughter gets attacked by a crackhead on your doorstep, and now enough people have that kind of experience that they just don’t care whether they sound PC or not— they’re just like, “Nope, this isn’t going to happen anymore.”

To your earlier point about if the Democrats don’t protect the border, then fascists will— at some point, people have just had enough, and they’re going to stand up and they’re going to take this back, and you get this violent swinging of the pendulum.

I would much prefer that people can be persuaded with ideas, but when I look at the world, I just— in the face of you saying there are only a few people that have to have their minds changed, I’m like, you’ve been out here for 20 years yelling into the wind.

I have certainly been influenced by your ideas, but it doesn’t seem like the right people are. It seems instead that people are breaking off into different states and people are leaving California, going to Texas, going to Florida because they don’t want to put up with this kind of thing, which is not, in my estimation, the ideal scenario.

So do you think that there’s just a better way to present these ideas, and we really will win at that level, or not?

Well, I do worry about that kind of pendulum swing and us just losing our patience and losing our cool, and suddenly becoming way more callous than we are just because we are swinging back, we’re swinging away from some very silly policies and their bad consequences.

I think— I mean, again, I’ve mentioned this a couple of times, but it’s just worth keeping in mind there is this massive problem of preference falsification where it is seeming like many more people agree with the fringes than do. The silence of the majority is being misread as agreement or at least just, or certainly not disagreement— whereas it really is just silence.

In many cases, I know this firsthand. There are many people who agree with me on my EDG opinions and just would never say anything in public. I mean, they’re so grateful that I’m out here saying the things I’m saying so that they don’t have to, but they don’t see the consequence of their silence in their lane— whatever that lane is.

Because it seems like in most cases, it seems like mere acquiescence to the crazy opinions that they’re happy I’m criticizing, right? So, like me— what you said about DEI, right?

I mean, until yesterday, to be against DEI in any way, really— to do anything other than celebrate it as, you know, finally we’ve arrived is to be racist. And to be called racist in America, certainly, is the worst thing you can be called, probably next to a pedophile.

To merely be called it is to be tainted. To be called it with no justification is, in many cases, enough to perform a kind of reputational murder. And that’s just— we have to grow out of that.

If you really want equality, if you really want to embrace MLK’s vision of valuing people based on the content of their character and get past the superficial differences between people like skin color, you have to hold to that, right?

You can’t overcorrect into this “Iben-Kendi” anti-racist— i.e., reverse racist— attitude, which is white people are bad, and it’s completely legitimate to harm their interests preferentially as a way of correcting for all the history of inequality in our society.

I think it’s totally valid to look at the consequences of past racism and worry that there’s something more we should be doing to correct for the current status quo. When you look at the details, you should still make people uncomfortable. I mean, the fact that, on average, white families have eight times the wealth of black families in America, to whatever degree past racism is the reason why that’s the case— that is a legacy that nobody should be happy about.

It’s completely understandable that there are people who look at that and say, “Okay, well, we should pay reparations. Right? That’s the way to solve this problem.” Now, I happen to think it’s the wrong way to solve the problem.

If you want to hear someone withstanding on this topic talk about it, you can listen to John McWhorter and Glenn Lowry. You know, they’ve kind of dissected why they think this would be a disaster.

But the impulse to just— we know what our history was with respect to race in America and to look at present inequality with respect to wealth and health outcomes, and levels of crime, it’s completely natural to say, “Okay, wait a minute. We’ve got something to atone for here. What can we do to help?”

I’m totally sympathetic with that. DEI, at the level of who gets into medical school, is the wrong way to help. Right? To lower the standards so that when you walk into an office and your doctor’s black, you have to think, “Oh my God, I know that for the last 15 years, standards have been lowered at every stage along the way to promote more black cardiologists and black neurologists, and now I have to— now I’m left thinking, does this guy or gal have lesser qualifications than the Asian doctor that I could go to or the Jewish doctor I could go to?”

To know that, in many cases, the answer is probably yes, given the system we’ve built— that’s awful, right? It’s racist to have to think that way. But the fact that you could be justified in thinking that way based on bad policies— that’s serving no one’s interest, certainly not the black community’s interest.

So if we’re going to put a thumb on the scale, we have to figure out ways of doing it that don’t actually destroy what is good about meritocracy. Right? Where, you know, the person who’s flying the plane is actually qualified to fly the plane, and you didn’t grade on a curve based on skin color so as to get more black or brown pilots.

I mean that’s just— no one wants that at 30,000 feet. Everyone’s an elitist. Everyone wants a qualified pilot, right? Everyone wants a qualified brain surgeon. When it’s brain surgery for your kid, you’re an elitist.

You don’t want the DEI version of brain surgery. And when we find out that Asians had to score 400 points higher on the SAT to get into Harvard because of their DEI policy, and then, you know, Harvard was correcting for it on the admissions committee by saying that Asians lacked personality— this was their euphemism for how they were going to implement their reverse racism.

It’s an embarrassment, and rightly so, for the whole institution.

So we— there’s no question that there are inequalities that we want to respond to compassionately. There’s no question that there will still be some amount of inequality left that we ultimately have to convince ourselves we don’t care about, right? Because there’s no way to make everything equal all the time.

There’s no question we want to figure out how to spread the wealth around, but we want to incentivize creative self-people to make as much wealth as possible. These are all— there are going to be trade-offs at the margins. But in the current environment, it’s very easy to recognize bad policies.

Um, I want to paint a vision for how I think we get out of this. Let me know if you see any holes in this because you’ve done a good job of mapping the problem space.

I come at it as a business guy, which I think is the right training for looking at something like this because you’re getting punched in the face by the market all day. You realize, to pay your staff their salaries and make sure they can take care of their family, you better solve these problems real fast.

You have to understand what a good outcome is; it has to be very well defined. You have to be thinking kind of like a pool player. It’s not enough to get the ball in the pocket; you want it to go in; you have to set up the cue ball for the next one that you’re going to knock in.

Think of it as second and third order consequences.

So I’ll just grant that doing some of the admissions— saying that Harvard was doing— was really coming from a wonderful place. They were just only thinking first-order consequences. They were just thinking, “I’m going to give more African Americans a chance at this.” But they may not have even looked at the die already being cast by— if Jeffrey Canada is right, and it really comes down to the number of words that a child hears by the age of three and the ratio of positive to negative words because of what it does to the language centers of your brain.

By the time they get to a college admissions board, that’s really not the place to try to help them again. Now I’m looking at it as a business guy, and I’m willing to say— and quite frankly, I changed the whole direction of my business when I realized that this was true—that, in some ways, you have to give up on adults.

The reward of time and energy is just not there. Adults can make change; please understand. I have a university that I teach only adults at. But they’re what I call the 2%.

I started all of this trying to teach adults when I was running my previous company, Quest Nutrition, and I just had so many kids that grew up in the inner cities. 2% of them changed their life forever. 98% though did nothing with the ideas. It was crazy because they were blinded by their frame of reference, potentially just not having encountered enough of these ideas early enough in their brain development.

That just made it harder for them later in life, again, that’s a poverty thing. It doesn’t have anything to do with skin color, right?

So anyway, that to me seems the way out. You just have to be relentlessly focused on nipping the problem in the bud, which as far as I can tell is poverty. You need education that is going to dramatically impact brain development, and then you have metrics all along the way for early indicators of future success: verbal fluency, reading comprehension, math problem-solving, how to be creative, and address novel problems, so on and so forth.

Do you think maybe that’s impossible? But do you think if it were possible that that would work? Or am I missing something?

Well, so I don’t know. I can’t speak to Canada’s results in education, but, you know, assuming they are as you say, yeah, obviously, there’s a consequence to having the right techniques at the earliest possible level in education versus the wrong ones.

So we want good teachers, and we want good methodologies, and, insofar as we know how to implement all that, we should do it. We should prioritize it at a level that’s far beyond what we do.

I mean, it’s amazing that being a primary school teacher is a very low-status job compared to all the other jobs on offer. It pays badly; it attracts people who couldn’t—I mean, you know, you’re not choosing between going into aerospace engineering or, you know, teaching kindergarten, right?

The educational track that would get you there is different. It’s just— it should be a much higher value job. What— how we educate our kids and— we may— it’s quite possible we haven’t figured out how to— we certainly haven’t figured out how to use technology so as to make that a better process than, you know— I mean, if COVID taught us anything, just getting more iPads into the system is not improving things.

I’m amazed at how mediocre education can seem even when it’s the best— seemingly the best education, you know, on offer. So much of it seems to be just warehousing kids. It’s like the real problem that’s being solved is the parents have to go to work every day. We have to get these kids up earlier in the day than they can physiologically even begin to pay attention because the parents have to leave the house at that hour to go to get to work.

We have these blurry-eyed kids getting warehoused in, you know, with nice laptops in, you know, private schools that cost $50,000 a year. It’s obviously way better than bad public schools. Yet, even bad public schools cost whatever it is— $177,000 a year per student in California, I think. Something like that? That’s an insane, you know, level of bureaucracy around it.

There’s a just a reaming out of the system we have to do and a lot of change we need to make to do it. But I agree with you that we want to prioritize the changes we can effectively make.

I'm not saying we can give up on adults, but we— you know, in terms of how we weight our resources. Yeah, we— if you can radically change a person's life at age six in a way that you absolutely can't at age 16, well then, yeah, we need to be driving toward the earlier interventions.

And then we have to do whatever we can do for older kids and adults. Again, self-interest alone should make you want to not have to confront the stark chaos and violence of a totally disregulated life right outside your office or, you know, the restaurant you've gone to with your kids or your home.

I just don’t think it works because the compassion circuit is too easy to hijack. When you were talking earlier, I took a note that said they just have better bumper stickers. So compassion people on the left— like, it’s just way easier to say that we need to take care of these people and that— think about how much of the things that you have if you grew up in a good family, middle class.

Yeah, that really is privilege. Did you really do anything to earn it? And by the way, neither of us believe in free will. So it’s like, really, really, did I earn any of this? No, because this is essentially billiard balls bouncing around.

However, the reason that I stay trying to push these ideas out is that regardless of whether free will exists or not, we do respond to encountering ideas.

We’re systems that can be influenced at every stage.

Exactly!

All right, on that note, I actually owe you a public apology. You had come on my show, so I had seen the trigonometry clip that you did that went crazy viral. I watched it, and I was like, “Okay, hold on. Sam is somebody I respect tremendously. You’re one of the most important parts of the sensemaking apparatus, I think literally for the world, certainly for me.”

I’m seeing people again use memes to just be like, “Oh, we don’t have to pay attention to Sam.” Now, to your point about selfishly— selfishly, that’s just from where I’m standing; that’s a terrible thing for the world.

So I wanted to go in and really understand it. I came up with a breakdown of what I thought you were saying, and you and I discussed it, and then Constantine and I discussed it.

Much to my dismay, you named both Constantine and me in a later podcast, saying, “I’m no longer going to try to explain myself to people because people just cannot understand me.” You said, “Look, I think Tom and Constantine are good guys. I’m in the communication business full-time, but I’ve admitted that I can’t correct someone's misperception of whatever they thought I said, and I’m no longer going to try.”

Yeah, it’s a pretty forlorn position to have arrived at, but understandably so.

It was a moment of just— I mean, it was comic despair because I realized that like I had spoken to both of you independently for something like three hours on that topic, and still you both seemed to be converging on what I viewed as a misunderstanding of my actual position.

I will not speak for Constantine, but I will speak for myself. I was aghast when I heard it because I thought you were so wrong.

I felt that I had so come to your aid, giving the only plausible explanation for what had happened. Then, I went in researching for this episode, rewatched all of it, including what I said, and I really was wrong.

It’s one of those— when I went into the research, I was like, “There’s no universe in which I don’t understand this.” So to be confronted with the fact that I did get it wrong is utterly fascinating.

So I want to present now what I think you were saying in that. And again, it’s not necessarily that I agree, and I touched on some of this earlier in our interview about where I don't agree.

In that, I think it has a second-order consequence you may not notice or may not care about. I don’t know, but anyway, here’s the take from that clip, where a lot of people were just like “Trump derangement syndrome; you can’t be trusted.”

So for people that don’t know, it was about the Hunter Biden laptop, and you said more or less— obviously a paraphrase— there’s no corruption you’re going to find on that laptop that is going to be more troubling than the corruption that I already know that Trump has.

Right? Given that the laptop was a political game that was being delivered, one needs to acknowledge that and be willing to play an equally effective— you didn’t say “political game,” but that felt like the undercurrent; like you just have to meet that with and— it was a coin toss. You were very clear on that you’re not sure what the way to go was, so you just thought better to go slow.

Now, there were a few things you started to say: “There’s nothing that could have been on” and then you stopped yourself. But me and others put that together with— oh, you were about to say, “There’s nothing that could have been on that laptop.”

Combined with— and in your defense, I said that Biden could have the corpses of children in his basement. Exactly! But it was clearly a joke, and so those things end up getting conflated.

Through it all, what I thought you were saying as I sort of parse through it and think, “How could— knowing that Sam is a well-intentioned person, what could he have meant?” The first erroneous conclusion I came to was you believed Trump was an existential threat to the world.

Now, in rewatching the clip, you were very careful. You said Trump is an existential threat to democracy, not to the world. So I missed that, right?

So that was part of my thing. I was like, “Okay, Sam is saying if he’s an existential—” and again, I was not speaking especially well on that podcast, so I said a few things that were genuinely misleading.

I used like an asteroid hurtling toward Earth analogy, and that immediately puts people in mind of, “Okay, I think Trump is an existential threat to the life on this planet,” right?

But I wasn't using that analogy to make that point. I was using it to make the other point that we were talking about conspiracies and whether conspiracies are ever legitimate. My point is if there’s an asteroid coming hurling toward Earth, if people are going to conspire behind closed doors to figure out what to do about that, that’s— we don’t care about— there’s nothing intrinsically bad about people coordinating their efforts in private to figure out how to solve an emergency.

Again, there was a lot that was easily— that podcast was so easily clipped to my disadvantage. But the truth is, any podcast is. This podcast is.

I mean, there’s no question that someone can take out a snippet of something I’ve said in the last two-plus hours and make me look like a racist who doesn’t care about inequality in our society and thinks whatever.

I mean, there are so many bad intentions adjacent to an honest diagnosis of any specific problem in our society. It’s like it’s so easy to look like you’re getting tipped over into someone who just doesn’t care about suffering in this world.

I mean, so anything said about Islam or Gaza or race in America— I mean, it all is easily caricatured or misunderstood.

It is always a tightrope walk, and you know, I need to be as careful as I can be in talking about it. But in that case, it sounded like, to the naive ear— and that this clip was engineered to produce that effect— it sounded like I was saying you can throw all of your commitment to honesty and integrity out the window because this was such an emergency.

It’s— you’re justified in lying, bearing evidence, you know, throwing all your journalistic scruples out the window, ignoring real stories just to get the political outcome that I, Sam Harris, want, which is Trump not having a second term.

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Now, I think the harder part of all this is that even I didn’t respond to the clip. I had responded to the full interview and even I took that away, doing what I consider pretty careful analysis.

My presentation to the world and then to you— my presentation to the world is I think it is incredibly important to steal-man somebody's argument when you don’t agree with them in a way that they would recognize.

So I steal-man your argument, really believing I had found a path forward where I could understand you because you’ve been so useful in my life. Thinking through difficult things, I was very reticent to say, “Trump really broke your brain,” or whatever, right?

Because then I’m— I start going, “Ooh, like there’s some major discounting there.” So I found it and ended up being wrong. I found that I was wrong because I steal-manned the argument in a way you did not recognize.

You gave me— I mean, this is a podcast sort of back and forth. We weren’t doing it directly, but you gave me feedback that you did not recognize my steel-manning of your argument.

Then I went back and was like, “Let me see who’s right,” and that has been a really positive loop.

Now, part of just my innate thing is I don’t trust myself to get things right. I’m very skeptical of myself, just in the way that people ought to be “skeptical” of the science.

I think it just makes sense to always be looking for, “Is there really something here? Just assume for now that it is my fault.”

In seeing that, I would encourage the world to always do that. Don’t think someone’s your enemy; think instead, “Okay, can I say what they’re saying in a way that they would recognize?” And actually get them to confirm that, where you can.

Okay, so that did me very well in this argument.

Now my request to you is ironically, all the stuff that I’ve been belaboring in this talk is actually more or less about Israel Palestine. The reason is I feel completely ill-equipped to think through the problem other than through first principles, which will get me some of the way, but I feel equipped to think through the problem of Israel Palestine.

I see people using a memed version of things you've said to just be like, “You’re racist,” basically. Like anything that they’re conflating you saying, “A tenant of radical Islam leads to the holy war of jihad,” that’s a problem.

So we’ll get into that in a second, but because I’ll watch people, like I’ll listen to your podcast and be like, “Whoa, these are incredibly useful points.”

Then I’ll see people do commentary on the same podcast and they just loop around, “This is racist, racist, racist.” I’m like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.”

Because they’ll often bring up the sequence of people misunderstanding it. I’m putting together you saying, “I’m no longer going to care if people understand. I’m just going to put my ideas out, and then what comes comes.”

Unfortunately, what comes is that— because it’s impossible to detect all the ways that somebody can misunderstand something— your ideas are going to get distorted more and more over time, and more and more people will just reject somebody who’s good at thinking through these problems.

Okay, so ultimately, my request there is hopefully you see by pointing out that somebody well-intentioned really didn’t understand you, that they went and did the work and now can represent your thinking in a way that you recognize.

Yeah, I appreciate that. Thank you for sure. And then, now we can talk about why I think that— and we don’t necessarily need to go into this super deep. We can just say we agree to disagree.

But I, um— what I hope you take away from this is merely that some people can be reached. So here’s where I disagree with the statement that you’re making.

Now, we’re back to Hunter Biden laptop or Hunter Biden laptop, which I will thumbnail sketch. Please tell me if this does not sound right. I will thumbnail sketch to what I said a moment ago, which is, um— you— there wasn’t going to be anything on that laptop that proves corruption beyond what you already know Trump has.

Right? Joe Biden is not an existential threat to democracy.

When somebody is using political gamesmanship— and I think this is what you’re referring to when you talk about an out-in-the-open conspiracy— you’re not trying to hide that you believe that Biden is the right person to get elected.

And so you would never lie; that crosses a line for you, you were clear on that. You said that. But that given that this was time to cause maximal disruption, the response should be in that context.

The response should be either to slow roll it or maybe someone like the New York Times, if they can really get their facts together quickly enough— coin toss— maybe they should debunk it. They definitely should not have silenced the Washington Post or New York Post.

Whatever it was— Twitter. Yeah. When you go back and look at all those, you really do lay those out.

So now, though, even though I understand all of that, and it’s a very nuanced position and does not strike me as crazy at all, however, it strikes me as not advantageous in a world where the second and third order consequences— it’s very hard to put all of that together to parse it.

Because of that, then people meme it, and they just go, “See, this is just evidence that there’s nothing on that laptop. Sam doesn’t even care. Sam’s just a shill for the left and he’s broken on Trump.”

I think that you could actually debate the points of “Is Trump an existential threat to democracy?”

What would have needed to be on that laptop where you’re like, “Oh [ __ ]! Biden is actually more corrupt than Trump?”

Then you can lay out why you think Trump is corrupt, where the line is for you, where if this thing had been— if Joe Biden is taking bribes from this country and this amount— whatever— I don’t know.

But if you give people that, then they can be like, “Okay, cool. I get it.” Because the initial thesis of this episode is we are falling into conspiratorial land— people’s desire for conspiracy, their appetite— that’s a better way to say it— their appetite and openness to conspiracy is skyrocketing.

And if they don’t have the institutions and experts that they can turn to, I think all hell breaks loose for the reasons I outlined at the beginning.

Well, so we’re in a vicious loop here because we’re awash in misinformation and lies. Our information landscape is just polluted with toxic waste.

The problem is any effort to clean that up— certainly any effort that the government exerts, you know, whether it’s through laws or just through encouragement— right? Just talking from the government, talking to social media companies— like, “Really, it’d be nice if you stopped this particular, you know, bot army that is lying about election fraud,” say, “Please would you do that?”

Anything like that, and anything that the technocrats do— the people who own the platforms— to dampen down, to bias the algorithm against what they consider to be misinformation— all of that looks like the Orwellian confirmation of the worst fears of conspiracy theorists.

Right? Our own institutions look like the bad guys. We’re being gamed moment by moment by China and Russia and Iran and who knows who else. We’re being— our youth is just being preferentially misinformed by TikTok.

They think to take the— IDF is guilty of genocide in Gaza, right? And that meme spreads to the ends of the earth. You’ve got billions of people for the first time recognizing how awful war is. But this is a moment for which they blame the Jews for everything.

So you have— you’ve got anti-Semitism skyrocketing. Any attempt to modify that algorithmically, to boost catastrophe, is perceived as a conspiracy, and maybe a Jewish-inspired conspiracy, if you’re on this particular topic.

It just gets framed as this is the real enemy— authoritarian control of our freedom of speech.

This is censorship now. We have to figure out how to break that spell. Because we have a misinformation problem; we have a cyber war problem. We are being gamed by outside actors that don’t wish us well.

It’s not all coming from Russia and China, but they are fanning the flames of our own ambient partisanship and noise, and they don’t have to do much work to do it. I mean, we’re at each other’s throats politically, that they just have to keep touching us.

You know, just keep Black Lives Mattering us over here and keep, you know, Libs of TikTok over here; we can’t recognize one another.

We have to figure— we have to acknowledge that problem and we have to get the people— this is why I think there’s something especially culpable about alternative media.

The space in which you and I live now, the appetite in alternative media most of the time is for the contrarian anti-establishment take on everything, right? It’s the worst case; it’s the Alex Jones-ification of everything.

This is where Brett Weinstein, I think, has been part of the problem. He’s been captured by this conspiratorial take on more or less everything.

Whether the fault is him or the fault is his audience, or whether it’s a folly ad to theirs, it’s part of this problem. We have to figure out how to reboot from there somehow.

Then, yeah, I mean, to come back to the Hunter Biden laptop story for a moment, for me, it was just very simple. It was not that I think Trump is an existential risk to all of humanity or that he’s “orange Hitler.” It’s that here we had a sitting president who would not commit to a peaceful transfer of power.

That, for me, was such a shocking violation of our political norms. Just like the main guard rail on the viability of our democracy. It’s like— it’s not even—I’m not even sure what to put before that.

I mean, it’s like the rule of law is the most important thing. The following the Constitution is the most important thing. But this particular law, right? Like that we’re going to abide by a legal election and transfer power peacefully is— maybe there’s something in front of it, but it’s, you know, it was just— there literally is no other concern— there’s nothing that could be on that laptop that would rise to the level of superseding that concern.

Right? Nothing that you can imagine.

Well, nothing that I think is remotely like— well, I’m sure I could imagine something.

I think for people to understand what you’re saying, give them an example. What could have been on that laptop where you’d be like, “Okay, now this is admittedly worse.”

It would be hard because, well, I mean, it would have to be a criminal intent on the part of Joe Biden. I mean, Hunter Biden is irrelevant to me, really. But it could be some criminal culpability of President Biden or— not yet President Biden, you know, candidate Biden at that point—that was as seditionist to the norms of our democracy as not committing to a peaceful transfer of power.

Right? Taking money from China, let’s say.

Yeah. It’s not as bad. I mean, it's bad. It’s awful. And to my knowledge, nothing like that has been established on the basis of the laptop. But I mean, all of that would be disqualifying, but it’s not as disqualifying as being a sitting president who will not commit to a peaceful transfer of power.

I just think that’s just an absolute no zone, and it should be completely discrediting to his candidacy.

Now, I mean the fact that he is the Republican candidate, given that history, and given that we didn’t have a peaceful transfer of power— given what happened on January 6th— I mean, as much as you want to discount that and say that some of that was just, you know, live-action role play and it wasn’t really— to call them insurrectionists is an exaggeration.

All of that— it was still we still failed to have a peaceful transfer of power for the first time in our history, and it was because of him. It was because of the kind of populist lunacy he had consciously stoked.

He had done it throughout his entire presidency, and he did it for a full nine months in the runup to the election. He was not committing to a peaceful transfer of power. He was seeding the concern that the election was going to be a fraud in advance, and so it was the most malicious use of presidential power I had ever seen directed against our own society and our own democratic norms.

I think it’s— yeah, it’s a 20 megaton political problem. You know it’s not— it’s not the end of the world, but it is potentially the end of our democracy.

I mean, if we have a president who will not leave and we have a constant constitutional crisis that we cannot solve— if Mike Pence and half a dozen other people had behaved differently on that day, I don’t know where we would be.

Right? I mean, like who would have sent in the troops to get, you know, Trump out of power when he’s still the president who’s not giving up power and calling the election a fraud and his vice president isn’t confirming the electors because he’s created a perfect personality cult under him?

We were very close to that. I mean, it was just a handful of Republicans who still cared about the Constitution who kept us from blowing through the last guardrails on our democracy.

All the Republicans who are minimizing what happened on January 6th, I think, are being completely diluted and irresponsible and setting up the stage for something awful to happen in November.

I mean, I don’t know— it feels like half of our society is poised to not accept the results of the next election, no matter how well-run it might obviously be.

Let me just step back. I think it’s disastrous that Biden is the candidate from— I mean, I think it’s just colossal malpractice on the part of the Democrats to leave us in this position that we’re running an obviously moribund candidate against a former president who has shown his commitment to violating our most important political norms.

There’s one piece— there’s one thing you said earlier that I just want to close a loop on because certain points are very easy to knock down.

So like this allegation that my criticism of Islam has anything to do with racism— it’s absolutely easy to see that that is a logical fallacy.

First, everything I say about Islam and even everything I say about Muslims as people— which I’m never really talking about. I’m always talking about ideas and their consequences.

But even if I was just going to talk about Muslims as people, Islamists or Muslims exist in a hundred countries, and many of them are white, like me, right? It’s got nothing to do with race.

Conversely, I’ve said again and again and again that I think some of the most important people in the world and the first people I would bring to the front of the line for immigration in our society are genuinely liberal Muslims and secular Muslims, and above all ex-Muslims.

Right? Ex-Muslims for me are just like superheroes because they know exactly what the problem is. You find— you take someone who was born in Pakistan and who speaks Urdu.

You take someone who was born in Iran and speaks Farsi. You take someone who was born in Egypt and speaks Arabic. And they are ex-Muslims. They are the— there is no one I want more in our society than those people because we have a problem.

We have to inoculate the Muslim community against religious extremism. There’s nobody better to do that than the people who know exactly how bad religious extremism is. The ex-Muslims know it better than anyone and have taken great personal risks to announce themselves as having disavowed that ideology.

If you hold those two statements together, you understand it’s just— it’s logically impossible to make the allegation of racism in anything I say about Islam. It’s just not— it’s just— it’s a non-sequitur. It’s got nothing to do with race.

Yeah, no, that one I will agree with. I— we may want to come back to how it gets memeified. I don’t know if it matters on that one, but I do want to close the loop on the laptop just by putting forth what I know I can speak for myself.

This is what I would want, and I think that I represent a lot of other people when I say what I would have wanted from you in that moment, since I already— I count myself as one of the people that just grows more conspirator-minded by the day.

I look, I’m trying to resist that gravitational pull, but when I encounter you encountering that laptop, I want you to do the emergency podcast. Go live for 18 hours— whatever it takes.

And go through and say, “Let's pretend,” because, to your point, it doesn’t seem like anything— just like absolutely outrageous has ever been pinned down off the laptop.

But let’s say that it had been, and it was extraordinary, but still for you fell below the threshold of “Trump is going to destroy democracy.”

Just say, “Here are the things that he’s done. These are absolutely horrible things. This is gross mismanagement of the democratic— of, um, the democratic caucus, whatever it’s called, for making him the candidate.”

But the reality is, I think that this is way worse than anything that you— the things that Trump is doing. Namely, that he’s refusing to peacefully transfer power.

That could be the end of our democracy.

That, to me, isn’t just slightly more important than this obviously horrible [ __ ] over here.

And therefore, I just want to go over and over and over this so that everybody has the information that they need.

I trust you, dear people of these great United States, to make the decision for yourself, but the thing is, I know you can’t trust the people to make that decision rationally.

And that’s why people twig out.

Yeah. They’re just wrong. I mean, so listen. There’s enough known about cognitive bias that we know that— I mean, there’s something called the “Ucer Truth Effect,” which is—

Even if you’re repeating a story, the more you repeat a story—even if you’re repeating it for the purpose of debunking it— the mere repetition effect of it gets lodged in people’s memory as there was something about that story that was true, right?

Even if— even if it’s a complete debunking, right? So knowing that, you’re not serving the interest of the public by saying, “Listen, I’m just— you know, sunlight’s the best disinfectant.”

We’re just going to talk about it for four hours on Joe Rogan’s podcast in front of 40 million people? “We’re debunking it.”

But we know that—in this case—it’s not going to be— it’s never going to be a perfect debunking. In fact, there’s just going to be awful stuff there that might be lured.

It’s going to— it could be analogous to showing a picture of a dead baby pulled out of rubble, and knowing that this is so inflammatory that literally 100% of people seeing it will— their gut reaction will be: “There is no earthly justification for that. Anything that produces that is evil.”

Right?

“Oh, the IDF produced that? Well, the IDF is evil.”

Right? That is just the human moral imagination in one of its failure modes.

We know we are psychologically ill-equipped, and I know my audience or any audience is psychologically ill-equipped. I am ill-equipped, if I am a member of that audience, to process certain things in a way so as to get the right punchline.

Especially when the clock is ticking in the middle of what is, you know, a kind of political emergency— which is again a sitting president who’s not committing to a peaceful transfer of power.

And, you know, we’re talking about a few percentage points, right, in the election. And again, we have the example of what happened to Hillary Clinton the year before when James Comey said, “Just out of an abundance of scrupulosity, I’m going to just revisit this whole email server concern.

There are a lot of emails here. You’re not going to be able to read them in time. We’ve only got two weeks. I’m going to hit you with 40,000 emails here, but let’s talk about it.”

I’m just doing, you know, I’m doing just doing— you know, “I trust the American people to decide about these emails that refer to a pizza parlor.”

Half of America is going to think that this is code for a pedophile rape cult. Right?

I know that half of America is predisposed to think that there could be a pedophile rape cult in the basement of a pizza parlor that doesn’t have a basement.

Right? I mean, that’s the country we live in. We have to be honest about that, I know that.

And yes, it’s just— when I think it matters, I ignore every liability I just spoke about when I—you know, I know that some significant percentage of any audience, perhaps yours, will hear half of what I say about Islam and half of what I say about race in America or, you know—

Half of what I say on any other polarizing topic and think, “Okay, that guy’s a racist [ __ ]” or “That guy’s a, you know, a neocon warmonger,” or whatever it is.

And I know they’re going to miss the point. I know it’s impossible to speak carefully enough or at full enough, you know, comprehensively enough so as to close every loophole that people want to rush through to malign you and hate you and distort your message.

And it’s just— so it goes with the territory. But I just think you— we have to be aware that there are often liabilities in just even having the conversation.

The wrong message is going to be delivered at scale just because we’re choosing to talk about that topic at that moment.

And it’s like the first editorial decision can be, “Let’s just wait on that. Let’s talk about that in a month.”

Right? I mean, I’ve— you know, I haven’t talked about the trans topic very much just because I think it’s— while it seems politically super important, it affects a tiny number of people and there’s way too much brain damage that comes with that topic.

It’s just like that— you have a crazy level of activism in proportion to the size of the problem, right?

And it’s just not worth it. It’s not worth weighing in on any side of it. I mean, I’m comfortable with my attitude toward it. I feel nothing but compassion for people who really have gender dysphoria, and I think they should get all the help they want and need, and we should have political equality for them.

Over here at the extremes, where it’s obviously social contagion among teenage girls and it has nothing to do with a real condition, it’s a social problem that we should get our hands on.

And all of the weird political ramifications where you’ve got people who were men 15 minutes ago now competing in women’s sports and winning titles that, you know, belong to the girls— that’s completely dysfunctional.

It’s obviously just rubbing people the wrong way for reasons that are totally understandable.

And yet, yet, if you really are a transgender athlete, you know, we should figure out some way for you to be athletic and, you know, it’s like without distorting everything because there’s only five of you in within— within, you know, 500 miles.

There are trade-offs; this is a situation where there are trade-offs, and there’s not going to be a perfect solution. But I have always felt that I don’t want to be a person who dedicates 10 podcasts to that topic, given the size of the problem and given the level of brain damage that comes at you when you say anything like what I just said for the last, you know, three minutes.

It’s just not worth it; you got to pick your battles.

Yeah, I get that, and I think that your point about trade-offs is the right point. That’s really what I’m trying to drive home.

I think that you— I mean, you’re so consistent in your position, but I think you’re making a trade-off on the way that you approach it. You’re talking about the Hunter Biden laptop, yeah, where you say that—that’s why I honestly— I really did say it was a coin toss for me.

Like, I still did— like, I still don’t have a settled opinion on it. It could be argued either way. I know that there are journalists even at the New York Times who disagree with me.

Right?

Yeah, but I’m just saying— go back to the thing that I will zoom in on in this exchange is there’s a second-order consequence to you saying that we just can’t. We know enough about the cognitive biases of people at scale in this country to know that they’re not going to look at a debunking of this and understand the argument that—

Even if he is corrupt, it’s just not as bad as breaking democracy, and so I’m being very consistent.

Me, Sam Harris, I’m being very consistent. And this is what I make the decision on, people just aren’t going to hear that.

When you say that we can’t trust them to make the decision— even if you’re right because this goes back to trade-offs, that, like for instance, me in that situation, I fully accept that to preserve the integrity I want to feel towards what I want democracy to be, I have to let democracy be jeopardized.

I have to let it go all the way. I have to let— this is just my take, but it’s not— democracy is not a suicide pact.

Right? I mean, it’s like if you know you’re jeopardizing democracy, you don’t have a democratic obligation to watch it go off the cliff.

Because here’s the— from my frame of reference, which I fully recognize as being that one that’s totally distorted, but from my frame of reference, it is a subversion of democracy to keep information from people because you don’t think they can make an educated decision.

I get that it happens all the time. There’s an infinite amount of potential information you, as the New York Times or you, as a podcaster or you, as anyone, can only get a hold of so much of it. You’re always making editorial decisions.

You’re always deciding like, the New York Times today has to decide, “Well, how much are we going to talk? Focus on the border, are we going to publish another article about the border? Are we going to wait a week? Is there anything new?”

It’s all just like— some of it’s to-the-pants, um, intuitions of just like, “What is rising to the level of interest with Hunter Biden’s laptop?”

The way it appeared, how it appeared, what the optics of its appearing, it certainly looked like it should have been Russian misinformation.

I mean, why on Earth would there be a laptop just sitting in a random computer store that happened to be Hunter Biden’s, right?

Um, so that— it was easy to see; it was all the biases against it being legitimate seemed completely legitimate.

We still just— there wasn’t that much— there wasn’t enough for a very calculated reason. We weren’t given enough time to really do due diligence on it.

I mean, I don’t know how much information was in there, but it was just thousands upon thousands of emails and texts and documents, and that was engineered to be that way, right?

So I mean, you just— Rudy Giuliani was wearing his cynicism and malice on his sleeve in how this was presented.

Was just like, like, I know this is only you've only got 10 days to figure this out and I know what that there's just a blizzard of weirdness in here. Once you open this box, it's just going to be so lurid, and we're going to be looking at naked photos of, of, of crackhead Hunter, and um, it's going to be massively embarrassing and so salacious that it's going to suck up all the oxygen, right? It's all we're going to be talking about. Do you really want a president whose son is, you know, sniffing blow off of a hooker?

It's, and it's like we know that we have a society; we know that we have a machinery of, you know, click-based journalism that's not going to be able to help itself from focusing on that. We know that we have a society wherein the optics are often everything. I mean, it's like we know that, you know, in a presidential debate, it has nothing to do with who's got the better policies or who can demonstrate better knowledge of what's actually happening in the world. We know that if one person is just more charismatic and gets a few laughs, that person is going to win the debate for 90% of America, right?

And so knowing that, it sort of matters like what it's just—is it even worth having it if you have a malicious con man who's just funny and charismatic, which is basically what we have in the person of Trump? Is a debate even a good idea? It’s worth asking whether a debate is a good—I mean, I happen to think, you know, the fact that Biden wants to debate him is just a sign of the desperation of the Biden campaign—but otherwise, it's probably a bad idea, right?

You know, and um, but this is not a matter of violating the norms of Dem. I mean, people can get whatever information they want; no one's going to pass a law to say that Rudy Giuliani couldn't leak Hunter Biden's laptop. Giuliani is not going to get thrown in prison for this. It's not a violation of anyone's free speech. The New York Times can just make the editorial decision: "We're just going to wait two weeks on this. We just, this is just too much like Hillary's emails and an October surprise. We don't want to be part of this."

And the truth is, most—again, I thought it was a coin talk, you know, and I know I've spoken to New York Times journalists who don't agree with me about it. You know, I think that's fair. My thing is, I just want that all to happen out in public, which is where we disconnect. And I get that we just have different base assumptions. My base assumption is that the second-order consequence of people feeling like there are people somewhere making a decision about what they get to see because they don't trust them to be able to make these decisions creates this sense that I live in conspiracy land.

And I think that that is worse than another four years of Trump, who was unable to subvert democracy in his first four years. So I look at that and go, "Yeah, don't love that; that's my candidate." However, again, this—but what was worse? What was worse than another—because what the only thing that happened? I mean, the thing that happened that I think shouldn't have happened was Twitter suspended the New York Post's account. But short of that, if Twitter hadn't done that and the New York Post ran with the story, but the New York Times didn't, that's worse than having Trump win an election he wasn't going to win but for the airing of a laptop story, which still seems like a non-story to me.

I mean, like, I still—I mean, I know there are people who are deep in the weeds of that laptop who think there's a lot of interesting stuff in there, but literally nothing of real importance has emerged from that laptop and gotten into my—this just comes down to how do we read the value of certain things. So for me, the whole idea of the consent of the governed, that's super important. The idea that things—that I'm not being knowingly manipulated—that once people feel like they're being knowingly manipulated, even though they are and always have been, but you're always being—it's not a matter of knowing.

I mean, that's one way to describe an argument when you don't agree with the argument, but the argument was there's this machine that very likely has all the appearance of a machine of political misinformation designed—partisan misinformation designed to affect an election at the very moment the election's about to be run, right? And the question is, do we collaborate naively with this or do we just wait?

Now it's not to say that we're never going to look at this laptop; it's just say that like, do we give Rudy Giuliani, again, who's like the least scrupulous person on planet Earth, next to the person whose interest he was trying to serve, do we give him everything he wants when he wants it, when we know what his intentions are and we have no reason to trust any representation of the contents of this thing being real? Like, it all takes too much time to figure out. Or do we wait a Beat? It just seems way—I mean, given what—again, four years before we saw what it looked like.

I mean, literally, that, you know, it looks like Hillary would very likely at that moment would have won the election but for what Comey did. My—is because I can now track your value system, your base assumptions, what matters to you. I completely understand where you're coming from; I just have a different value system around that second-order consequence of it. It has made people feel that they've got yet more evidence that they're being manipulated by—let's just call it elites, as just a simple way—but everything is a manipulation at that level.

So I get somebody lying; they're falling into conspiracy land. No, but everything is like, again, everything is a choice, and more information, more accurate information even, isn't always better. I mean, for instance, don't you think that I don't understand what you're saying? Because really, if you like to defeat my stance, you would have to come at me and say, "Where you're going wrong is being worried about people falling into conspiracy land. It is not going to have the negative impact on human flourishing, which Tom, you said is what you want." It's not going to have the negative impact on human flourishing that Trump getting back into office will have.

And then it's like, "Okay, then we can debate the merit of that." But every word I say, for me, is downstream of I believe the second-order consequence of making people lose faith in their experts and institutions is creating so much derangement. I'm actually way more afraid of that than I am that we might get four more years of Trump because we might again get four more years of Trump. Honestly, I’m not even sure if people take RFK off the ballot—I don't know what the [__] I'm going to do because I've got one candidate that is obviously in cognitive decline. Good luck convincing me otherwise, which means even if I elect him, he's not the one running the country. That freaks me out; that doesn't feel democratic.

And then on the other hand, I have Trump, who—like, there are so many things there that make me uncomfortable, I don't even know where to begin. And so I feel like, okay, now I'm left with these absolutely horrendous options. And so all I focus on in this moment is I don't trust myself to be the arbiter, so that means that I—this is just me, this is just how I see the world. I don't think that we can—make that anyone ought to make the decision, even though it is clearly a malicious thing that's being done by them to very much try to make sure that their candidate wins.

I see that with eyes wide open, so October surprise, totally get what they're doing; it's a total manipulation. But the only thing with my worldview that I think is a bigger mistake is to do a thing that makes people lose more [__] trust in their institutions because to me, that moment feels exactly like the "Hey everybody, don't wear masks because they don't work, but by the way, save them for our healthcare professionals."

It's just like things like that make me go, "This is all a big [__] lie. This is [__] crazy," and so you're turning me, a by-nature rule follower, into somebody who's just pushing back against everything. And I think continuing to push people like me farther into thinking everybody's [__] lying to them and being paranoid and being like, "Is this all a conspiracy?" That is the more unwise.

Yeah, well, so to be clear, I never thought that lying was part of the ethical response—like never. Lies, the noble lie, in my view, always backfires or virtually always backfires, and I want to remind people you’ve been very clear about that.

Yeah, so, and it just—it would entail no lie. It would just entail, uh, it could just—it could just be, you know, "We're working on the story and right now, I am zoomed in on one comment that you made," which is you said, "Knowing the cognitive biases of people at large, we cannot simply present this, combat it with logic, and expect that it won't influence."

Well, like here's another example that’s just relevant for my personal life, and it's like, so I put myself among the people in this regard. So, if I have to take a medication for some health condition, and my doctor recommends it—my doctor, who I trust, I found this doctor and I've settled on this doctor because I trust him—he recommends it, he's done it with all his patients, and it's important that I do it, right?

How much time am I going to spend looking at the possible side effects? Am I going to really get into the fine print? Am I going to go online and seek out the bulletin boards where people for the last 10 years have been complaining about how this drug ruined their lives? I know that it's as scrupulously as you present that information, it is so hard to appropriately respond to it because in certain cases, depending on who you are, the mere idea of certain possible side effects is enough to make you feel like [__].

It's just, I know I'm a bad judge of probability, and I know it's only, you know, less than 1% of people had this thing, but I'm going to feel so stupid if I'm one of those people. And it's just—that's—it's like, it's just not worth it, so I'm not going to take the drug, right?

And I understand all of about myself in many—I mean, in certain cases, I, you know, obviously I look at what's possible, but in other cases, I think it's just not worth it. Like, I don't actually even need those facts, and if I start feeling worse taking the drug, well then maybe I'll look at what the side effects are, but I don't actually need to engineer the nocebo effect for myself. I mean, the placebo effect is a very real thing, and the nocebo effect—the negative placebo effect is also a real thing, you know?

And so for you to tell people, "Listen, this drug is great, but you know, you might, um, you know, you might start feeling, you know, weak and nauseated, and, um, you know, your workouts might not be as good," and you—like—and what percentage of people are going to actually start feeling that way? And it's just pure nocebo effect, right? It's going to be a high percentage.

So knowing that about the human mind, it's totally rational to say, "Listen, I'm going to bet on the fact that if we have institutions that I can trust—and this is why it's important to have institutions we can trust—if we have a drug approval process that I can trust, if we have an FDA I can trust, if I know that this thing has been run."

I mean, in certain cases, you have, you know, tens of millions of people who have taken this drug before you, right? If I can trust that, if I can trust the clinical experience of my doctor, I'm going to use—I’m going to outsource my moment-to-moment intuitions about whether I should be taking this drug to all of that, you know, collective intelligence and place a bet that I'm not one of these statistical outliers whose head falls off when I take this pill.

I'm someone who's actually going to take it, and it's actually going to have its intended effect, which is to mitigate the illness that I've been suffering that sent me to the doctor in the first place, and that's totally rational.

Now, for some people, that might sound like, "Okay, you're just, you know, that's the ostrich strategy; you're burying your head in the sand," but the reality is there's a consequence to being the sort of person who goes down the rabbit hole and just studies side effects and horror stories for everything. And literally, you can do it for everything, and you'd be paralyzed. If you waited everything with the same emotional intensity, you would be paralyzed.

I mean, so, you know, something like 7,000 people die every year—this used to be the case, I don't know if it's—perhaps the number has grown. I think it was, you know, the internet will correct me if I'm wrong, it was something like 7,000 people die every year in America from non-steroidal anti-inflammatories like Advil, you know, ibuprofen. I take Advil all the time, right? Whenever I get migraine headaches, I take Advil. Advil works, right?

It's how much time should I spend thinking that? I know there's possible GI problems with taking Advil, Sam; the analogy at least for me is very clear. But the thing I want to make sure that we draw a straight line to is, um, given that I think that that's a completely rational way to do a lot of things in life, and all of us are going to make a balance of okay: am I just going to trust the—that big connective tissue blob of things that have other people taking it, testing, FDA—all of it?

And just to finally close the loop on that—I mean, just imagine the analogy of me deciding to have, you know, a whole series of podcasts on all the people who have been killed by non-steroidal anti-inflammatories. And I—and to interview the, you know, the widow of the guy who just took Advil the first time he even took Advil and he just died outright on a vacation. You know, those people exist, I'm sure, right? And I could talk to them, and I could make this my hobby horse.

Like, "7,000 people a year, every year are dying." It's a— To even one death is unacceptable. Look at this kid that I'm from Gaza. That's unacceptable. We're worried about 7,000 kids in Gaza who died because of the IDF; we're calling it a genocide. I'm telling you that 7,000 Americans are going to die from Advil this year. This is an unacknowledged genocide, right?

It would be completely delusional use of my time. It's obviously I'm not tempted to do it, but so much of what we're doing in alternative media is analogous to that sort of thing. You can amplify the noise into some, you know, or find some tiny signal that seems like the most important one and amplify it and disregard all of the other noise you're amplifying in the process, and it just strikes me as irresponsible.

I hear that; however, we imagine you were doing those podcasts, and you were uncovering true things where you really have been lied to. Sometimes by a small degree, sometimes by a horrendously large degree, sometimes where you're like, "I could give them the benefit of the doubt," but other times you're like, "This was just blatant lying." And you know the famous phrase, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you."

And you can flip that—just because they're after you, doesn't mean you're not paranoid. Like, we keep finding out that we really have a reason to be paranoid. And so all I'm saying in this is that there is the second-order consequence of saying I know that there are these cognitive biases; I know that people will fall for them and therefore they will not make a wise decision, and they will re-elect somebody that is a threat to democracy potentially.

And it's a towing cost; I don't know what the right answer here is. I just know that slow rolling, going a beat is the right answer. People just start to pick up on like, "Oh wait, we can't be trusted." Like, "Wait a second, what do you mean?" And so it's—it’s that just another in that case.

I mean, the weai in was also just like no one could be trusted to do a good enough job to actually present the final story. And in the time of it—that's why it was an October surprise; that's why he didn't leak it six months before election, of course. I mean, all of this really does come down to what tradeoff are people comfortable with.

I feel you’ve been very articulate; I feel you’ve also been amazingly clear and consistent, and so I feel now that I have actually been able to map some of your worldview, and while we disagree on sort of what you put it on a bumper sticker—I'll be—well, that'll be H actually. I think we could get pretty close to a bumper sticker, which would be, uh, let me really try. Given the fallibility of the human mind, you must rely on experts and institutions as a part of your sensemaking apparatus.

It's a long bumper sticker, and failure to do so puts you at risk of catastrophic error. Yeah, I mean, that's a point we haven't made explicitly until now, but I certainly agree with it. We just can't—there's no substitute for institutions and institutional knowledge. It's like we just—if without them each of us is forced to reinvent civilization on his own every time he gets out of bed in the morning.

And that is what's happening essentially. It doesn't feel like that much work, but you're creating an N of one frame of reference where you see a world that is slightly different than the world the next person sees, slightly different than the next, than the next. And certainly, the world of independent media is generating that at scale; social media is generating that at scale.

To Constant's point though, there's no putting the toothpaste back in the bottle, so then it just becomes a question of how do we deal with that. And my solution—and your solution somewhat in practice, though I have heard your very well-articulated disagreements—mine is you just have to put all the ideas, even the crazy ones, if they have a sufficient amount of popularity on the table and debate the merits, and then whatever comes, comes.

And that terrifies me because I see us racing in a direction that I think is just really horrible for human flourishing. But I just come back to the world gets to be whatever the world wants to be, and if the world wants to be majority Muslim, then they're going to get it. It just is; it's just a fact of the way that this all works. And so the only thing that you can do is fight at the level of "These are the ideas that I believe in."

I think that the service that you do particularly well is give people the language that they need to grasp and convey ideas that otherwise by themselves they might not be able to think through. And now, me pitching back to the world again, is what I hope they hear is even if there are times where they don't agree with you—if they can map the base assumptions that you have or the value system that you have and go, "Okay, cool, I see what he believes and then I get why he takes that," there, I don't share those beliefs.

And so that's a part where I'm going to say, "I can't just outsource to him thinking through this one." I either have to do it myself, or I'm going to work with other people that may align in those values, and that's fine. What drives me absolutely [__] crazy is when people need everyone to see the world exactly the way they see it, and they're not looking for tension.

And if they looked for things that countered what they already believe, and they hungered for people that think differently than they think, and that they find a wise path forward, by knowing where they're trying to end up using data to tell if they're getting there and then testing their ideas against other people who actually disagree with them, I think they've got a way better shot.

Yeah, yeah, well, I agree there. So thank you for the conversation; obscenely generous with your time. Where can people connect with you?

The Making Sense podcast or the Waking Up app—those are the two places I'm spending most of my time. They are both brilliant, and I spend a ton of my time there as well.

All right everybody, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace.

To learn more about these complex topics, check out this episode with the one and only Jordan Peterson. Look how much I love my son; he doesn't even have a penis anymore. Those women online displaying themselves—they're not human. You're a fool if you think that's human. And Jews, you know, they have IQs that are probably 15 points higher than the typical, so they're radically...