Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs | Lex Fridman Podcast #365

1. 0:00 – 3:38

   Introduction

   1. LFLex Fridman0:00

      The following is a conversation with Sam Harris, his second time on the podcast. As I said two years ago when I first met and spoke with Sam, he's one of the most influential pioneering thinkers of our time. As the host of the Making Sense podcast, creator of the Waking Up app, and the author of many seminal books on human nature and the human mind, including The End of Faith, The Moral Landscape, Lying, Free Will, and Waking Up. In this conversation, besides our mutual fascination with AGI and free will, we do also go deep into controversial challenging topics of Donald Trump, Hunter Biden, January 6th, vaccines, lab leak, Kanye West, and several key figures at the center of public discourse, including Joe Rogan and Elon Musk, both of whom have been friends of Sam and have become friends of mine, somehow in an amazing life trajectory that I do not deserve in any way, and in fact believe is probably a figment of my imagination. And if it's all right, please allow me to say a few words about this personal aspect of the conversation of discussing Joe, Elon, and others. What's been weighing heavy on my heart since the beginning of the pandemic now three years ago, is that many people I look to for wisdom and public discourse stopped talking to each other as often with respect, humility, and love when the world needed those kinds of conversations the most. My hope is that they start talking again, they start being friends again, they start noticing the humanity that connects them that is much deeper than the disagreements that divide them. So let me take this moment to say, with humility and honesty, why I look up to and am inspired by Joe, Elon, and Sam. I think Joe Rogan is important to the world as a voice of compassionate curiosity and open-mindedness to ideas both radical and mainstream, sometimes with humor, sometimes with brutal honesty, always pushing for more kindness in the world. I think Elon Musk is important to the world as an engineer, leader, entrepreneur and human being who takes on the hardest problems that face humanity and refuses to accept the constraints of conventional thinking that made the solutions to these problems seem impossible. I think Sam Harris is important to the world as a fearless voice who fights for the pursuit of truth against growing forces of echo chambers and audience capture, taking unpopular perspectives and defending them with rigor and resilience. I both celebrate and criticize all three privately, and they criticize me, usually more effectively, from which I always learn a lot and always appreciate. Most importantly, there is respect and love for each other as human beings, the very thing that I think the world needs most now in a time of division and chaos. I will continue to try to mend divisions, to try to understand, not deride, to turn the other cheek if needed, to return hate with love. Sometimes people criticize me for being naive, cheesy, simplistic, all of that. I know, I agree, but I really am speaking from the heart, and I'm trying. This world is too fucking beautiful not to try in whatever way I know how. I love you all. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Sam Harris.

2. 3:38 – 11:30

   Empathy and reason

   1. LFLex Fridman3:38

      What is more effective at making a net positive impact on the world, empathy or reason?

   2. SHSam Harris3:45

      It depends on what you mean by empathy. The- there are two, at least two kinds of empathy. There's the- the cognitive form which is, you know, I would argue even a species of- of reason. It's- it's just understanding another person's point of view, you know? You understand why they're suffering or why they're happy or what, you know, we- we just, you have a theory of mind about another human being that is- is accurate, and so you can- you can navigate, uh, in relationship to them more effectively. Um, and then there's an- another layer entirely, not incompatible with that, but just distinct, w- which is what people often mean by empathy, which is more a kind of emotional contagion, right? Like you feel depressed and I begin to feel depressed along with you because, you know, it's just, it's contagious, right? I- I, you know, we're so close and I'm- I'm so concerned about you and your problems become my problems and it bleeds through, right? Now, I think both of those capacities are very important, but, um, the emotional contagion piece, uh, and this is not really my thesis, this is something I- I have more or less learned from- from Paul Bloom, um, a psychologist, uh, who wrote a book on this topic titled Against Empathy, um, the emotional, social contagion piece is a bad guide rather often for ethical behavior and eth- ethical intuitions. It-

   3. LFLex Fridman5:20

      Oh boy.

   4. SHSam Harris5:21

      And I've... So I'll give you the- the clear example of this whi- which is, uh, we find s- stories with a single identifiable protagonist who we can effortlessly empathize with far more compelling than data, right? So if I tell you, you know, st- this is the- the classic case of- of the little girl who- who falls down a well, right? You know, this is some- somebody's daughter, you see the parents, uh, distraught on television, uh, you hear her cries from the bottom of the well, the whole country stops. I mean, this, there was an example of this, you know, 20, 25 years ago I think where it was just wall to wall on CNN, this is just the perfect use of CNN, it was, you know, 72 hours or whatever it was of continuous coverage of j- just extracting this girl from a well.So we effortlessly pay attention to that. We care about it. We will donate money toward it. I mean, it's just... It marshals 100% of our compassion and altruistic impulse. Um, whereas if you hear that there's a genocide raging in some country you've never been to and never intend to go to and the numbers don't make a dent and the... And we, we find the story boring, right? We'll change the channel in the face of a genocide, right? It doesn't matter. So the... And it literally, it perversely, it could be 500,000 little girls have fallen down wells in that country and we still don't care, right? So, um, it's, uh, you know, many of us have come to believe that this is a bug rather than a feature of our moral psychology. And so the, the empathy plays an unhelpful role there. So ultimately, I think when we're making big decisions about what we should do and how to mitigate human suffering and, and what's worth val- valuing and how we should protect those values, um, I think reason is the better tool. But it's not that I would want to dispense with any part of empathy either.

   5. LFLex Fridman7:17

      Well, there's a lot of changes to go on there, but briefly to mention, you've recently talked about, uh, effective altruism on your podcast. I think-

   6. SHSam Harris7:26

      Hmm.

   7. LFLex Fridman7:26

      ... you mentioned some interesting statement, I'm going to horribly misquote you, but that you'd rather live in a world, like it doesn't really make sense, but you'd rather live in a world where you care about maybe your daughter and son more than a hundred people that live across the world or something like this.

   8. SHSam Harris7:44

      Yeah.

   9. LFLex Fridman7:44

      Like where the calculus is not always perfect, but somehow it makes sense to live in a world where it's irrational in this way and yet empathetic in the way you've been discussing.

   10. SHSam Harris7:54

       Right. I'm not sure what the right answer is there or, or even whether there is one right answer. There could be multiple, you know, peaks on, on this part of the moral landscape. But, so the, the opposition is between an ethic that's articulated by, you know, someone like the Dalai Lama, right? You know, or really any exponent of, of, um, you know, classic Buddhism would say that sort of the ultimate enlightened ethic is true dispassion with respect to friends and strangers, right? So that you would... The, you know, the, the mind of the Buddha would be truly dispassionate, you would love and, and care about all people equally. Um, and by that light, it seems some kind of ethical failing or at least, you know, failure of, of to fully actualize compassion in the limit or, you know, enlightened wisdom in the limit. Um, to care more or even and much more about your kids than the kids of other people or, and to, and to prioritize your, your energy in that way, right? So you spend all this time trying to figure out how to keep your kids healthy and happy and you'll attend to their minutest concerns and however superficial and y- and again, there's a genocide raging in Sudan or, or wherever and it, it takes up less than 1% of your bandwidth. I'm not sure it would be a better world if everyone was running the, the Dalai Lama program there. I think some prioritization of, of one's nearest and dearest, uh, ethically m- might be optimal because we- we'll all be doing that and we'll all be doing that in a circumstance where we have certain norms and, and laws and, and other structures that force us to be dispassionate where that matters, right? So like when I go to... When my daughter gets sick and I have to take her to, to a hospital, you know, I really want her to get attention, right? And I'm worried about her more than I'm worried about everyone else in the lobby. But the truth is, I actually don't want a totally corrupt hospital. I don't want a hospital that treats my daughter better than anyone else in the lobby because she's my daughter and I've, you know, bribed the guy at the door or whatever, you know, or the guy's a fan of my podcast or whatever the thing is. You don't want starkly corrupt, unfair situations. E- and when you're, when you sort of get pressed down the hierarchy of Maslow's needs, you know, individually and, and, and societally, a bunch of tho- a bunch of those variables change and they change for the worse understandably. But yeah, when things are, when everyone's corrupt and it's, you're, you're in a, in a state of, of, uh, collective emergency, you know, you've got a lifeboat problem, you're scrambling to get into the lifeboat, yeah, then, then fairness and norms and, and, um, the, you know, the o- the other vestiges of civilization begin to get stripped off. We can't reason from those emergencies to normal life. I mean, in normal life we want justice, we want fairness, we want... We're all better off for it even when the spotlight of our concern is focused on the people we know, the people who are friends, the people who are family, people we, we, we have good reason to care about. We still by default want a system that protects the, the interests of strangers too and, and we know that generally speaking just in, in game theoretic terms, we're all gonna tend to be better off in a fair system than a corrupt one.

3. 11:30 – 54:24

   Donald Trump

   1. SHSam Harris11:30

   2. LFLex Fridman11:30

      One of the failure modes of empathy is our susceptibility to a- anecdotal data. Just a good story-

   3. SHSam Harris11:39

      Yeah.

   4. LFLex Fridman11:40

      ... will get us to not think clearly. But what about empathy in the context of just discussing ideas with other people and then there's a large number of people, like in this country, you know, red and blue, half the population believes certain things on immigration or on (laughs) the response to the pandemic or any kind of controversial issue. Even if, if the election was fairly executed, having an empathy for their worldview, trying to understand where they're coming from, not just in the explicit statement of their idea, but the entirety of like the roots from which their idea stems-... that kind of empathy e- wh- while you're discussing ideas. What is, in your pursuit of truth, having empathy for the perspective of a large number of other people, d- versus raw mathematical reason?

   5. SHSam Harris12:33

      I think it's important, but I just, it only takes you so far, right? It doesn't, it doesn't get you to truth, right? It's not, e- truth is not a, uh, is not decided by, uh, you know, democratic principles. And, um, certain people believe things for understandable reasons, but those reasons are nonetheless bad reasons, right? They, they don't scale, they don't generalize. They're not reasons anyone should adopt for themselves or, or respect, you know, epistemologically. And yet their, their circumstance is understandable and it's something you can care about, right? And so yeah, like let me just take, uh, I think there's many examples of this you might be thinking of, but, I mean, one, one that comes to mind is I've, I've been super critical of Trump obviously, and, um, I've been super critical of certain people for endorsing him or not criticizing him when he really made it, you know, patently obvious who he was, you know, if, if there had been any doubt i- initially. There was no doubt when we have a sitting president who's not, uh, not, um, agreeing to a, a peaceful transfer of power, right? So, um, I'm, I'm critical of all of that and yet the fact that many millions of Americans didn't see what was wrong with Trump or bought into the, um, didn't see through his con, right? I mean, they bought into the idea that he was a b- a brilliant businessman who c- might just be able to change things because he's so unconventional and so, you know, his heart is i- in the right place, you know, he's really a man of the people even though he's a, you know, gold-plated everything in his life. Um, they bought the myth, somehow, uh, of, uh, you know, the... Largely because they had seen him on television for, uh, almost a decade and a half, uh, pretending to be this genius businessman who could get things done. Um, it's understandable to me that many very frustrated people who have not had their hopes and dreams actualized, uh, who have been the victims of globalism and, and, um, many other, you know, current trends, uh, it's understandable that they would be confused and, and, and not see the liability of electing a grossly incompetent, morbidly narcissistic person i- in, into the, into the, the presidency. Um, so I don't... So w- which is to say that I don't blame... There are many, many millions of people who I don't necessarily blame for the Trump phenomenon, right? But I can nonetheless bemoan the phenomenon as, as indicative of, you know, a very bad, uh, state of affairs in our society, right? So it's, it's, there's two levels to it. I mean, one is I think you have to call a spade a spade when you're talking about how things actually work and what things are, are likely to happen or not, but then you can recognize that people are, have very different life experiences and, and, yeah, I mean, I think empathy and, you know, probably the better word for what I would hope to embody there is compassion, right? Like, really, you know, to really wish people well, you know, and to really w- wish, you know, strangers well effortlessly, w- wish them well. I mean, to realize that you... There is no opposition between... In the end bottom, there's no real opposition between selfishness and selflessness because wise selfishness really takes into account other people's happiness. I mean, you wa- which do you... Do you want to live in a society where you have everything, but most other people have nothing? Uh, or do you want to live in a society where you're surrounded by happy, creative, self-actualized people who are having their hopes and dreams realized? I think it's obvious that the, the second society is much better, however much you can guard your good luck.

   6. LFLex Fridman16:36

      But what about having empathy for certain principles that people believe? For example, the, the pushback, the other perspective on this, 'cause you said bought the myth of Trump as a great businessman. There could be a lot of people that are supporters of Trump who could say that Sam Harris bought the myth that we have this government of the people, by the people, that actually represents the people as opposed to a bunch of elites who are running a giant bureaucracy that is corrupt, that is feeding themselves, and they're actually not representing the people, and then here's this chaos agent, Trump, who speaks off the top of his head. Yeah, he's flawed in all this number of ways, he's a more comedian than he is a presidential type of figure, and he's actually creating the kind of chaos that's going to shake up this bureaucracy, shake up the elites that are so uncomfortable, because they don't want the world to know about the game they got running on everybody else. So that's, you, you know-

   7. SHSam Harris17:38

      Yeah, yeah.

   8. LFLex Fridman17:38

      That's the kind of perspective that they would take and say, "Yeah, yeah, there's these flaws that Trump has, but this is necessary."

   9. SHSam Harris17:45

      I agree with the first part. It's a... So I- I haven't bought the myth that it's, uh, you know, a truly representative democracy in, in the way that we would, you know, might idealize. Um, and, uh, you know, on some level, I mean, this is a different conversation, but, um, on some level, I'm not even sure how much I think it should be, right? Like I- I'm not sure, um, we want, in the end, everyone's opinion g- uh, given equal weight about, you know, just what we should do about anything. And I include myself in that. I mean, there are many topics around which...... I don't deserve to have a strong opinion, because I don't know w- what I'm talking about, right? Or what I would be talking about if I had a strong opinion. So, um... And m- I think we'll probably get to that, to some of those topics, because I've declined to have certain conversations on my podcast just because I think I'm the wrong person to have that conversation, right? Be- and, and it's, um, and I think it's important to see those bright lines in, in one's life and in, in the moment politically, uh, and ethically. Um, so yeah. I think, um... So leave aside the, the, the viability of democracy. Uh, I, I, I'm, I'm under no illusions that all of our institutions are, you know, worth preserving pre- precisely as they have been up until the moment this great orange wrecking ball came swinging through our lives. But I just, it was a very bad bet to elect someone who is grossly incompetent and, um, wor- worse than incompetent. Um, genuinely malevolent in his selfishness, right? I th- and this is something we know based on literally decades of him being in the public eye, right? He's not as, he's not a public servant in any normal sense of that term. And he couldn't possibly give an honest or sane answer to the quest- the question you asked me about empathy and reason and, and like how should we... You know, what should guide us. Um, I, I genuinely think he is missing some necessary moral and, and psychological tools, right? And, and this, this is... I can feel com- compassion for him as a human being because I think having those things is incredibly important and genuinely loving other people is incredibly important and, and knowing what all that's about is, is, is... That's really the good stuff in life. And I, I, um, I think he's missing a lot of that. But I think we, we don't want to promote people to, to the highest positions of power in our society who are far outliers in, in pathological terms, right? We want them to be far outliers in, in... If, if... In the best case, in wisdom and compassion and some of the things you've, some of the topics you've brought up. I mean, we want someone to be deeply informed. We want someone to be, um, uh, unusually curious, unusually alert to how they may be w- wrong or getting things wrong consequentially. Um, he's none of those things. And if... And so far as we're gonna get normal mediocrities in that role, which I think, you know, is often the best we could expect, let's get normal mediocrities in that role. Not, uh, once in a generation, uh, narcissists and, um, uh, frauds. I mean, it is like the... Just take honesty as a single variable, right? I think you want... Yes, it's possible that most politicians lie at least some of the time. I don't think that's a good thing. Um, I think people should be gen- generally honest, um, even to a fault. Um, yes, there are certain circumstances where lying, I think, is necessary. It's kind of on a continuum of self-defense and, and violence. So it's like if you're gonna... You know, if the Nazis come to your door and ask you if you've got Anne Frank in the attic, I think it's okay to lie to them. Um, but, uh, Trump, there's... Arguably, there's never been a person in... That anyone could name in, in human history who's lied with, with that kind of velocity. Um, I mean, it's just... It was, he was a... Just a blizzard of lies, great and small, you know, to, to... Pointless and, and to... And effective. But it's just... It says something, uh, fairly alarming about our society that a person of that character got promoted. And so, uh, yes, I have compassion and concern for, for half of the society who didn't see it that way, and that's gonna sound elitist and, and, uh, and smug or something for anyone who's on that side listening to me. But, um, it's genuine. I mean, I'm... I understand that, like... Like, I barely have the... I'm like one of the luckiest people in the world and I barely have the bandwidth to pay attention to half the things I should pay attention to in order to have an opinion about half the things we're gonna talk about, right? So how much less bandwidth does somebody who's working two jobs or, you know, a single mom who's, who's raising, you know, multiple kids, even a single kid. It's just, it's unimaginable to me that people have the bandwidth to, to really track this stuff. And so then they jump on social media and they, they see... They get inundated by misinformation and they see what their favorite influencer just said, um, and now they're worried about vaccines and they're... It- it's just... It's... We're living in an environment where our, our... The information space has become so corrupted, uh, and we've built machines to, to further corrupt it. You know, we've built a business model for the internet that further corrupts it. Uh, so it's, it is just, um... It's chaos in informational terms. And I don't fault people for being confused and impatient and, uh, at the, at their wits end. And, um, yes, Trump was a, an enormous "Fuck you" to the establishment, and that, and that's, that was understandable for many reasons.

   10. LFLex Fridman24:01

       To me, Sam Harris, the great Sam Harris, is somebody I've looked up to for a long time as a beacon of voice of reason, and there's this meme on the internet, and I would love you to steel-man the case for it and against, that Trump broke Sam Harris' brain. That there is something, disproportionately to the actual impact that Trump had on our society, he had-... um, an impact on the div- on the ability of balanced, calm, rational minds to see the world clearly, to think clearly, you being one of the beacons-

   11. SHSam Harris24:39

       Right.

   12. LFLex Fridman24:39

       ... of that.

   13. SHSam Harris24:40

       Right.

   14. LFLex Fridman24:40

       Is there, is there a degree to which he broke your brain?

   15. SHSam Harris24:44

       ... Well-

   16. LFLex Fridman24:45

       Uh, otherwise known as Trump derangement syndrome. (laughs)

   17. SHSam Harris24:47

       Yeah, yeah, yeah.

   18. LFLex Fridman24:48

       Medical, medical condition.

   19. SHSam Harris24:50

       Well, so I, my, yeah, I, I mean I think Trump derangement syndrome is a, is a very clever meme, because it, it just, uh, throws the, you know, the, the problem back on the person who's criticizing Trump.

   20. LFLex Fridman25:00

       Sure.

   21. SHSam Harris25:00

       But e- in truth, the, the true Trump derangement syndrome was not to have seen how dangerous and divisive it, it would be to promote someone like Trump to that position of power, and to not, a- and in the l- in the f- the final moment, not to see how, uh, untenable it was to still support someone who, uh, uh, uh, you know, a pr- a sitting president who was not committing to a peaceful transfer of power. I mean, that was, if, if, if that wasn't a bright line for you, you have been deranged by something, um, because that was, you know, the, that was one minute to midnight for our democracy as f- as far as I, I'm concerned. And I think it really was but for the, the integrity of, uh, a few people that we didn't suffer some real Constitutional crisis and, and real emergency, you know, a- after January 6th. I mean, if, if Mike Pence had caved in and decided to not certify the election, right? Uh, if he d- s- literally you can count on two hands the number of people who held things together at that moment. And so it was, so it wasn't for want of trying on Trump's part that we, we, um, didn't succumb to some, you know, real, uh, t- truly uncharted, uh, uh, catastrophe, uh, with our democracy. So the fact that that didn't happen is not a sign that those of us who were worried that it was so close to happening were exaggerating the problem. I mean, it's like, you know, you almost got run over by a car, uh, but you didn't, and so, you know, you're, the fact that you're adrenalized and you're thinking, you know, "Oh boy, that was dangerous. I probably shouldn't, you know, s- you know, wander in the middle of the street, uh, with my eyes closed," um, you weren't wrong to feel that you really had a problem, right? Um, and came very close to something truly, uh, terrible. So I, I think that's where we were, and I think we shouldn't do that again, right? So the fact that he's, he's still, he's coming back around as potentially a viable candidate, you know, I'm not spending much time thinking about it frankly, because it's, you know, I'm, I'm waiting for the moment where it r- it requires some thought. Um, I mean, it, it did, it took up, uh, I mean, I don't know how many podcasts I devoted to the topic. It wasn't that m- I mean, it wasn't that many in the end, you know, against the, the number of podcasts I, I devoted other topics. But there are people who look at Trump and just find him funny, entertaining, not especially threatening. It's like not a, you know, it just, it's just good fun to see somebody who's like, who's just not taking anything seriously and is just f- just putting a, you know, a stick in the wheel of, of business as usual again and again and again and again. Um, and they don't really see anything, uh, much at stake, right? Doesn't really, doesn't really matter if we don't support NATO. Doesn't really matter if he says he trusts Putin more than our intelligence services. Uh, none of this is, it doesn't matter if he's, uh, on the one hand saying that he loves, uh, the leader of North Korea and on the other threatening, th- threatens to, to, you know, bomb them back to the Stone Age, right? On Twitter. It's all, it all can be taken in the spirit of kind of reality television. It's like this is just, this is the part of the movie that's just fun to watch, right? And I understand that. I can even inhabit that space for a few minutes at a time. But there's the deeper concern that we're in the process of entertaining ourselves to death, right? That we're just not taking things seriously. And this is, this is a problem I've had with several other people we might name who just c- who are just appear to me to be goofing around at scale, and they lack a kind of moral seriousness. I mean, they're, they're touching big problems where lives hang in the balance, but they're just fucking around. And I think there are really important problems that we have to get our heads straight around. And we need, you know, it's not to say that, that institutions don't become corrupt. I, I think they do, and I, I think, and I'm quite worried that, you know, both about the, the loss of trust in our institutions and the, the fact that trust has eroded for good reason, right? That they have become less trustworthy. I, I, I th- you know, they've become infected by, you know, political ideologies that are not truth tracking. I mean, I, I worry about all of that. Um, but I just think the, we need institutions. We need to rebuild them. We need, we need experts who are real experts. We need to value expertise over, you know, uh, amateurish speculation and conspiracy thinking and just, you know, and bullshit.

   22. LFLex Fridman29:49

       The kind of amateur speculation we're doing on this very podcast? (laughs)

   23. SHSam Harris29:54

       I'm usually alert to the moments where I'm just guessing or where I actually feel like I'm s- st- talking from within my wheelhouse, and I try to telegraph that a fair amount with people. Um, so yeah. I mean, it, but it's, it's not ... It's different. Like I mean, you, you can invite someone onto your podcast who's an expert about something that you're, you're not an expert about, and then you, you in the process of getting more informed yourself, your, your audience is getting more informed. So you're asking smart questions. And you might be pushing back at the margins, but you know that when push comes to shove on that topic, you...... you really don't have a basis to have a, a, a strong opinion. And if you were gonna form a, a, a, a, a strong opinion that was this counter to the expert you have in front of you, it's gonna be by deference to some other expert who you've brought in, or who you've heard about, or whose work you, you've read or whatever. But there, there's a paradox to how we value authority in science that most people don't understand. And, uh, I think we should, at some point, unravel that because it's, it's the basis for a lot of public confusion and, and for ... Or at least the basis for a lot of, you know, criticism I received on these topics where it's, you know, people think that I'm a ... You know, I, I'm against free speech or I'm an establishment shill or it's, it's like I just think ... I'm a cred- credentialist. I just think people with PhDs from iv- Ivy League universities should, you know, run everything. It's not true, but there's a ton of confu- there's, there's a lot to cut through to get to daylight there because people are, um, very confused about how we value authority, in the service of rationality generally.

   24. LFLex Fridman31:42

       You've talked about it, but it's, it's just interesting, the intensity of feeling you have. You've, you've had this famous phrase about Hunter Biden and children in the basement. Can you just revisit this case?

   25. SHSam Harris31:55

       Okay.

   26. LFLex Fridman31:55

       So, le- let me, let me give another perspective on the situation of January 6th, and Trump in general. It's possible that January 6th and things of that nature revealed that our democracy is actually pretty fragile, and that Trump is not a malevolent, an ultra competent malevolent figure, but is simply a j- a jokester. And he just, by creating the chaos, revealed that it's all pretty fragile.

   27. SHSam Harris32:24

       Mm.

   28. LFLex Fridman32:24

       Because you're a student of history and there's a lot of people, like Vladimir Lenin, Hitler, who are exceptionally competent at controlling power, at being executives-

   29. SHSam Harris32:36

       Yeah.

   30. LFLex Fridman32:36

       ... and taking that power. Controlling the generals, controlling all the figures involved, and certainly not tweeting, but working in the shadows, behind the scenes, to gain power. And they did so extremely competently, and that is how they were able to gain power. The, the pushback with Trump is he was doing none of that. He was creating what he's very good at, creating drama, sometimes for humor's sake, sometimes for drama's sake, and simply revealed that our democracy is fragile. And so he's not this w- uh, once in a generation horrible figure.
4. 54:24 – 58:58

   Military industrial complex

   1. SHSam Harris54:24

      yeah, I mean, everything you said about the military-industrial complex is true, right? And, and it's been, we've been worrying about that on both sides of the aisle for a very long time. I mean, that's just, you know, that phrase came from, from Eisenhower. Um, it's, uh, I mean, so much of what ails us is a story of bad incentives, right? And bad incentives are so powerful that they corrupt even good people, right? How much more do they corrupt bad people, right? Like, so it's like you want to, at minimum, you want reasonably good people, at least non-pathological people in a s- in the system.... trying to navigate against the grain of bad incentives, and better still, all of us can get together and, and try to diagnose those incentives and change them, right? And, and s- and we will really succeed when we have a system of incentives where the, the good incentives are so strong that even bad people are effortlessly behaving as though they're good people because they're so successfully incentivized to behave that way, right? That's... and, and so, so it's, it's al- it's almost the inversion of our current situation. So yes, and you say I changed my mind about the war, uh, I, not quite. I mean, I, I was never a, a supporter of the war in Iraq. I was always worried that it was a, a distraction from the war in Afghanistan. I was a supporter of the war in Afghanistan, and I will admit in hindsight that looks like, uh, you know, at best a highly ambiguous and painful exercise, u- you know, prob- more likely a, a fool's errand, right? It's like that would... you know, it did not turn out well. It's, uh, it's... it wasn't for want of trying. I, I don't, you know, I, I have not done a deep dive on, on all of the failures there, and maybe all of these failures are failures in principle. I mean, maybe it's just the, maybe that's not the kind of thing that can be done well by anybody, whatever our intentions. Um, but yeah, the, the move to Iraq always seemed questionable to me, and, um, when we knew the problem, uh, e- the immediate problem at that moment, you know, Al-Qaeda, uh, uh, was in Afghanistan and, y- you know, and then bouncing to Pakistan. Um, anyway, all, you know... so, yes, but I... my, my, my sense of the possibility of nation building, my sense of, of, um, you know, in so, in so far as the, the, the neo-con, um, spirit of, of, um, you know, responsibility and idealism, that you know, America was the kind of nation that should be functioning in this way as, as the world's cop and we'd go- we have to get in there and, and untangle some of these knots by force, um, uh, rather often because, you know, if we don't do it over there we're gonna have to do it over here kind of thing. Um, yeah some of that has definitely changed for me in my thinking. And there are c- obviously cultural reasons why it failed in Afghanistan and, and if you can't change the culture, um, it's, uh ... you're not gonna force a change at gunpoint i- in the culture. Or it certainly seems that, that's not gonna happen and it took us, you know, over 20 years to, apparently to realize that.

   2. LFLex Fridman57:53

      That's one of the things you realize with a war is there's not going to be a strong signal that things are not working. You can just keep pouring money into a thing.

   3. SHSam Harris58:01

      Yeah.

   4. LFLex Fridman58:01

      A military effort.

   5. SHSam Harris58:02

      Well, also there, there are signs of it working too. You have all the stories of girls now going to school, right? You know, the girls are getting battery acid thrown in their faces by religious maniacs, and then we come in there and we stop that, and now girls are getting educated and there's a... I mean, and that's all good, and our intentions are good there. And I mean we're on the right side of history there. Good - girls should be going to school. You know, Malala Yousafzai should have the Nobel Prize and she shouldn't have been shot in the face by, by the Taliban, right? Um, we know what the right answers are there. The question is what do you do when there are enough, in this particular case, religious maniacs who are willing to die and let their children die in defense of crazy ideas and moral norms that belong in the seventh century? Um, and it's a problem we couldn't solve, and we couldn't solve it even though we spent tr- you know, trillions of dollars to solve

5. 58:58 – 1:23:05

   Twitter

   1. SHSam Harris58:58

      it.

   2. LFLex Fridman58:58

      This reminded me of, um, the thing (laughs) that you and, and Jack Dorsey, uh, jokingly had for a while s- uh, the discussion about banning, uh, Donald Trump from Twitter. Uh, but does any of it bother you now that Twitter files came out that... I m- I mean, this has to do with sort of the Hunter laptop, Hunter Biden laptop story. Does it bother you that there could be a collection of people that make decisions about who to ban and not, and that that could be susceptible to bias and to ideological influence?

   3. SHSam Harris59:34

      Well, I, I think it always will be or, in, in the absence of perfect AI, it always will be.

   4. LFLex Fridman59:41

      And this becomes relevant with AI as well.

   5. SHSam Harris59:44

      Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

   6. LFLex Fridman59:44

      Because there's some censorship on AI happening.

   7. SHSam Harris59:46

      Yeah.

   8. LFLex Fridman59:47

      And it's an interesting question there as well.

   9. SHSam Harris59:48

      I don't think Twitter is important as people think it is, right? And I, and I, I used to think it was more important when I was on it, and now that I'm off of it, I think it's, it's, uh ... I mean, first let me say it's just, eh, eh, a- an unambiguously good thing in my experience to delete your Twitter account, right? It's like, it, it is just even the good parts of Twitter that I miss were bad in the aggregate, i- in the, the, the degree to which it was fragmenting my attention, the degree to which my life was getting doled out to me in periods between-

   10. LFLex Fridman1:00:25

       Yeah.

   11. SHSam Harris1:00:25

       ... those moments where I checked Twitter, right? And had my attention diverted. And s- and I was, you know, I was not a, a, a crazy Twitter addict. I mean, I was a, I was probably a pretty normal user. I mean, I was not someone who was tweeting multiple times a day or even every day, right? I mean, I would, I probably, I think I probably averaged something like one tweet a day, I think I averaged. But in reality it was like, you know, there'd be like four tweets one day and then I wouldn't tweet for, you know, the better part of a week. And, but I was looking a lot because it was my newsfeed. I was just following, you know, 200 very smart people and I would... just wanted to see what they were paying attention to and I would... they would recommend articles and I would read those articles and, and then when I would read an article that then I would, that I would... thought I should signal boost, I would tweet. And so all of that seemed good and, you know, like, that's all separable from all of the odious bullshit that came back at me in, in response to this, l- largely in response to this Hunter Biden thing. Um...But even the good stuff has a downside, and it- and it- and it comes at just this point of your phone is this perpetual stimulus of, um, which is intrinsically fragmenting of time and attention. And now my phone is- is a much less of a presence in my life, and it's- it's not that I don't check Slack or check email and I... You know, I- I use it to work. But, um, my sense of just what the world is and my sense of my place in the world, the sense of where I exist as a person has changed a lot by deleting my Twitter account. I mean, I had a... You know, and it's just- it's, um, and- and the things that I think... I mean, we all know this phenomenon. I mean, we- we say of someone, you know, that person's too online, right? Like, what does it mean to be too online? Um, and where do you draw the- that- that boundary? You know, where- how do you know wha- what constitutes being too online? Well, in some sense just being, I think being on- on social media at all is to be too online. I mean, given what it does to... Given the kinds of information it- it, um, signal boosts and given the, um- given the impulse it kindles in each of us to reach out to our audience in- at- in specific moments and in specific ways, right? It's like there- there are lots of moments now where I have an opinion about something but there's nothing for me to do with that opinion, right? Like, there's no Twitter, right? So like there- there are lots of things that I would have tweeted in the last months that are not the kind of thing I'm gonna do a podcast about. I'm not gonna roll out 10 minutes on that topic on my podcast. I'm not gonna take the time to really think about it. But had I been on Twitter, I would have reacted to this thing in the news or this thing that some- somebody did, right?

   12. LFLex Fridman1:03:21

       What do you do with that thought now?

   13. SHSam Harris1:03:23

       I just let go of it.

   14. LFLex Fridman1:03:24

       Like, chocolate ice cream is the most delicious thing ever.

   15. SHSam Harris1:03:27

       Yeah, it's- it's usually not that sort of thing, but it's- it's just... But then you look at the kinds of problems people create for themselves. You look at the life deranging and reputation destroying things that people do, and- and I look at the things that- that have, you know, the analogous things that have happened to me. I mean, the things that have really bent my life around professionally over the past, you know, decade. So much of it is Twitter. I mean, honestly in my case almost 100% of it was Twitter. The- the controversies I would get into, the things I would- I would think I would have to respond to in a pod- like I would release a podcast on a certain topic, I would see some blowback on Twitter. You know, it would give me the sense that there was some signal that I really had to respond to. Now that I'm off Twitter, I- I recognize that most of that was just... It was totally specious, right? It was- it was not something I had to respond to. But yet I would then do a cycle of podcasts responding to that thing that like-

   16. LFLex Fridman1:04:27

       Mm-hmm.

   17. SHSam Harris1:04:28

       ... taking my foot out of my mouth or taking someone else's foot out of my mouth, and it became this- this self-perpetuating, uh, cycle which... I mean, it's... You know, if you're having fun, great. I mean, if it- if it's- if it's generative of useful information a- and- and engagement professionally and- and psychologically, great. But... And- and there, you know, there was some of that on Twitter. I mean, there were people who I've connected with bec- because I just, you know... One- one of us DMed the other on Twitter, and it was hard to see how that was gonna happen otherwise. But it was, um, largely just a machine for manufacturing unnecessary controversy.

   18. LFLex Fridman1:05:16

       Do you think it's possible to avoid the drug of that? So now that you've achieved the zen state, is it possible for somebody like you to use it in a way that doesn't pull you into the whirlpool? And so anytime there's attacks, you just... I mean, that's how I try to use it.

   19. SHSam Harris1:05:31

       Yeah, but it's- it's not the way I wanted to use it. It's not the way it- it- it promises itself as- as a...

   20. LFLex Fridman1:05:37

       You wanted to have debate

   21. NANarrator1:05:38

       ... discourse with...

   22. SHSam Harris1:05:38

       I wanted to actually communicate with people.

   23. LFLex Fridman1:05:40

       Yeah.

   24. SHSam Harris1:05:41

       I want- I wanted to hear from the person because, again, it's like being in Afghanistan, right? It's like there- there- there are the- the potted cases where it's obviously good, right? It's like in Afghanistan, the girl who's getting an education, that is just here, that's why we're here. That's- that's obviously good. I've had those moments on Twitter where it's like, okay, I'm hearing from a smart person who's detected an error I made in my podcast or in a book or they've just got some great idea about something that I should spend time on, and I would never have heard from this person in any other format and now I'm actually in dialogue with them and it- it's fantastic. That's the promise of it, to actually talk to people. And so I- I kept getting lured back into that. Um, no, the- the way... The sane or sanity preserving way of using it is- is just as a marketing channel. You just put your stuff out there and you don't look at what's coming back at you. Um, and that's... You know, for... You know, I'm on other social media platforms that I don't even touch. I mean, my team put- post stuff on Facebook and on Instagram. I never even see what's on there.

   25. LFLex Fridman1:06:48

       So you don't think it's possible to see something and not let it affect your mind?

   26. SHSam Harris1:06:52

       No, that- that's definitely possible, but the question is... And I did that for vast stretches of time, right? And but then the- the promise of the platform is dialogue and feedback, right? So like why am I... If I know for whatever reason I'm gonna see like 99 to One awful feedback, you know, bad faith feedback, malicious feedback. Some of it's probably even bots and I'm not even aware of who's a person, who's a bot, right? But I'm just gonna stare into this fun house mirror of...... acrimony and dishonesty, um, that is going to- I mean, the- the- the reason why I got off is not because I couldn't recalibrate and- and- and find equanimity again with all the- the- the- the nastiness that was coming back at me, and not that I couldn't ignore it for vast stretches of time. But I could see that I kept coming back to it hoping that it would be something that I could use. A- a real tool for communication.

   27. LFLex Fridman1:07:55

       Yeah.

   28. SHSam Harris1:07:55

       And I was noticing that it was insidiously changing the way I felt about people.

   29. LFLex Fridman1:08:02

       Yeah.

   30. SHSam Harris1:08:03

       Both people I know and people I don't know, right? Like, p- people I, you know, mutual friends of ours who are behaving in certain ways on Twitter, which just seemed insane to me, uh, and then I w- that became a signal I felt like I had to take into account somehow, right? You're seeing people at their worst, both friends and strangers, um, and I- I felt that it was, as much as I could sort of try to recalibrate for it, I felt that I was losing touch with what was real information.
6. 1:23:05 – 2:06:48

   COVID

   1. SHSam Harris1:23:05

   2. LFLex Fridman1:23:05

      The shaking up of what is true. Uh, so actually that returns us to experts. Do you think experts can save us? Is there such thing as expertise and experts at something? How do you know if you've achieved it?

   3. SHSam Harris1:23:16

      I think it's, it's important to acknowledge upfront that this i- there's something paradoxical about how we relate to, to authority, e- e- especially within science. Um, and I don't think that paradox is going away and it's just, it doesn't have to be confusing. It's just, it's, and it's not, it's not truly a paradox. It's just like there are different moments in time. So it is true to say that within science or within any, uh, within rationality generally, I mean, we're just when- whenever you're making, uh, having a fact-based discussion about anything, it is true to say that the truth or falsity of a statement does not even slightly depend on the credentials of the person making the statement, right? So it doesn't matter if you're a Nobel laureate, you can be wrong, right? The thing you could, eith- uh, the last sentence you spoke could be total bullshit, right? And it's also possible for someone who's deeply uninformed to be right about something or, and, or to be right for the wrong reasons, right? Or, or someone just gets lucky or someone, or, or, and there, there are middling cases where you have like a, a backyard astronomer who's got no credentials but he just loves astronomy and he's got a telescope and it's, he's spends a lot of time looking at the night sky and he discovers a comet that no one else has seen, you know, not even the professional expert astronomers.

Episode duration: 4:27:45