Making Sense - Sam Harris - #172 — Among the Deplorables

00:00:00.000 welcome to the make it sense podcast this is sam harris okay brief housekeeping once again i'm

00:00:24.600 now adding afterwards at the end of these podcasts so i will save some of my remarks for there again

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00:01:04.420 also many of you have asked whether the conversations that i'm now having on the waking up app

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00:01:19.080 on my website only not pipe them to the subscriber feed this is because they really are narrowly

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00:02:21.760 and you'll be given a free account okay today i'm speaking with andrew marantz andrew is a staff

00:02:32.260 writer at the new yorker his work has also appeared in harper's new york magazine mother

00:02:38.120 jones the new york times and many other publications he is a contributor to radio lab

00:02:44.520 and the new yorker radio hour he has spoken at ted and he's been interviewed in many places cnn

00:02:51.760 msnbc npr and we are talking today about his book antisocial online extremists techno utopians

00:03:00.680 and the hijacking of the american conversation and it's an interesting book and an interesting

00:03:07.140 discussion it gets more contentious than i was expecting about an hour in or so andrew is more

00:03:15.060 woke than i realized and we talk about all that i can't tell if we disagree more than is apparent in

00:03:22.760 this conversation or less i'm going to guess more again i was a little surprised at the line he took

00:03:30.980 through parts of this conversation this is becoming an occupational hazard anyway i'll have a few more

00:03:37.380 things to say about that in my afterward and now i bring you andrew marantz

00:03:43.620 andrew thanks for joining me on the podcast thank you thanks for having me so you've written a

00:03:53.380 fascinating book which is a really fun read uh the book is antisocial online extremists techno utopians

00:04:02.020 and the hijacking of the american conversation before we jump into your book give me a potted bio for

00:04:10.020 you how do you describe your career as a journalist uh it's a good question well first uh i think some

00:04:17.060 people might have a hard time believing that it's a fun read but i appreciate you saying it because

00:04:21.620 although it is dark subject matter i did try to find some of the the dark comedy in it yeah yeah

00:04:28.340 there's a lot of that yeah no i'm glad that landed because you know you can't just be bleakness from

00:04:33.860 start to finish even though it does get bleak sometimes i guess i would say i graduated from

00:04:40.100 college in 2006 uh moved to brooklyn and became a freelance journalist because that's what all my friends

00:04:47.220 were doing basically and you know for other reasons too i wanted to learn about stuff and pursue truth

00:04:55.060 without sort of boxing myself into one academic discipline exclusively for the rest of my life and

00:05:01.220 wanted to try to write beautiful sentences that also spoke to true things in the world and you know all the

00:05:09.620 sort of cliche reasons one becomes a sad young literary man in brooklyn and um ended up freelancing

00:05:17.700 for you know harper's new york magazine mother jones a variety of places and did a master's program

00:05:25.460 where i met someone who was leaving an editorial position at the new yorker and told me that one was

00:05:31.300 opening up and it was a kind of entry-level bottom of the food chain sort of job there but i just was so

00:05:37.620 impressed with everyone i met there that even though i wasn't sure i wanted an editorial entry-level job

00:05:44.260 and i was in some ways just happier being a writer i uh i took that job and then i sort of was an editor

00:05:51.700 and a writer for six or seven years before going back full-time into writing mostly for the new yorker

00:05:58.500 and for this book it's interesting so your book is it's fascinating because essentially you embedded

00:06:04.260 yourself among the deplorables and you know so it's really a report from the front when did you

00:06:11.460 actually start reporting for the book uh there's kind of different ways of answering that i mean

00:06:16.500 in one sense the idea for the book really gelled once trump entered the picture you know on that

00:06:23.140 on that escalator that we all remember from june 2015 in another way the preoccupations of the book

00:06:29.300 predated that you know i was reporting on click bait factories and the kind of degradation of

00:06:36.500 online media since 2014 and so it it was kind of it was a set of preoccupations i had already had and

00:06:44.820 then once trump and trumpism entered the picture and then from there you know various kinds of trollery

00:06:51.060 and misogyny and white nationalism and stuff it all kind of congealed into something that i felt really had

00:06:56.820 to be a book but the underlying concerns i think had had been with me for a while they were just kind

00:07:01.860 of inchoate and hard for me to even really put a name to so before we we actually begin to walk

00:07:08.500 through your adventure in the book and and touch specific topics like social media and fake news and

00:07:16.900 gatekeeping and trump and how the press deals with him and there's just there's a lot to cover here but

00:07:23.860 what's interesting to me is that many of us have been isolated in a kind of liberal scare quotes

00:07:30.820 elitist bubble and this book is really a kind of breaking of that spell is what it's like to fully

00:07:38.500 embed in this culture of reaction in their own terms to elitism and your book offers some considerable

00:07:49.220 testimony to to what has been happening but i do have a concern that as we analyze this we are very

00:07:58.100 likely to be importing our the continued liberal confusion into that context and misunderstanding

00:08:05.940 things and and so what i feel like this is this is now a concern that i've expressed on multiple

00:08:11.140 podcasts i feel like there's a the prospect of either exaggerating the problem of things like

00:08:19.620 white nationalism for instance uh and sparking a kind of pendulum swing into moral panic i mean i

00:08:25.460 certainly see that on the left i see that especially clearly because there are people on the left who

00:08:30.340 think i'm a white nationalist which is completely insane so as we walk through this at various points i'm

00:08:37.620 going to want to question whether or not the way you see the the data you were confronting the data

00:08:45.620 being these these conversations with people is the only interpretation to which it's susceptible so

00:08:51.700 with that caveat let's just weigh it in and well just to just to add on before we get going i think

00:08:57.620 that's all stuff i'd be interested in exploring in the conversation i guess one thing about being

00:09:02.820 blindsided and being in a in a you know elitist bubble and all that stuff it's sort of fully yes

00:09:08.580 and and also no i mean on the one hand i do find it sort of inexplicable that trump could have any base

00:09:16.020 at all in this country on a kind of like a priori level on another level i you know was the guy sort

00:09:22.740 of betting my friends that he would win because i had that read of the political landscape even though i

00:09:29.140 was sort of you know incredulous about it i still did think it would happen and there was kind of a

00:09:36.500 lull in you know october 2016 when i sort of finally accepted okay i guess all the polls can't be wrong

00:09:44.100 but up until then i did sort of have a sense that it was not only possible but in many at many points

00:09:51.780 probable so i definitely own the uh you know latte sipping glasses wearing brooklynite

00:09:59.620 label that i very clearly wear but i also you know i think there there are bubbles and there are

00:10:05.460 bubbles and yeah i think it's possible to see out of them and in some cases all you have to do to see

00:10:11.460 out of them is just you know do a google search or a facebook search and and there it is so i definitely

00:10:16.420 everybody has their biases and i have mine but um i do think that the sort of liberal elites who can't

00:10:22.660 even believe that trump you know misspelled a word on twitter kind of you know caricatured you know

00:10:28.660 we get carried away with that sometimes i think yeah i actually had forgotten that part of your

00:10:32.500 book where you you detail your impressions with respect to trump so i was more in the bubble than

00:10:38.820 you were except i was struck by the detail you flagged that the new yorker had not prepared a cover

00:10:47.220 for a trump victory they only had a clinton cover which was yeah fairly amazing yeah and there is

00:10:52.420 a degree to which and we can get into this too but there's another kind of bifurcation here with with

00:10:58.740 regard to the new yorker because in a sense the new yorker is kind of a minor character in the book

00:11:02.900 and there's a way of reading what i do as a kind of you know parody of the new yorker's you know

00:11:10.900 insistence on putting accents on you know the word elite or you know you have the diuresis or whatever

00:11:17.940 and like that stuff is fun to mock and i'm happy to mock it lightly on the other hand there is this

00:11:24.100 sort of strange almost reversal that i experienced where my natural tendency is to be pretty anti-authoritarian

00:11:32.980 and contrarian and anti-establishment in many ways that's kind of my natural instinctive tendency

00:11:38.820 and yet i find myself kind of coming to this from within the kind of inner sanctum of elite american

00:11:46.260 journalism and i guess there's a lot to say about it we can explore many angles of it but i guess

00:11:50.660 there are just different kinds of elitism and many of them most of them are obviously bad and i think

00:11:57.620 that from my experience of the new yorker from being inside it it actually doesn't subscribe to that

00:12:04.820 bad kind of elitism nearly as much as i would have expected i mean i expected a lot of snooty

00:12:11.380 elbow patch wearing you know all the stuff you see on the family guy or something i didn't that that

00:12:18.180 hasn't been my experience it has however been my experience that there's a lot of um there are a lot of

00:12:26.180 discriminations being made you know with regard to which piece is better than another piece or how a

00:12:32.180 piece should be structured or which arguments withstand scrutiny and so it is um hierarchical

00:12:39.300 in that sense you know it is a gatekeeping institution in the sense that it takes great

00:12:44.100 care to decide which things to publish and which things you know not to but so i mean that's just to

00:12:50.340 sort of mark that as to the extent that that is um hierarchical you know there are different ways of

00:12:57.220 being hierarchical some more arbitrary than others yeah well i once wrote an article titled in defense

00:13:04.020 of elitism for newsweek and and then john meacham helpfully retitled it when atheists attack i still

00:13:12.180 think yours is more clickable but uh yes maybe more meretricious right yeah i was i was going after

00:13:17.860 sarah palin back in the day so um let's start with social media i mean you you make this so i think

00:13:25.940 many of us feel that social media is somewhere close to the root of the problem you know that coupled to

00:13:31.860 the the advertising model for digital media and the and the primacy of clicks you point out in a

00:13:38.500 recent new yorker article i don't think you make this point in your book but that you know the

00:13:42.740 gutenberg revolution unleashed similar problems right i mean the you know the printing press had

00:13:49.140 had liabilities in that it allowed for the amplification of misinformation and martin luther

00:13:54.420 is often celebrated as a sign that you know the printing press enabled the reformation but as you

00:14:03.300 point out it also allowed him to spread his murderous anti-semitism and ushered in something

00:14:08.980 like a century of religious conflict but it seems that there is something special about

00:14:15.620 the time in which we're living and this notion upon which facebook and these other companies are

00:14:21.860 founded that linking people digitally is just an intrinsic good that hasn't really survived contact

00:14:29.780 with reality these few years yeah it it unfortunately survived i think a few years beyond where it was

00:14:36.340 plausible and that extension of a few years was enough to in part give us trump and brexit and

00:14:43.940 bolsonaro and modi and you know duterte i mean i could go on but but yeah i think you're right it's it's

00:14:50.980 the worm has kind of turned on that one i think you know in the space of you know just the few years

00:14:56.660 between when i started embarking on this project and when i'm putting it out into the world i've been

00:15:01.220 shocked at how much public opinion has swung from in my view one sort of extreme to the other

00:15:10.580 and i think that's helpful i don't think that it's i don't think we're all the way there yet in terms of

00:15:17.220 nuance and understanding you know obviously there's a lot of helpful stuff bundled together with a lot of

00:15:23.700 really dangerous stuff and i don't think on a large scale we've really teased it all out yet i guess to

00:15:29.220 your to your point about whether it's different i think yes it's different in the sense that well

00:15:34.020 two things one i think because we relied on a really unrealistically oversimplified idea of what

00:15:43.540 liberatory technologies do because a lot of the because a lot of the you know young men who started

00:15:50.100 these social media companies were just sort of assuming that their technologies would be like the

00:15:54.900 printing press and that the printing press essentially did nothing but help us move toward

00:16:00.500 progress and democracy and all the rest of it they had an opportunity if they had had a more nuanced

00:16:06.980 view of it to build in protections right from the beginning and they didn't do that and so they set

00:16:13.780 themselves up for more pain than was necessary i also think that even though the early publishers and

00:16:22.420 printers in you know renaissance europe were ambivalent about their status as gatekeepers they did come to

00:16:31.140 accept pretty quickly that they had that role and responsibility and the social media founders worked

00:16:38.740 really hard to deny that they were gatekeepers to deny that they had any curatorial responsibility

00:16:44.500 to deny that they could be held accountable for what happened on their platforms in some cases they're

00:16:48.580 still trying to deny it again without without any plausibility in my view so yeah i think it's the

00:16:54.580 combination of these massively powerful tools with all kinds of denials of the idea that the tools could

00:17:01.380 have any negative impact and that if they do have any negative impact well we're just not responsible for

00:17:06.420 it um i think that is unique plus you know now we have nukes and climate crisis and you know just

00:17:14.660 things that they didn't have to deal with back then do you think the gatekeeping problem is soluble

00:17:20.900 i think it can be improved i don't have a perfect solution in mind but i think one key thing

00:17:27.780 is for the engine of virality to be moved away from what it currently is which is

00:17:37.300 what i call activating emotion or i don't call it that the scientists that i cite call it that

00:17:41.380 i think that's one big thing you could do where instead of the current system which measures

00:17:48.900 engagement and engagement is measured by proxies for you know essentially things that increase your

00:17:56.100 galvanic skin response you know anger lust laughter you know there's just these very kind of

00:18:02.500 animalistic behavioral responses if you moved away from that as the coin of the realm and moved

00:18:08.420 into a more you know balanced system where those emotional reactions were mixed with other

00:18:15.060 kinds of reactions you know more slow brain kinds of reactions more pro-social reactions to use the

00:18:21.860 mirror image of the book's title that would solve a lot the problem is it's really hard and it might

00:18:26.980 make the companies a little bit less money yeah well i mean there is just this problem which you cite

00:18:32.660 in the book that fake news consistently spreads faster than the truth and it is because we're we've

00:18:39.380 optimized for these these activating emotions we've created essentially a quasi-darwinian system

00:18:47.140 that selects for outrage and misinformation this is a machine for generating controversy and you could see how

00:18:55.140 you might tinker with the settings there but it may just be a fact of human nature that the lurid

00:19:02.820 incredible terrifying and divisive is stickier than something that tells us that people are mostly good

00:19:11.780 most of the time and that you know order is progressing yeah i i would agree that the lurid and the

00:19:18.420 you know that those things are stickier inherently i guess my hope would be that you could build a

00:19:26.900 system that doesn't just privilege those things i mean we tend to assume that what we see on social

00:19:32.660 media is just kind of a flat reflection of the popular will or that you know because we're seeing a

00:19:38.820 lot of something that means that you know a lot of people want that thing to be out there and you know

00:19:44.980 know that it's just sort of a flat reflection of democratic urges and desires i guess on one kind of

00:19:53.140 immediate level that's true because there are people or bots in many cases you know clicking on the

00:19:58.100 things but in another sense it is you know there's a system that is conditioning people to behave a certain

00:20:05.700 way so you know it may have always been the case that lurid and false and you know sensationalist

00:20:11.620 things got more attention but you know if you were a producer of a newspaper let's say yeah there was

00:20:17.780 plenty of yellow journalism there were plenty of penny papers and partisan presses and all the rest of it

00:20:22.180 but they also had a sense of shame they also were you know members of a society that could be made to

00:20:28.980 feel that they should stop you know goading society into war because their buddies would look down on

00:20:35.380 them if they did it or that you know they would do it for the beginning of part of their career and then

00:20:39.300 try to look much more high-minded for the latter part of their career like joseph pulitzer did so

00:20:44.980 i guess you know i do think that human urges can be pushed back against when you have people in

00:20:52.580 charge of the systems who are willing to try yeah i guess i'm just i'm sympathetic with this distinction

00:20:57.460 that every social media overlord wants to draw between a publisher and a platform and you know they

00:21:05.860 consider themselves the latter and and therefore have more or less um happily abrogated any curatorial

00:21:14.580 responsibility that you or i would want to assign to them and i do understand that just because of the

00:21:21.060 sheer scale of the problem and but for the fact that we might invent some ai that is truly competent

00:21:29.860 you know and doesn't make egregious errors you know just censoring you know normal republican senators

00:21:35.300 as you know neo-nazis or whatever the failure would be there's a difference between you know you

00:21:40.900 the new yorker making a decision about who to publish and what sort of views to amplify or me making a

00:21:47.220 decision about who to speak with on this podcast i think those kinds of decisions have to be made

00:21:53.700 responsibly and i and i take it seriously the the concern about whether it makes sense to give

00:21:58.980 someone a platform or not you know and there are many people i've you know there are people you you

00:22:04.020 spoke with in your book who've asked to be on the podcast and who i've decided essentially never to speak

00:22:09.700 with because i think they are at least beyond my overton window and even there i'm i'm somewhat

00:22:15.780 conflicted because part of me you know i'm somewhat idealistic about the prospects of just shining

00:22:21.860 sunlight on bad ideas and insofar as i think i'm capable of doing that it's tempting to do it with

00:22:28.180 any bad ideas of consequence but um i don't know when you when you talk to someone like uh you know

00:22:34.820 jack dorsey or anyone who's running a platform of this kind it's hard to see how they can ever

00:22:42.180 curate this correctly you know in a way that doesn't cause more problems than it's solving because

00:22:49.780 there's just so many casualties of their inept efforts to curate i mean they're people who have

00:22:55.060 received lifetime bans from twitter for saying things like men are not women in that case that

00:23:00.900 was considered hate speech against the trans community i mean say more about your sense of

00:23:07.140 optimism that we should even move in that direction but what if the technology on some level just doesn't

00:23:12.180 allow for this to be done in a way that is going to solve this particular problem yeah there's a lot in

00:23:18.660 there and i i so i've i'm rarely accused of being an optimist so i appreciate that i don't think i'm

00:23:24.820 very optimistic about their ability to do it certainly not their ability to do it flawlessly

00:23:29.060 you know we can get into specific cases i think you know my instincts on the trans stuff might be

00:23:35.860 different than yours but just you know we can take any number of examples but i do take the larger

00:23:42.340 point that there's problems of scale it's never going to be perfect and that in some cases the the

00:23:47.540 medicine could be worse than the disease when it comes to banning people or kicking them off i mean

00:23:52.260 i get that in principle and i am i am definitely sympathetic to how hard it is for someone who's in

00:23:58.740 charge of one of these platforms to make these very tough decisions i don't think i have all the

00:24:04.740 answers or that if i were in charge i would know exactly what to do i guess we kind of have a different

00:24:10.820 starting point though where it seems like you might be starting from the you know the system as it

00:24:15.540 exists and then saying well how can we expect them to know exactly who to ban when and i guess

00:24:21.700 i would start a few steps back in the causal chain and and question how the system was built in the

00:24:26.580 first place i think by the time you get to the point of deciding who to ban or who not to ban it's

00:24:31.540 it's in a sense too late and you're dealing with symptoms instead of root causes i mean just because

00:24:36.660 you brought up the example of jack dorsey he's been going around for the last six months or so saying

00:24:41.540 well i think it might help if we you know got rid of follower accounts i think it might help if we

00:24:46.500 didn't incentivize likes and follows and and shares as much as we incentivized other things

00:24:51.300 he hasn't done any of that i'm not sure why he hasn't done it if he thinks it would help but

00:24:55.460 i mean i think i do know why because it would make the company less profitable and it's it's

00:25:00.100 profitability is a big question mark right now but but that's just one example of how there are

00:25:05.380 structural changes that can be made that are way above the level of do we ban this account

00:25:10.820 or not and i think what that gets to is the notion that these things were not built with this stuff in

00:25:15.860 mind you know facebook is right now working on abdicating some of this responsibility but they're

00:25:20.820 doing it by building a so-called supreme court of facebook that is not a body that is not an idea

00:25:26.660 they would have entertained even three years ago so there are different ways of getting around

00:25:31.300 this problem it's not just to curate or not to curate yeah it's interesting to consider what would

00:25:38.660 happen if we could curate perfectly let's say it's an error-free you know nazi detector but then

00:25:46.020 you still have the question of when these platforms become more or less identical to internet infrastructure

00:25:54.420 which you could argue that some of them already are you know that means so that you could draw

00:25:59.860 an analogy to something like the phone company right so let's say that the phone company could

00:26:05.860 perfectly detect when people were spreading you know nazi ideas in their private phone conversations

00:26:14.260 should the phone company just shut down those accounts that's sort of the territory we're in

00:26:19.460 if we actually could do this well just to address the point you just made i mean i guess the analogy

00:26:26.580 i would use is that the phone company would be more analogous to you know crowd strike or or not

00:26:33.140 crowd strike that's the thing in the ukraine complaint what's it called cloud flare cloud flare yeah exactly

00:26:38.180 that that there would be deeper layers of internet architecture to analogize the phone company to twitter

00:26:43.460 would be to imagine that the phone gives you extra points every time you say something you know really

00:26:51.220 exciting or you know something that really riles people up that you know when you're on a conference

00:26:57.140 call if you call someone a douchebag or something you know you get 15 extra points like you're in a video

00:27:02.020 game if the phone were tilting the playing field in that way then the phone yeah i think would have

00:27:06.820 more of a gatekeeper analogous responsibility because the phone would be affecting our behavior in a in a

00:27:12.740 proactive way okay well let's jump into the book properly so you really go behind the scenes with

00:27:20.660 a fairly motley cast of characters none of whom i've met in person i think but some of whom i've

00:27:27.940 had various skirmishes with online but there is this larger issue which you know we should touch on

00:27:34.180 which is just this guilt by association algorithm that is running on the left i mean this really is a

00:27:41.540 problem of the left where if you talk to someone you know who's ever spoken to someone who has spoken to

00:27:47.780 someone who's a nazi you're a nazi right no one can survive that scheme you have spoken to someone

00:27:56.420 who's spoken to someone who's spoken to someone who's a nazi and well i've spoken to all of them so

00:28:00.740 yeah but you i mean you you have spoken with them you could argue to however amicably you're you're

00:28:07.780 actually on horsing them and their worldview or to to some degree doing that this is not no one is going

00:28:14.180 to argue reading your book that you gave these people platforms in or at least i wouldn't expect

00:28:20.260 that would be a common charge i would hope not yeah i think that's right i i set out to see them

00:28:26.740 through a critical lens from the beginning and there is a confusion that i think a lot of journalists

00:28:32.900 have and a lot of the public has about journalism and it's a it's a good faith confusion it's not easily

00:28:38.260 resolved between being unbiased or objective or any of those words and being someone who you know

00:28:47.060 takes in the evidence of your senses and more and more of those things seem to be at odds so there's

00:28:52.020 a way of that i could have approached this project where i could have said well i'm just gonna quote what

00:28:57.860 they say and i'm just gonna kind of you know transcribe it and be a stenographer to power and that's

00:29:04.820 that or i could have done what i did do which was be really critical and in some cases really acerbic

00:29:11.540 and mocking which i think was deserved and in some cases necessary but you can't really do both i mean

00:29:19.700 you can't always be both even-handed and tell the full truth there's a difference there between me using

00:29:27.060 the material i've gathered to tell the story i want to tell and you know handing the microphone to

00:29:32.100 someone to tell the story they want to tell i think that's a meaningful distinction does having

00:29:37.220 hung out with these people in person noticeably corrupt your objectivity with respect to how you

00:29:44.980 portray their ideas or i mean do you think you're you're less combative in your treatment of them and

00:29:50.740 their ideas for having you know broken bread with them and and shared long car rides and all the rest

00:29:56.340 yeah it's a good question i i can't know for sure i've only run that experiment once i don't

00:30:02.340 have a control group but i think you probably do have a control group in that there are other people

00:30:06.260 you cover who you presumably don't meet face to face even and you know what that's like right that's

00:30:12.740 a good point yeah i mean one thing i do try to do it's not just a sort of straight ahead taxonomy of

00:30:19.700 shitty people on the internet you know i do try it's sort of using them as fodder to tell a larger

00:30:24.980 story but i do try to take care to taxonomize to the extent that you know i don't want to run

00:30:31.860 together differences and conflate differences you know some of them are nazis some of them are not

00:30:37.620 some of them are white nationalists some of them are not some of them you know are just kind of die

00:30:43.300 hard trumpists who i find absurd because they hold that opinion but i actually am fine with talking to

00:30:51.220 in all other respects and some of them i just find kind of skin crawly and creepy all the way through

00:30:56.340 so it is case by case now the question of whether you know the case by case accounting is different

00:31:02.820 for cases where i've hung out with people versus not i think it's hard to say i mean the kind of

00:31:07.860 journalism i do mostly requires just really being a fly on the wall for long periods of time and there

00:31:13.940 are some people who do that kind of longitudinal immersive style journalism who just don't do it

00:31:20.660 about people they don't think they're gonna like i mean i have colleagues and friends who say i don't

00:31:25.140 want to write a profile of someone unless i am reasonably sure that i'm gonna enjoy their company

00:31:30.740 because i don't want to spend my time in a combative environment and i also just don't want to take

00:31:37.140 on the responsibility of writing a really sharp critical piece in the end and i just would rather

00:31:43.540 write an admiring piece now obviously i'm not one of those journalists but i i was always on guard

00:31:49.060 against the possibility that they were playing me or that they were using their time with me to try to

00:31:53.860 subtly lobby me toward a more flattering picture of them in some cases i think there was no danger of

00:32:00.260 that such as the cases of you know me a jewish journalist talking to a professional anti-semite

00:32:06.820 there was very little chance that i was gonna see eye to eye with that person and yeah in the end even

00:32:13.700 in cases where there wasn't that direct of a conflict i don't think that i was hoodwinked by any of them and and

00:32:22.180 at the same time i don't think i overreacted to that or overcompensated by trying to go harder on

00:32:28.580 them than was merited but i mean it's really not for me to decide yeah there is an interesting effect

00:32:35.380 of you know compassion creeping in for better or worse where i mean just as the reader i mean you

00:32:41.460 you know the one of the more odious characters you talk about is this guy mike enoch who i knew nothing

00:32:49.620 about that's his pseudonym what's his real name again uh painovich painovich mike painovich but when you

00:32:55.460 get the details of his childhood and his life it's it's pretty easy to see that there's a a

00:33:02.420 psychological explanation for at least you know some of his obsession with these ideas and and you

00:33:09.380 know the misuse of his own mind i mean he's he's a smart guy who's spending all his time being an

00:33:15.860 anti-semite yet married to a jewish woman or i guess no longer married to a jewish woman once once

00:33:22.420 you discovered the nature of his podcast but i mean the whole thing is so depressing you know that

00:33:30.420 it's it's hard not to just see him as a casualty of something i mean it's like his his his own agency

00:33:36.980 kind kind of erodes and you just see you know but for the fact that he wasn't you know fed an endless

00:33:43.860 supply of prednisone because he had such horrible eczema as a child that things might have been different

00:33:49.220 and um it's those kind of details which if you're just dealing with the ideas you know i just find

00:33:55.060 if i'm just reacting to someone because they're putting out terrible memes that's one level where i

00:34:01.780 can just deal with the ideas and i can be as uncompromising as i can be but then if you hung

00:34:07.700 out with someone and gotten a sense of their humanity and all of the exculpatory or potentially

00:34:13.620 exculpatory influences on them you come away sort of not knowing how harshly to judge them as a

00:34:20.180 person i i felt the same thing with cernovich frankly i've never met cernovich he's attacked

00:34:25.220 me a bunch online and i you know responded in kind a little bit but then i just sort of got more of a

00:34:30.740 sense of you know how complicated it was it was to be mike cernovich and i just couldn't keep it up

00:34:38.260 anymore you know it just seemed like all right this is just it's not worth interacting in a hostile

00:34:44.420 way with this person at all and yeah so i just don't know if you if you felt that in your reporting

00:34:49.620 or not because as a reader i i felt it you know meeting some of these guys it just felt like it's

00:34:55.460 uh you know i wouldn't want to trade places with any of these people so um how harshly am i going to

00:35:01.060 judge them i think you're right that spending a lot of time with these people both as a reporter and

00:35:10.740 for you as a reader it does change and deepen the way you see them and that was part of my goal i

00:35:17.460 think it's tricky because you don't want to let people off the hook for their terrible behavior and

00:35:24.260 there's a really fine line between empathy and excuse or you know you use the word compassion

00:35:31.460 i don't know how many layers deep we want to go it's kind of deep in my ethos that i try to have

00:35:37.780 radical compassion for everyone i try to have compassion for donald trump who's obviously

00:35:42.900 suffering from one or more personality disorders and who it would be easier to have compassion for

00:35:49.140 him if you felt that he was actually suffering right but you're using suffering in a in a different

00:35:55.380 sense because i mean we're suffering from his his neurological disorders but he doesn't appear to be

00:36:00.340 suffering from them you know i think in the first few minutes before he can actually get the tv to turn

00:36:04.900 on in the morning i think he probably experiences immense suffering right but i you know obviously don't

00:36:09.460 know and in a sense it doesn't matter right because what i really try to do and i'm not i'm not saying

00:36:16.420 that i'm you know able to do this always i'm not some christ-like saint or anything but i do think

00:36:22.260 on some deep level the goal is to try to have empathy for everyone even the worst people now that

00:36:30.900 obviously doesn't mean that you excuse what they're doing and i every fiber of my being thinks donald

00:36:36.980 trump is a bad dude it's just like what do we really mean by bad we mean that he behaves badly

00:36:42.740 he's bad for the world he's bad at his job you know you can go down the list but does it mean

00:36:48.660 that he is condemned on every level that he you know is a soulless creature who's not a human being

00:36:56.740 you know i mean if you really really want to get down to the core of it a part of it has to do with

00:37:04.100 you know you you mentioned the concept of things might have been different in these people's lives and

00:37:07.940 one of the deep sort of concepts that i'm wrestling with in the book is this concept of contingency

00:37:12.580 and how history might have been different and people's lives might have been different and that

00:37:16.820 yeah there is this kind of deep existentialist effect of a kind of you know giant pachinko machine that

00:37:24.140 we're all in but i think the key and i didn't expect to be talking about this kind of stuff but i think

00:37:30.400 it does get to that deep level pretty quickly because i think the key is to try to hold at once

00:37:35.880 the sort of existentialist absurdist notion that nothing is predetermined and that we're not on a

00:37:41.500 automatic track toward progress and redemption while also not you know becoming nihilistic and

00:37:48.700 feeling that life has no meaning and so part of how that for me applies in this case is to think that

00:37:55.380 on some level of course people need to be held accountable for their actions and of course there's

00:37:59.500 a massive moral difference between being a professional anti-semite and being a professional

00:38:06.360 nurse or bus driver or you know i mean like there are differences in how we act in the world and

00:38:13.080 they're immensely meaningful but i i really struggle with saying that that that the deepest and most

00:38:22.160 complete explanation we can give for someone who does bad things is that they're a human dumpster

00:38:27.440 fire and that's the only thing we have to say about them i actually think it's more incumbent on us

00:38:32.480 again not to excuse not to look away but to actually understand the complexity of it and and and in no

00:38:38.700 way to say oh if you grew up poor or if you had eczema therefore you can do whatever you want absolutely

00:38:44.740 not or that we have to agree with you know we have to go from 100 condemnation of their behavior to

00:38:50.800 90 it's not that at all it's just that on some deeper level you know my my wife has been a public

00:38:57.220 defender in the past and their sort of ethos is you're not the worst mistake you ever made and

00:39:02.800 it's really really hard to apply that to nazis i trust me it's not instinctive it's not intuitive and

00:39:08.860 again i don't claim to be some gandian figure who just naturally intuitively does that i mean nazis

00:39:14.640 make me upset they make me angry i i get why people want to yell at them i get why people even want to

00:39:20.160 punch them and i i don't claim to be above that i just think it it's not the only place to land and i also

00:39:26.200 think it doesn't help us understand anything i mean there are different projects right there's one

00:39:30.940 project that is about fighting the ideas which is valuable and there's another project that's about

00:39:36.280 diagnosing and understanding where they come from i think they're both necessary well there really is a

00:39:41.620 problem of understanding what's going on because in addition to having nazis out there and and you know

00:39:49.340 extremists of various types we have this other problem this layer that is built you know around

00:39:57.060 it on it you know somehow interacting with it of what we might call troll culture and there's just

00:40:03.860 this new style of insincerity or apparent insincerity or you know irony usurping every other value

00:40:12.780 which creates a problem of assessing what people actually believe and intend or you know even if

00:40:21.380 you do grant that people should be taken literally even in these contexts it's hard to know just how

00:40:29.160 committed they are to these specific ideas there's a culture of just deliberate obfuscation around this

00:40:35.520 where you know as you report there some of these people are you know i think this was i forget which

00:40:40.720 website this was but you know it was explicit that they wanted it to be hard for the normies to tell

00:40:48.040 whether or not they're joking right right and contained in that is the implication that you know most of

00:40:54.480 the time we're not really joking right or you know we're not joking about some of the worst stuff how do

00:40:59.640 you think about troll culture and what should be the appropriate response to it because the response i'm

00:41:07.060 seeing more and more in the mainstream media and on the left is just taking the worst possible

00:41:16.020 construal of everything as the literal truth of everything yeah and i i get where that impulse comes

00:41:23.840 from and you know look it's really really complicated i mean i say a couple times in the book that

00:41:30.160 trolls set this ingenious trap right because if you're a good troll and you know i think the president is

00:41:36.880 good at very few things but i think trolling is definitely one of them if you're good at it you

00:41:41.180 don't leave people any good choice right if you pay any kind of attention to a troll you're letting

00:41:48.400 them win because what they want is attention if you let their views or putative views or offensive jokes

00:41:56.740 or ironic whatever go unchallenged then they also win so it's a kind of trap and i don't think we've

00:42:05.460 figured out a good way out i think you know i have a a little part of the book where i'm i'm at the

00:42:13.160 white house briefing room and um i'm there with uh this kind of you know just just he's he's essentially

00:42:21.480 an insurgent in a in a dirty culture war who is acting as a white house correspondent for

00:42:28.980 a gateway pundit so i'm there kind of shadowing him and sort of seeing how how far he can go in the

00:42:36.780 he's essentially just performing he doesn't actually ask questions or intend to ask questions

00:42:42.580 he's just there to kind of act out the degradation of the norm of the press briefing room being

00:42:50.100 meaningful at all and right while he's there but nonetheless he and others in this vein were just

00:42:57.640 adorably excited to have been granted press credentials in the first place absolutely you

00:43:02.320 know so they're subverting it as then the norm of this institution is like this is just a worthless goof

00:43:07.860 and yet this is the biggest day in my life that i get access to the white house totally i mean yeah

00:43:13.200 you see that all over the place you see that with all kinds of reactionaries and proto-reactionaries

00:43:18.260 and want to be authoritarians that you know our whole system is meaningless and you know should

00:43:23.580 be consigned to the waste bin of history and yet as soon as i have any power within it i'm going to

00:43:27.880 flaunt that power to the maximum not that these guys were really reactionaries in the sense that

00:43:33.040 they had a consistent ideology but just that they their impulses run in both directions but while i was

00:43:38.580 there with him a few of the real reporters who were there called him out and sort of confronted him

00:43:45.440 on camera or you know everything is on camera these days because someone just holds up a phone

00:43:49.740 and they wanted to nail him to the wall they wanted to nail him on having a view that was

00:43:55.960 inarguably beyond the pale so that they could prove that he didn't belong there and they couldn't really

00:44:04.680 do it because they didn't well because they just didn't know exactly who he was and so they kept

00:44:11.840 saying well you are a white nationalist and he said well my boyfriend is colombian so i guess i'm not a

00:44:19.320 good white nationalist you know and he was able to kind of win that round now even though they weren't

00:44:26.800 wrong in their intuition that he didn't belong there he absolutely didn't belong there because he

00:44:32.040 wasn't even pretending to be good at being a journalist i mean he and some level was pretending

00:44:37.600 but just in the barest most superficial way he really he really was to the extent that what

00:44:42.700 happens in that room is meaningful at all which we can you know call into question but to the extent

00:44:48.040 that that kind of journalism is meaningful he shouldn't have been there but they couldn't really

00:44:52.200 nail down why and the reason i ended up being so scene dependent in the book is because i feel like

00:44:58.100 i went round and round in my head about these theoretical concerns and reading into the history

00:45:04.140 of questions of journalistic ethics and reading public opinion by walter lippman and thinking through

00:45:09.900 how democratic institutions do or don't survive and all of which was an interesting thought exercise

00:45:16.260 but then you know to just see a scene like that playing out in front of your eyes and seeing how

00:45:21.280 even when something is obviously going awry it's not always easy to name it accurately or to

00:45:28.100 decisively prove it and so to me to get back to the substance of your question that kind of seems

00:45:33.880 like it it suggests two different things to me that may or may not be at odds with each other like

00:45:39.740 on one hand it seems to me like you want to be really minimalist and limit yourself to only lodging

00:45:46.320 accusations that you absolutely know to be true because otherwise you know you could set yourself up for

00:45:51.560 for humiliation on the other hand when you're dealing with a really slippery gifted troll they're not

00:46:01.180 always going to give you the ammunition you need so if you limit yourself to only the barest assertions

00:46:08.200 of fact you're just letting them win because you are allowing a liar to dictate the terms of the debate

00:46:16.980 so of course i don't advocate for making up accusations or for you know misinterpreting jokes

00:46:25.020 as reality or vice versa obviously in a vacuum you want to get things right as often as you can but

00:46:29.780 the problem is they don't say what they mean they don't give you the courtesy of of of telling you who

00:46:36.040 they are and so i get why people try to you know why sometimes people overplay their hand because you

00:46:41.940 you you you have to get outside of their setting of the terms well many of them tell you who they

00:46:49.240 are that or they tell themselves who they are when only their friends are listening i mean so if you if

00:46:54.340 you listen long enough to many of these people i think the mask if they're ever wearing one does come

00:47:00.760 off sometimes yeah so let's go to one of the kind of the harder cases which are more by definition more

00:47:07.080 mainstream and here i think our intuitions might divide a little bit and again i mean my intuitions

00:47:16.260 here are now you know sort of newly anchored to the experience of being on the other side of this i

00:47:22.600 mean being targeted by people's poorly calibrated racist detectors so like take the cases of tucker

00:47:30.120 carlson and laura ingram right so these are both people who i've been interviewed by i've never met

00:47:35.200 either of them in person i don't think but you know i've been interviewed by each of them a few

00:47:40.560 times you know not recently but you single them out essentially as as racist dog whistlers for things

00:47:48.380 they've said recently and i think so laura ingram said you know democrats mostly want to replace those

00:47:53.720 old white yahoo conservatives with a new group who might be a little a bit more amenable to big

00:47:59.040 government and that you read as a dog whistle i believe i can read that more charitably just

00:48:04.960 as a fairly factual statement i mean there's so many people on the far left who are banging on and on

00:48:13.240 about white privilege and using whiteness and age and gender you know it's old white men being the

00:48:23.800 filter against which they would make almost any political decision i mean they're advertising this

00:48:29.080 about themselves and it seems to be charitable to laura and that's an impulse i don't often feel

00:48:35.560 she could have just been remarking on that and not dog whistling to actual racist much less expressing

00:48:43.580 her own racism yeah so i believe you that you can parse that in a way that you see it as not a dog

00:48:53.340 whistle i guess i don't see it that way and i don't really see why you i mean i i look i get that

00:49:03.100 it's always possible to read a quote literally as not racist in the sense that the person is not

00:49:10.180 literally saying in the quote i a racist believe that the races are that the white race is superior to

00:49:16.940 the non-white races like in any quote where somebody's not saying those words it's possible

00:49:21.920 to read it as not racist i haven't listened to every episode of your show but i've heard some

00:49:27.120 former episodes where i've heard you do this a few times with trump you know saying you know yes he told

00:49:33.520 you know these women of color to go back to their countries but i'm not sure i see that as a racist

00:49:37.900 dog whistle and i guess i guess i don't see why we we should ignore what's right in front of us

00:49:44.420 and not take the obvious inference from it there there is a a very well-known poisonous theory

00:49:51.680 called the great replacement theory that we all know now because they were chanting about it in

00:49:57.020 charlottesville and so to the extent that people didn't know about it before that which i would

00:50:01.460 argue it's probable that laura ingram and tucker carlson did know about it before that but i can't

00:50:05.560 prove it but we all know about it after that to then traffic in those words replacement and give it an

00:50:12.900 explicitly race related valence and then to turn around and deny that you're trafficking and race

00:50:18.980 baiting i it just it it just beggars belief and i i don't you know plus you can put it together with

00:50:24.920 a decades-long history of of doing similar things and of supporting policies that have those effects

00:50:30.440 so i guess i just don't i don't see why we would try to contort ourselves into you know trying to i i get

00:50:37.820 the point of being charitable to people but this doesn't seem charitable this seems implausible i mean i can

00:50:42.440 give you an answer to that question i mean why bend over backwards to be charitable even in the case

00:50:51.000 when you're dealing with someone who have other reason to believe

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - October 21, 2019

#172 — Among the Deplorables

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