Making Sense - Sam Harris - #229 — A Few Thoughts for a New Year

Sam Harris's thoughts on the end of the year and the start of the new one, and why we should pay attention to the things worth paying attention to, personally and professionally, in order to make sense of the past year and what we can do to make the next one better. He also talks about the crisis of trust in our institutions, and how they have contributed to the breakdown in public trust in them, and the ways in which they have failed to address the problems we are all facing, including the epidemic of Ebola and the ongoing pandemic of Chikungunya, the killer virus that has ravaged much of the world's population for the past two years, and is rapidly becoming a major threat to our health and well-being, as well as the ongoing efforts to fight the spread of misinformation and pseudoscientific pseudoscience spreading across social media and the mainstream media, and what it means for our ability to protect ourselves and our society from the threat of pandemic epidemics like Ebola and other major pandemic viruses like S.E. coli and other viruses that threaten to devastate our food supply and disrupt our daily lives. Make sense of it all here at The Making Sense Podcast. Make sense here at Making Sense here at the Making Sense podcast. Thanks to our sponsor, Amazon Prime and VaynerMedia for sponsoring the podcast. Making Sense is a production of Gimlet Media. Please consider pledging a review of the podcast by clicking the link below, and/or reviewing the podcast on iTunes, and leaving us a rating and review in your podcast review, and review on Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your listening choices are available. Thanks also, and we'll be giving you a discount on the podcast listening to the podcast in the future episodes of the making sense podcast, making sense in the next week! Thank you for listening and sharing the podcast! Thanks again for listening, and good vibes! - Your feedback is much appreciated. -Sam Harris and Good Luck, and Good Morning America - Timestamps: 5 Star Reviews: 5 Star Reviewer: 6 Starred: 7 Starred, 8 Starred 9 Starred? 10 Starred Podcast: 11 Starredacted, 12 Starred in the podcast 13 Starred by 15 Starred Out? 16 Starred In the podcast: 17 Starred By 17

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris.

00:00:24.280 Okay, well I want to say a few things about my hopes for the new year here. Like all of you,

00:00:33.460 I'm happy to get 2020 behind us, but of course there's no guarantee that 2021 will be better,

00:00:40.920 right? I mean, these calendar dates are just concepts that have very little connection to

00:00:45.660 the dynamics of what is actually happening out in the world, apart from the tenuous connection of

00:00:52.160 all of us hoping to reset our lives on January 1st, which is not nothing, but it's not a lot

00:00:59.160 either. As for whether a virus mutates, or a hostile foreign power hacks our government

00:01:06.220 and major corporations, and steals or manipulates sensitive data, these things happen on their own

00:01:13.360 schedule, as you know, and both of these things appear to have happened in the last few weeks.

00:01:17.600 To what end, it's not yet clear. But it's natural, and useful, I think, to use the change in calendar

00:01:27.440 as a device to clear one's head, and attempt to get one's priorities straight. So, like many of you,

00:01:35.280 that's what I'm doing. In fact, the madness of this last year has already helped me get my priorities

00:01:40.960 straight, or straighter. I now have far fewer browser tabs open in my life, and I think this will be true

00:01:50.880 going forward. There's a spirit of triage I now feel. What is worth paying attention to, personally

00:01:59.140 and professionally? I'm living with this question more and more. If you can think back to January

00:02:06.580 and February of last year, how were you planning to spend 2020? And how startling was it to discover

00:02:14.600 that the world had other plans? There's been a tsunami of private pain, even for fairly lucky

00:02:21.740 people. And for the unlucky, 2020 was just brutal. And publicly, there's been a failure, especially in

00:02:30.820 the United States, to cohere around a feeling of shared purpose, and shared sacrifice. And that has

00:02:38.740 been beyond disappointing. It's really been unnerving, how fully we failed here. And in its place,

00:02:47.780 we've witnessed a level of estrangement from one another, which has often been described as

00:02:53.040 hyper-partisanship in a political context. But that doesn't quite cover it. The level of hostility

00:03:00.400 and the degree to which it's been fed by lies and misinformation seems genuinely new to me,

00:03:08.720 and not at all compatible with our building a good society. Now, of course, the interaction between

00:03:15.720 technology, in particular social media, and politics has been the main story here. We've seen vast

00:03:23.580 numbers of people borne away on a tide of misinformation and conspiracy thinking, and it's rendered them

00:03:29.480 totally unreachable. In fact, our society appears to have shattered itself into competing cults.

00:03:36.560 The cult of Trumpism, with its especially crazy core of QAnon, and the cult of wokeness, with its 0.95

00:03:44.860 crazy core of critical race theory. I'm not saying these problems are precisely the same or necessarily

00:03:50.800 proportional, but they are the same in being constituted almost entirely by propaganda, to a

00:03:57.480 degree that should only be possible in dystopian fiction. It's like we've come ashore on the

00:04:02.980 proverbial island of liars, and it's just deranging. And all of this seems caused by and further causes a

00:04:11.060 breakdown in social trust and trust in institutions. On one level, a breakdown in trust is understandable.

00:04:17.760 The conjunctions of competence and incompetence we've seen have been fairly breathtaking. We've had

00:04:25.100 record-breaking vaccine development, alongside a total failure of political leadership on both the

00:04:31.060 left and the right, and at all levels, to successfully manage a pandemic. We have literally seen the time

00:04:38.140 course of medical research cut down to almost nothing. The Moderna vaccine was created in a weekend.

00:04:44.980 It was created before there had been a single death from COVID in the United States. Yes, it depended

00:04:50.920 on many years of prior work, but going from a viral genome sequence to a vaccine in a matter of days

00:04:57.960 is astonishing. And yet our most prestigious medical institutions, like the CDC, and our most

00:05:05.340 prestigious medical journals, like the New England Journal of Medicine, have worked extraordinarily

00:05:11.000 hard in the last year to destroy their reputations. The contamination of public health and scientific

00:05:18.400 communication by political dogmatism on both the left and the right has been catastrophic.

00:05:25.940 We've had our most respected medical voices either capitulate to Trump and his messaging or capitulate to

00:05:34.120 the wokeness. And if you don't know what I'm talking about, you haven't been paying attention.

00:05:38.440 And now we're botching the distribution of the vaccine. At the time I'm recording this,

00:05:44.800 it will take a decade to vaccinate the entire country at our current pace. And we've had nearly

00:05:50.980 a year to prepare for this moment. It's just incredible. Thousands of people are dying a day

00:05:57.880 as vaccine risks spoiling on our shelves. I mean, we're great at molecular biology,

00:06:06.100 but we appear to suck at everything else. And surely information and misinformation is at the core of

00:06:13.720 this. Something like 50% of our society appears to be quite sanguine about getting the novel

00:06:20.340 coronavirus, but terrified to get the vaccine for it. I've heard reports from hospitals where 50%

00:06:27.560 of the frontline healthcare workers are refusing their doses of vaccine. Throughout the pandemic,

00:06:34.160 and especially through the election and its aftermath, it has been amazing to hear from

00:06:39.220 people on both sides of what seems to be a mass hallucination, a pseudo-spiritual awakening that

00:06:46.000 has engulfed the minds of most of the people in our society. I mean, left and right have broken down

00:06:52.220 as concepts in many ways. But whatever you call them, the political extremes have gone mad.

00:06:58.600 Perhaps they were always mad. But the madness has crept inwards and has tainted vast stretches of the

00:07:05.540 mainstream. Mainstream Republicans have capitulated to Trump and Trumpism to a degree that I wouldn't

00:07:12.100 have thought possible. And the ideological capture of the media and our other institutions by wokeness

00:07:18.020 has been just as amazing. One has to reference the behavior of cults to begin to understand what's

00:07:24.500 going on here. And it's worth asking yourself, are you in a cult? Are you actually thinking clearly

00:07:32.300 about anything? Are you getting good information about anything? I asked this about myself, too. It has

00:07:41.360 become genuinely hard to find a path through information space that leads to anything like

00:07:46.540 daylight now. Do you think there was a massive voter fraud in the 2020 election and Trump actually won?

00:07:53.380 And Republican election officials and secretaries of state and judges are all in on the plot? Well,

00:08:00.940 if you do, you're in a cult. Do you think that racism and sexism and other forms of bigotry are

00:08:08.020 main problems in society now? And that they explain all current inequality? Do you think that great

00:08:14.840 companies and medical schools and the entertainment industry and other desirable places to learn and work

00:08:21.440 are currently in the business of excluding qualified people of color and women out of a preference for

00:08:28.580 white men? Is that really what you think? Well, then you're in a cult. Do you think the COVID pandemic 0.75

00:08:36.160 is basically a hoax? And that the lockdowns were imposed to destroy the economy and defeat Trump?

00:08:42.880 Do you think we're being told to wear masks just to get us to comply with arbitrary limits on our

00:08:47.120 freedom? Well, then you're in a cult. And the new media landscape has not helped matters. What I think

00:08:55.100 I've seen in many of my fellow podcasters and writers is the phenomenon of audience capture. My friend

00:09:01.780 Eric Weinstein came up with that phrase for undoubtedly an older phenomenon. But it's when you begin telling

00:09:07.860 your audience what they want to hear and you get rewarded for it and the cycle becomes self-reinforcing.

00:09:14.620 So some of this is probably inevitable, right? We all gravitate toward messages that we like and to

00:09:20.620 people we find persuasive. And these people tend to keep doing what works. You know, it's nice to be

00:09:26.420 liked, especially when the business model depends on it. But audience capture is a real problem and I

00:09:34.280 have consciously guarded against it. Ever since I discovered that whole sections of my audience were

00:09:39.280 outraged by one or another position I've taken, I decided not to be concerned about that and not

00:09:45.580 to do anything differently. And I don't think I'll ever understand those of you who claim to love what

00:09:51.220 I'm doing here on the podcast and who have read my books and followed my work for years, who imagine

00:09:57.020 that I would have been a fan of Donald Trump or wokeness. I mean, both of these grotesque objects 0.97

00:10:03.660 are the antithesis of everything I care about. Both are purely divisive, purely misleading.

00:10:12.280 Both represent a near total embrace of error. Trumpism and wokeness are like two doors leading

00:10:18.900 to alternate hells from my point of view. And between the two, I think I've offended 50% of you

00:10:25.080 in the last few years. And many of my guests have done likewise. We really need careful,

00:10:32.260 principled, intellectually honest people to help sort through the rubble now and begin building

00:10:38.920 again. And these are the types of people I'm eager to speak with on this podcast. I realize all of this

00:10:45.040 sounds a little gloomy, but it seems important to acknowledge how fully things have unraveled over

00:10:50.820 the last year. Of course, on another level, it's amazing that things work as well as they do.

00:10:56.860 And to even have the expectation that things will work and to be appalled when they don't

00:11:01.880 is a testament to our progress. We expect airplanes to not only take off and land safely, but to serve

00:11:08.900 decent coffee. We have come a long way in 100 years. 100 years from now, if we don't annihilate

00:11:16.380 ourselves in the meantime, we will view everything I'm complaining about today as just a few growing

00:11:22.620 pains on the way to a glorious future. I really want our children to inhabit that glorious future.

00:11:30.680 And it appears to be within reach. So much of our suffering is obviously unnecessary. So many of our

00:11:39.560 losses are the result of spectacular own goals. Of course, politics is the area where the worst of

00:11:47.100 this happens again and again. But the problem is much larger than politics. Ask yourself, what are we

00:11:54.180 doing here as a species? For the most part, we're creating and consuming culture. The near-term goal

00:12:02.320 should be pretty obvious. We have to build a culture that is conducive to sanity. We need a

00:12:09.980 culture that is at minimum compatible with our long-term survival. And we have serious problems

00:12:15.940 to solve. Infrastructure, pandemic preparedness, that would have been nice, right? Climate change,

00:12:24.560 cybersecurity, education, wealth inequality, our relationship with China.

00:12:30.460 Wouldn't it be amazing to just get busy and sort this stuff out without all the animosity and

00:12:37.980 conspiracy thinking and dogmatism and perverse incentives and everything else that makes sane

00:12:44.640 policies and compromises impossible? The issues are at once so complex and yet so simple. Just consider

00:12:54.000 our current moment through the lens of a single variable, wealth inequality. There are good

00:13:00.440 faith debates to be had about how much inequality is too much. But there really is no question that

00:13:05.680 this is a problem that decent, compassionate people, or even merely self-interested people,

00:13:11.580 are now wise to worry about. However rich and insulated you are, if you don't think that you've lost

00:13:18.240 something when the level of homelessness and crime soars in your city, well then you've lost your mind.

00:13:24.380 Honestly, even a sociopath should be able to recognize that his own selfishness is best fulfilled in a

00:13:32.520 context where others are doing at least reasonably well, where the sidewalks haven't come to resemble

00:13:37.920 free fire zones or refugee camps. I've been worrying about wealth inequality for at least a decade. I wrote a

00:13:45.400 few articles about it in the aftermath of the 2009 crash, and it's been a recurring topic on the podcast.

00:13:51.700 And I worry about it from a place of not wanting to stigmatize wealth at all. I think the people who

00:13:57.960 are railing against the mere existence of billionaires are just confused about economics.

00:14:02.780 But everyone who is railing against increased social welfare in all its forms, anyone for whom terms like

00:14:09.220 inequality and redistribution have become radioactive, is just confused about ethics.

00:14:15.560 What kind of world do we want to live in? It seems to me there are pretty uncontroversial answers to this

00:14:22.000 question. We want to live in a world where people are incentivized to do creative work that makes the

00:14:28.400 world better and better. We want cures for terrifying diseases. We want to be able to distribute vaccines

00:14:36.540 faster than we are at present. And we want a space program just for the fun of it, and also to ensure 0.89

00:14:43.740 that human life continues indefinitely. If we discover there's a massive asteroid on a collision

00:14:49.520 course with Earth, we want to be able to divert it and save our species, and every other species.

00:14:56.880 We actually want to be that competent. Therefore, we want to massively fund science. And we need a rich

00:15:05.720 civilization to do this. We want a future of real prosperity. And we are right to want that.

00:15:13.820 And obviously, we need a model for global growth that's sustainable. But the end game for us isn't

00:15:20.560 to cease innovating and improving our technology. We want our technology to become more and more

00:15:25.540 effective and benign. So this already rules out some visions of the future. This can't be a hippie

00:15:32.740 paradise where everything is made of hemp. Capitalism, for all its flaws, really seems to

00:15:39.160 have this part right. We need to work with the grain of human nature and leverage people's selfishness

00:15:45.820 and their desire for status in a way that brings out the best in us, not the worst. We need to

00:15:52.080 incentivize people to build things that actually work. It's not enough to just play the didgeridoo on the

00:15:58.300 sidewalk in Seattle or Portland. We need to get things done. And we want beautiful public spaces

00:16:05.980 and brilliant works of art and great food and cars and smartphones. But we also want a world where the

00:16:15.040 differences between good and bad luck don't cause us to avert our eyes in horror. We don't want a world

00:16:22.560 where people leap to their deaths from the rooftops of the factories that are building our toys.

00:16:28.320 We don't want an epidemic of homelessness in San Francisco or Los Angeles or New York. As we produce

00:16:35.560 more and more wealth, we have to become more compassionate and more connected to one another,

00:16:41.560 not more sociopathic. There are really two paths we can take here, and they are diverging steeply now.

00:16:49.960 And the only thing that will determine which path we take will be the ideas that prevail in the

00:16:55.920 culture. The ideas that win will affect each of us personally. There will be new norms to which we

00:17:03.460 will effortlessly adhere, because to do otherwise will be embarrassing. Wearing a seatbelt is a norm

00:17:09.920 that very few people need to rethink now. And yet it used to be a bizarre concession to fear.

00:17:15.420 Now you're just an imbecile not to wear a seatbelt. We need new norms that anchor our deeper values. 0.99

00:17:23.800 We need norms that make us better people. Let's be even more specific. It's been much noticed of

00:17:30.520 late that there seems to be an exodus in the tech community out of California to states that don't

00:17:36.580 have an income tax, in particular Texas and Florida. Now there's some question about whether or not this

00:17:42.160 trend has been overhyped. But I can personally account for tens of millions of dollars, and

00:17:49.720 probably even hundreds of millions of dollars, of California's tax base drying up, simply judging

00:17:56.160 from the people I know personally who are leaving the state, and who are in some cases taking their

00:18:01.140 companies and employees with them. In California, the top 1% of earners pay 50% of the taxes. So it

00:18:09.980 doesn't take that many rich people to decide to move before the state's revenue goes into freefall.

00:18:16.600 Now this is a very complicated issue, ethically and politically, and even psychologically. Because

00:18:23.680 of course it's rational for any individual to want to pay as little in taxes as he or she legally

00:18:29.540 can. And if we have a system wherein simply moving to another state amounts to the equivalent of

00:18:36.120 someone paying you millions of dollars a year to live there, it's very easy to see why that would

00:18:41.240 seem like an opportunity that's just too good to pass up. So I don't feel especially judgmental about

00:18:46.640 these people moving, especially when you consider how mismanaged our tax dollars often seem to be.

00:18:53.680 It would be one thing if the return on our taxes was undeniably good, but unfortunately the results are so

00:19:00.680 mixed, especially now, that it's very easy for people to become cynical. And many of these people 1.00

00:19:06.760 have become cynical about the prospects of government ever functioning effectively. But there's an

00:19:12.080 interesting needle to thread here. One can seek to pay as little in taxes as one legally can,

00:19:19.800 while also believing that taxes are necessary, and that the tax rate should be raised given the

00:19:26.680 magnitude of the magnitude of the need, while also believing that tax revenue is often wasted, and that

00:19:32.560 government needs to be seriously reformed. I don't see a contradiction there. Personally, I try to pay as

00:19:38.660 little in taxes as I can, legally, but I think taxes should be raised on everyone in my bracket. And I think

00:19:45.840 this, despite my certainty, that some of that money will be wasted, or spent in ways that I would judge

00:19:51.860 totally counterproductive. A challenge one often hears from libertarians is, you're free to pay more

00:19:58.640 into the treasury yourself, so why not just do that and shut up about raising taxes on the rest of us?

00:20:04.480 But that misses the point. It misses several points. No one should be eager to make a solitary sacrifice

00:20:11.380 that serves no purpose. The point is that waste and mismanagement aside, our infrastructure and

00:20:18.020 education and everything else in our society needs to be funded, and there is no one in a better

00:20:23.840 position to fund these things than the wealthy. Government mismanagement isn't an argument for not

00:20:30.700 paying taxes, and it isn't an argument for lower taxes. It's an argument for better government.

00:20:38.800 Of course, charitable giving is part of the picture here. Here's a new norm that we really must spread.

00:20:45.220 If you're wealthy enough to have hired professionals whose primary job is to ensure that you pay as

00:20:52.580 little as possible in taxes each year, well then you should also be giving a lot of your money away

00:20:57.400 to the most urgent causes. Not after you're dead, but every year while you're alive, and while you can

00:21:04.560 enjoy it. This goes to the question of what is wealth for? What is it good for? One thing it's good for

00:21:13.080 is that it gives you the ability to help people very directly. And if you don't use that ability,

00:21:20.460 given the excruciating need, people will begin to think that you're just selfish, as they should.

00:21:28.600 Actually, all the strands of this web converge on San Francisco in a way that's instructive.

00:21:34.620 Recently, Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan gave $75 million to San Francisco General

00:21:42.380 Hospital. And this is the largest gift to a public hospital ever, apparently. And yet the city's

00:21:50.480 board of supervisors voted 10 to 1 to condemn the naming of the hospital after Zuckerberg and Chan.

00:21:59.760 And they further vilified Zuckerberg in the process. So this moment contains the whole problem

00:22:07.260 in miniature. Zuckerberg and Chan gave $75 million to a hospital. And obviously this is a wonderful

00:22:15.440 thing to do. And the fact that this is the largest private gift to a public hospital ever tells you

00:22:22.800 that it should be celebrated rather than sneered at, which is what the social justice lunatics on the

00:22:28.520 board of supervisors have done. And they did this as their streets fill with homeless people and spent

00:22:35.480 needles. And the crime rate soars. They're spitting on a $75 million gift to a hospital.

00:22:44.600 But beneath all this, and beneath the animosity of the supervisors, is the growing problem of wealth

00:22:50.980 inequality. Zuckerberg's gift probably seems more generous than it is, in fact. And for someone with

00:22:57.420 75 billion dollars to cut a check for 75 million, that's like someone with 75 million cutting a check

00:23:04.440 for 75,000. Or for someone with 75,000 to give 75 dollars towards some cause. Okay, that is, it's no big

00:23:14.580 deal at all. In fact, the richer you get, the more this proportion falls apart. Someone with a net worth of

00:23:21.900 $75,000 is actually making more of a sacrifice by parting with $75. Because that increment of money

00:23:30.060 is still relevant to their budget. Once a person becomes fantastically wealthy, their personal

00:23:37.320 spending, even on the most extravagant luxuries, represents a tiny portion of their net worth.

00:23:44.100 So when you look at the details, this is not the sort of sacrifice one should be tempted to write

00:23:50.320 newspaper articles about. Actually looking at the Forbes list now reveals that Zuckerberg is currently

00:23:57.160 worth $100 billion. He seems to have made $25 billion when I wasn't looking. Given how quickly

00:24:04.540 Zuckerberg's wealth has grown, there were many days this year, probably most days this year, where his net

00:24:12.600 worth increased by more than $75 million. The wealthiest people in our society make millions

00:24:20.240 of dollars a day, every day, whether they work or not. Most people just don't have good intuitions

00:24:27.260 about the magnitude of these differences in wealth. The richest people now make in a day what the most

00:24:35.520 successful movie stars, Tom Cruise and Will Smith and Scarlett Johansson, make over the course of many

00:24:43.160 years, or even a lifetime, at the absolute pinnacle of success in the movie industry. This is where we

00:24:51.500 are in terms of wealth inequality. Again, I don't mean to demonize wealth at all. And it's worth noting

00:24:57.980 that Zuckerberg and his wife have pledged to give 99% of their wealth away over the course of their

00:25:03.060 lifetime. That's amazing, right? And that should be celebrated without any reservation whatsoever.

00:25:08.800 That's the sort of thing people should write newspaper articles about. Assuming they actually

00:25:13.320 do this, and they don't just park all the money in a charity after they die, they will be total heroes

00:25:19.600 for living this way, whatever else you might think about them. So there's a complicated set of issues

00:25:25.840 to think through here, politically and ethically. San Francisco is an extremely wealthy city,

00:25:31.880 which has been ruinously mismanaged. And the rich appear to be leaving for perfectly rational

00:25:38.800 reasons. This is a death spiral. And the quasi-socialist demonization of wealth, of the sort

00:25:47.160 that one hears from people like AOC and Elizabeth Warren, is part of the problem. We just can't afford

00:25:54.220 zero-sum thinking in a positive-sum game. And prosperity can be positive-sum. That's not to say there

00:26:01.560 aren't trade-offs and inevitable inequality. But we need to find policies that lead us in a direction

00:26:08.820 that benefits more or less everyone. And we need to incentivize people to really succeed,

00:26:13.980 and then use their taxes and charity to help others. It seems to me that what we need to solve

00:26:20.960 our problems is both competence and compassion. We have seen so little of either lately. And merely

00:26:30.000 dunking on people on Twitter won't produce these things. Becoming a single-issue thinker won't

00:26:37.180 produce these things. We have to recognize that we're living in an unhealthy ecology of ideas.

00:26:45.580 It's become like a Superfund site of bad memes, and we have to clean it up. Anyway, I intend to use my

00:26:53.320 podcast this year to bring you useful conversations in this vein. Not every episode will be about

00:27:00.300 solving problems. Sometimes we just need to hear about interesting things in physics. But more and

00:27:06.360 more, I want to drill down to ideas that actually have consequences for people's lives, whether

00:27:12.700 personally or at the level of public policy. So I'm looking to speak with guests who can help me

00:27:17.880 figure out what we should all be doing to make life better. And finally, I want to thank all of

00:27:24.800 you who are subscribed to the podcast. You make it possible for me to do this. And if you're not

00:27:30.880 subscribed and you want to be, you can do that on my website at samharris.org. As always, I want to

00:27:37.340 remind you that if you can't afford a subscription, you need only tell us that, and we'll give you a free

00:27:42.820 one. And this isn't just my COVID policy. This has always been the policy. I feel two things very

00:27:50.480 strongly in this space. I believe that we should value digital content appropriately, and that we'll

00:27:56.440 ultimately get what we pay for online. As you know, I think the ad model has been incredibly destructive.

00:28:03.860 But on the other hand, I believe that money should never be the reason why someone can't get access

00:28:08.480 to my digital content. Again, I see no contradiction here. Most of my stuff is behind a paywall and needs

00:28:15.640 to be for any of this to work. But it's free if you can't afford it. As most of you know, there are

00:28:22.040 two places where I currently publish my audio, on this podcast and on the Waking Up app. And Waking Up

00:28:28.680 has become much more than a meditation app. There's a growing library of lessons that are essentially

00:28:33.700 applied philosophy. We now have tracks on Stoicism by William Irvin, and more of those are coming.

00:28:41.040 And we'll soon have a section devoted to psychedelics. There's a lot going on over there at Waking Up,

00:28:46.040 and much more happening soon. So I just wanted to invite you to download the app and check it out,

00:28:51.820 if you haven't lately. As you know, if you're a subscriber to the podcast, you get access to the

00:28:57.320 conversations I have over at Waking Up through my website. But there's much more to Waking Up

00:29:02.860 than the conversations. And again, if you can't afford a subscription, you need only send an

00:29:08.020 email to support at wakingup.com and request a free account. It's the exact same policy we have

00:29:13.620 here on the podcast. Okay. Well, despite all the doom and gloom, I am really looking forward to this

00:29:22.100 year. And needless to say, I wish you all a healthy and happy one. Thanks for listening.

00:29:32.860 Bye-bye.

Making Sense - Sam Harris - January 06, 2021

#229 — A Few Thoughts for a New Year

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