Making Sense - Sam Harris - #350

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if

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00:00:45.100 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. I'm fighting my way through a

00:00:51.180 respiratory virus here, so I will keep this short. Today I'm speaking with Jonathan Rausch

00:00:56.520 and Josh Zeps. Jonathan is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

00:01:02.960 He is the author of eight books and many articles on public policy, culture, and government. He is a

00:01:10.380 contributing writer for The Atlantic and a recipient of the 2005 National Magazine Award, which is the

00:01:17.120 magazine industry's equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize. His latest book is The Constitution of Knowledge,

00:01:22.840 A Defense of Truth. And that is one of the focuses of our conversation today.

00:01:28.980 Josh Zeps is an independent journalist. He was a founding host of HuffPost Live. He also hosted a

00:01:35.260 national morning television show in Australia and a radio show on ABC Radio. And now he's full-time

00:01:41.480 on his own platform, the wonderful podcast Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Zeps.

00:01:46.660 Josh and I have collaborated in the past. We did some live events in Australia. And I wanted to

00:01:53.700 bring him on to co-pilot this interview with me, with Jonathan. As I said, we talk about Jonathan's

00:01:59.920 book, The Constitution of Knowledge. We talk about the fragmentation of society, the state of the

00:02:06.180 mainstream media, diversity of viewpoints, the threatened reality-based community, what the COVID

00:02:13.020 pandemic did to our information landscape, the unique challenge of Trump and Trumpism, the dangers of a

00:02:19.540 second Trump term, the problem of immigration and controlling the southern border of the U.S., and other

00:02:26.300 topics. And now I bring you Jonathan Rausch and Josh Zeps.

00:02:31.740 I am here with Jonathan Rausch and Josh Zeps. Jonathan, Josh, thanks for joining me.

00:02:44.540 Thank you. Thanks so much.

00:02:46.620 So let me explain the structure here. I've invited Josh, who I think most of my audience will already

00:02:53.760 know, to co-pilot this interview with me. This is just for the fun of it and also to get the most out

00:03:00.820 of you, Jonathan. But let me just have you both just kind of introduce yourselves here. Jonathan,

00:03:07.960 how do you describe what you do? We're going to talk mostly about your book, The Constitution of

00:03:13.580 Knowledge, A Defense of Truth, which was a fantastic defense of truth as advertised and also use it as

00:03:21.360 a lens through which to look at some current events that I think worry all of us. How do you

00:03:27.260 summarize your career as a writer and journalist? Oh, well, that's exactly how I summarize it. I'm a

00:03:32.880 writer and journalist. I'm sometimes mistaken for an academic and called doctor. But my highest degree

00:03:39.680 is a bachelor's degree in history. I started out actually in a newspaper, which is how people did

00:03:45.560 start out back in the day and have done magazine work and written books on a lot of subjects. But

00:03:52.080 unlike some journalists, I'm comfortable in the world of theory. And so I do a lot of that.

00:03:58.440 Yeah, you should have gotten a PhD for this book. Your discussion of the foundation of knowledge and

00:04:04.580 just the way you marry the principles that safeguard our scientific epistemology and political

00:04:12.220 liberalism is just fantastic. So congratulations there.

00:04:16.260 Well, coming from you, it means a lot. Your work has been an inspiration and indeed is quoted

00:04:22.600 multiple times in the book.

00:04:25.020 Nice, nice. Well, Josh, remind people who you are.

00:04:28.120 I hereby bestow upon Jonathan an honorary doctorate from the School of Uncomfortable

00:04:32.260 Conversations. There you go, Jonathan. I'm an independent journalist.

00:04:37.300 Yeah, I just won't ask you to perform any cardiology if we're on a plane and someone calls out for a

00:04:42.280 doctor.

00:04:42.540 Just don't make me write a speech.

00:04:44.180 I'm an independent journalist. I have just left the legacy media where I was hosting a daily talkback

00:04:51.120 radio show on Australia's national public broadcaster for the past couple of years.

00:04:56.400 Prior to that, I anchored a sort of morning television show in Australia and I spent most

00:05:02.500 of my professional life in New York City. You may detect from my accent that I'm not from there.

00:05:07.940 I'm Australian. And in New York, I was a founding host and a producer of HuffPost Live,

00:05:13.820 which was this sort of big experiment to try to produce thousands of hours of live streaming,

00:05:20.020 talk, television. And so I hosted thousands of hours of content with interesting people there and

00:05:26.220 then decamped back to Australia when I had kids and got married a few years ago. And now I've gone

00:05:32.320 independent after finding it sort of intolerable. I guess I was somewhat pushed out of legacy media in a

00:05:39.260 story that's kind of parallel to Barry Weiss's or a story that has been replicated in many instances.

00:05:45.540 People who don't feel like the legacy media is doing a terribly good job of encapsulating the

00:05:50.820 full rambunctiousness and excitingness of all the conversations that we could be having find

00:05:56.880 themselves excluded from the party. And at some point I just said, you know, stuff this. So

00:06:01.460 Uncomfortable Conversations is now my gig.

00:06:03.180 Nice. Well, it's great to have you here. And you've got the truly professional radio voice that

00:06:08.820 will keep us on the straight and narrow here. I've got a respiratory virus going on, so I

00:06:13.920 happily will not catch my book.

00:06:15.440 Yeah, I definitely don't have that. If I may, I forgot to mention two institutional affiliations.

00:06:21.720 One is I'm a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, and the second is I'm

00:06:27.660 a contributing writer of The Atlantic.

00:06:30.020 Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, so, you know, this is, I don't tend to do straightforward interviews. It

00:06:36.240 really are conversations. And so, you know, Josh and I can be expected to take up a fair amount of

00:06:41.940 time, but really we're trying to get the most out of you, Jonathan. Just to kind of open with my

00:06:46.540 concerns here, I think many of us sense that the moral intelligence of the West appears to be

00:06:53.500 somewhat exhausted. And we can see this both on the right and the left. I mean, the fact that

00:06:59.580 on the populist right, people can't seem to see that we have any stake in, I'm speaking from more

00:07:06.220 or less an American perspective here, people just can't seem to see that we have any stake in reducing

00:07:10.900 the danger and the chaos that is happening outside our borders. They seem to think that we should

00:07:15.740 become a nuclear-armed Switzerland of some kind. And even a phrase like the rules-based international

00:07:22.680 order is now sneered at as a piece of neoconservative or neoliberal can't. And on

00:07:29.960 the populist left, we have people who can't seem to distinguish between civilization and barbarism,

00:07:37.020 as we witnessed after October 7th. I mean, and they show no inclination or capacity to defend the

00:07:42.640 former. And this relates to the topics you deal with in your book. You know, these, this kind of

00:07:48.400 unraveling relates to the foundations of our knowledge, our ability to have a, anything like

00:07:53.960 a shared consensus about what's happening in the world. And it relates to the hope that we

00:07:58.480 one day may live in a world where people everywhere can agree about the basic norms and values that

00:08:05.160 allow for a truly open-ended form of cooperation among 8 billion strangers. So I thought we could start

00:08:12.460 with your book and there's two phrases in your book that do a tremendous amount of work. So I'd like you

00:08:18.340 to explain both of them and how they are connected. And the first is the title, The Constitution of

00:08:25.060 Knowledge. And the second is The Reality-Based Community. What do you mean by those phrases and

00:08:31.180 how are they connected?

00:08:32.540 So the constitution of knowledge is the system of norms and institutions that we in liberal societies

00:08:44.280 rely on to keep us anchored to some common version of reality. They don't require us to agree on

00:08:51.300 everything. In fact, they require us to disagree because disagreement is where knowledge comes from.

00:08:57.280 That's what allows us to check each other's errors, those different perspectives. But we do have to

00:09:02.360 have a set of rules. What I'm pushing back against there is the view that I started with 30 years

00:09:09.880 ago in an earlier book, which is called Kindly Inquisitors, The New Attacks on Free Thought. And

00:09:14.760 it's a good book, but it kind of starts and ends where most people start and end, which is

00:09:20.980 the marketplace of ideas and John Stuart Mill, which is all you need is a free environment and public

00:09:28.000 criticism where people are allowed to say things to each other and correct each other and knowledge

00:09:33.660 will appear as if by magic. That's not a terrible model. I love the marketplace of ideas metaphor. I

00:09:42.360 use it and I'm a fan of John Stuart Mill. But the part we forgot, partly because that system was so

00:09:50.000 successful for so long, is it doesn't just happen. You need a lot of rules and a lot of structure

00:09:56.280 to get people to disagree in ways that are productive. And that requires a lot of rules.

00:10:04.720 It turns out they look very, very much like the rules for the U.S. Constitution. For example,

00:10:11.360 the U.S. Constitution pits ambition against ambition, as we know from the Federalist. Constitution of

00:10:19.080 Knowledge pits bias against bias. They're both open-ended systems, which never allow a final say

00:10:27.180 or a final destination, and so forth. So that's the Constitution of Knowledge. So the Constitution of

00:10:35.040 Knowledge doesn't govern everything we do in life. It doesn't decide what we can say at the dinner table,

00:10:41.720 Thanksgiving. It doesn't apply in church. As you have tirelessly pointed out, most of the beliefs of

00:10:47.900 most major religions would flunk the Constitution of Knowledge because they're not replicable.

00:10:52.560 The areas, the fields that do adhere to the Constitution of Knowledge are what I call the

00:10:58.380 reality-based community. These are the spheres, mostly professionals, that do the work every day of

00:11:06.280 developing what we think of as objective knowledge. And the big four there are academia, science,

00:11:13.360 research, research, all of that. That's number one. Second is media, mainstream media, reality-based

00:11:20.060 media. That's my world. I think probably that's your world, certainly Josh's world. The third is law.

00:11:28.280 People forget that the idea of a fact comes not from science. It predates that. It comes from law

00:11:33.700 because courts needed a count of the facts that people could agree on in order to settle

00:11:38.700 cases. So they came up with these adversarial systems of fact-finding, evidence-based.

00:11:45.420 And the fourth is government. Our government, all liberal governments, are just shot through

00:11:51.900 with institutions and rules that keep them tethered to reality. Everything from the Administrative

00:11:58.640 Procedures Act to the many research agencies, the inspectors general, the Justice Department,

00:12:04.400 which, for example, has to be fact-based. If a government stops being fact-based, it becomes

00:12:09.180 tyrannical. It's just that simple.

00:12:11.920 It's fascinating, Jonathan. I mean, one thing that I pick up from what you're saying is that there is a

00:12:17.760 gulf in our experience of how knowledge gets accumulated if we haven't worked in one of those

00:12:25.840 environments that you just pointed to. When I'm talking to friends who have never worked in a

00:12:31.360 newsroom or a science lab or an academic institution or a court of law or the public service,

00:12:39.140 for example, where they're not familiar with the processes that are in place to sort fact from

00:12:45.620 nonsense, then I think there can be an assumption that the reason why we're losing our way and why

00:12:52.380 there's so much bullshit, pardon the French, floating around at the moment is because bad actors just

00:12:58.300 aren't doing a good enough job of being honest. The problem, as you articulated, is actually

00:13:05.280 thornier than that. It's not that there are bad people who are being dishonest. It's that we have

00:13:10.400 systems in place that are ignorant of the countervailing systems that are required in order

00:13:15.340 to filter the best ideas. If you've worked in a newsroom and you've ever had an editor come to you

00:13:21.740 and say, you don't have it yet, you don't have that story yet, you've got the shape of the story,

00:13:27.200 but I need two more sources and we need someone on the record about this, then it's hard to understand

00:13:32.720 the kind of framework of truth seeking that supports and buttresses ourselves. I mean,

00:13:39.360 I speak from personal experience here because I'm intentionally stepping out of that environment and

00:13:42.660 I'm requiring myself to erect this artifice of truth seeking on my own and kind of build the plane

00:13:48.940 while it's flying. And Sam has done essentially the same thing of holding oneself accountable.

00:13:55.100 But what do you want to say to people who've never been in that environment and who just think,

00:13:58.880 you know, well, the problem is that people are being nasty and lying?

00:14:03.660 This is a bad subject for me because I get defensive. I am old media incarnate. I work for

00:14:11.780 the Atlantic, which is what, 1857. I used to work for The Economist, 1848. And I am a believer

00:14:20.840 that there is a reason for all of those rules and norms, those layers of editing and copy editing and

00:14:28.280 fact-checking that go into a traditional media establishment. It's very expensive. It's very

00:14:34.040 exacting. I just went through two days of fact-checking at the Atlantic. It's an exhausting process.

00:14:42.540 And what's frustrating for me, and maybe for you guys too, I don't know, is people out there in

00:14:49.160 the world understandably think it's just easy. You know, why don't we just write what's true and not

00:14:54.120 write what's false? Why are we so biased? Why do we have all these blind spots? Why did we miss,

00:14:58.520 you know, the distress that was leading to the election of Donald Trump? Why are we too far left?

00:15:03.220 Why are we too far right? And there are certainly valid criticisms. There needs to be, I think,

00:15:09.880 more diversity, ideological in newsrooms. But what we are tasked to do every day is really hard. Come

00:15:19.280 up with some coherent, accurate account of reality in a complicated world on very, very tight deadlines.

00:15:26.020 You know, scientists get two years to do what we have to do in two hours. So I guess I'd be whining

00:15:31.640 to say the rest of the world should be more appreciative. But the truth is, that's how I feel.

00:15:35.580 Well, as you pointed out, I think the phrase that you use in the book is, the turbulence is a source

00:15:42.060 of stability, both politically and epistemically, right? So it's the fact that political factions

00:15:48.160 can oppose one another and government is divided. No one has all the power. That fractiousness is what

00:15:57.020 keeps the plane flying. And epistemically, the fact that scientists are in the business and journalists

00:16:02.780 are in the business of proving one another wrong based on their own biases. I mean, all of that

00:16:07.420 works to the advantage of truth and liberty on the political side in the end, except when it doesn't,

00:16:16.360 except, I mean, there's only so much turbulence that the system can use to its advantage. And I think what

00:16:22.420 many of us are now worried about, and you certainly appear worried in your book, is that the current

00:16:28.100 state of media, and journalism in particular, and social media, and the way in which the layer of

00:16:33.740 social media is interacting, and putting pressure on media, it's just made this, the information

00:16:40.740 landscape a kind of hallucination machine, right? It's no longer tracking truth, or it's no, I think

00:16:48.220 your phrase is something like, there's no longer a positive epistemic valence to all this chaos,

00:16:54.480 or it seems certainly reasonable to worry that there's not. And, you know, in the book, you talk

00:17:00.720 about how fear of new media is really quite old. I mean, it's as old as writing, and it's certainly

00:17:06.100 as old as the printing press, which, you know, quite infamously stoked the fires of the Inquisition

00:17:12.640 and the wars of religion. The Malleus Maleficarum, which was that great witch-finding manual of the

00:17:17.980 15th century, was one of the first bestsellers. So I'm not sure at what point our nostalgia for

00:17:24.880 the past should be focused. I mean, I think you also go into some detail in the book that

00:17:29.760 the early days of American journalism were pretty ugly, and fake news was really the standard of the

00:17:36.000 time. But at a certain point, that changed. And most of us, as you just suggested, are nostalgic

00:17:43.460 for some moment in the past when journalism seemed to be run by at least a sufficient number of adults

00:17:52.480 in the room. Do you think that was always an illusion? And if not, how do you judge the current

00:17:59.780 state of journalism? Perhaps we should take social media as a separate piece.

00:18:03.040 Yeah, I was going to say one has to disaggregate. So I'd be very interested in Josh's view. He's closer,

00:18:10.000 actually, to the newsroom these days than I am. I'd say you have to disaggregate, and that the core

00:18:16.900 values of mainstream media, places like the network newscasts, the Wall Street Journal, Washington

00:18:22.980 Post, New York Times, LA Times, those places still have their values intact, and they're struggling to

00:18:29.920 defend them economically. And there's a huge crisis, and this doesn't need any embellishment on this show,

00:18:37.520 but there's a huge problem with the business model, which is checking reality is extremely

00:18:43.380 expensive. People think, you know, Hunter Biden's laptop, that came in 10 days before the election,

00:18:49.580 why wasn't it checked? Well, it took a team of Washington reporters the better part of a year

00:18:54.780 to check a handful of the material. It's just very expensive and time-consuming to do this work.

00:19:02.220 But there, I think that's the issue. I don't think it's really, we've seen the kind of corruption of

00:19:06.500 values in mainstream media on anything like the scale that we've seen it in parts of academia,

00:19:11.540 which really has become very politicized. Others may disagree. They may say that I'm,

00:19:16.180 you know, kind of whitewashing mainstream media, so we can have that conversation.

00:19:20.380 Did you read Bennett's Economist piece on the post-mortem from his firing from the New York

00:19:27.160 Times? Yes, I did. Yeah, okay. Yeah, I just want to make sure that those facts were in evidence.

00:19:32.460 John, I can hear the new media listener, the younger listener, perhaps, saying to you mentally,

00:19:41.780 I mean, okay, so maybe it takes a year to absolutely fact-check every aspect of the

00:19:46.260 Hunter Biden laptop story, but why is that the bar for me as a voter to find out about it?

00:19:51.420 Like, why can't we just have different categories of truth claims? And okay, if the New York Times

00:19:56.900 doesn't want to publish something until they've absolutely got something where they can take it to

00:20:01.140 the bank, that's fine. But I want to live in a media universe where I have access to information

00:20:05.660 that might be true and that might be relevant. And so there has to be a mechanism by which I can

00:20:10.200 know about the Hunter Biden laptop story without it being hidden from me because my grand poobah

00:20:16.000 overlords say that I'm too stupid to be able to sort fact from fiction. And we don't necessarily want to

00:20:22.300 yield that space to the Tim Pooles and Alex Joneses and Mike Cernoviches of the world. There needs to be

00:20:28.620 some other mechanism by which we can ascertain things that may be true without requiring them

00:20:34.020 to meet the standard of traditional media. So I'll give you the traditional answer to that.

00:20:39.260 I'm not sure how younger people will like it, but this is not a new problem. Journalists have been

00:20:47.020 wrestling for over a hundred years since the age of the yellow press and the gutter media with,

00:20:53.000 what do you do with salacious gossip? And the old rule was, well, you just print it because why not?

00:20:58.620 It's fun. People read it. They eat it up. And then we got a different kind of system that emerged

00:21:05.140 and we got defamation lawsuits and we got schools of journalism and lots of rules that said, if it

00:21:11.140 isn't true, don't print it. That's your responsible. And we wound up with kind of a multi-tiered system

00:21:16.120 where you had highbrow journalists, places like the New York Times. And if you saw it there, it was very

00:21:21.100 likely to be checked and true. You know, they got stuff wrong, of course, but pretty, pretty darn

00:21:26.680 responsible. And then you had the tabloid media and the gutter press and the gossip mags and the

00:21:32.660 gossip columnists. And that's where the other stuff circulated. So people knew about it, but there

00:21:38.200 were these different sort of levels of gatekeeping and credentialing. And that seemed to work pretty

00:21:43.540 stably for a while. The problem today, of course, is who makes those decisions and why. You know,

00:21:51.020 it's really tough. For example, what would you do with the Steele dossier? So this is a pile of

00:21:58.880 unverified gossip. And that's all it even claims to be. Some guy goes out and collects a lot of

00:22:05.840 gossip and writes it down because that's what he's been hired to do. He's not even saying it's true.

00:22:09.680 He's just saying he's heard it. And then this circulates and it seems like everyone around

00:22:13.940 Washington has seen it or read it. I didn't, but apparently a lot of people did. And then

00:22:19.620 no one's publishing it because it's against the policy of the New York Times and the Washington

00:22:24.880 Post to publish salacious, unverified, possibly completely false gossip about anybody, including

00:22:30.840 Donald Trump. So they're trying to do the responsible thing. But then BuzzFeed says, well,

00:22:37.460 to heck with that. Everyone's reading this. The public should be able to read it too. They published it.

00:22:41.920 And I think that was the wrong decision. Maybe that's old fashioned of me, but a lot of people

00:22:47.760 disagree. Ben Smith clearly disagrees. And I don't think we'll ever have a pat answer to this question.

00:22:54.920 But I will tell you that I think that not thinking that this is a difficult question and that absolutely

00:23:00.260 everything alleged by anyone should be immediately published and transmitted around the world is a

00:23:04.860 good answer. I don't think that's a good answer. But I don't know. What do you think? I mean,

00:23:09.620 you worked at ABC. I mean, the challenge is that once the BuzzFeed publishes the piece,

00:23:15.600 then the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal have to report on the

00:23:19.500 existence of the controversy about the publication of the piece. So there's this meta story about the

00:23:24.020 story, which it sort of would be derelict not to talk about because everybody's talking about the

00:23:28.540 fact that BuzzFeed has published this thing. So then you get this weird situation where readers of

00:23:33.120 the legacy media are saying, hang on, they're talking about how this other place has published this

00:23:37.960 other thing, but I don't even know what the underlying story actually is. I mean, it's tricky

00:23:43.680 and it complicates. You know, one thing that I'd love you to talk about, and Sam, forgive me if I'm

00:23:49.500 sort of hijacking this in a sense, but I'm interested in, you talk about this funnel of knowledge that

00:23:56.560 journalism is up to and academia and the other institutions that you're talking about where

00:24:00.200 you want as large as possible a mouth of the funnel where there is total free speech and everyone

00:24:06.200 can say whatever they want. And that goes into the funnel. Then the funnel starts cranking away and

00:24:09.600 doing its job. And at the bottom of the funnel, you have these pearls of wisdom. You have these

00:24:14.000 Willy Wonka everlasting gobstoppers of truth spitting out the bottom of the machine. The problem at the

00:24:19.460 moment, as I have seen it working in the legacy media, is that there are constraints on what is

00:24:27.240 going into the top of the funnel that the people who are imposing the constraints aren't even aware of

00:24:31.580 as constraints. They don't identify their worldview as being a worldview. They don't identify their

00:24:38.580 opinions as being opinions. You know, I had a run in with management at one organization because we

00:24:44.640 had a difference of opinion about gay pride. And John, you and I are both gay. We have our own

00:24:50.700 differences of opinion, probably not with each other, but with the rest of the gay universe.

00:24:54.540 The extent to which, you know, oiled up muscled men sitting astride giant inflatable penises going

00:25:02.620 along on a march is constructive or useful to young people who are trying to sort out their sexuality.

00:25:08.140 I was trying to articulate that point. I'm glad you got that phrase out. I use that phrase once every

00:25:12.940 podcast. So I'm glad we got it at the top here. And my employer was fully 100% pro pride. In fact,

00:25:23.680 was the official broadcaster of pride. And I got into a run in where they weren't allowing me to

00:25:29.460 articulate this point of view because they said that hosts, you know, on air talent are not allowed

00:25:34.380 to express opinions about controversial social or political or cultural events. Now, everybody else

00:25:40.080 on the air was expressing their support for pride, but that doesn't land as an opinion for them.

00:25:47.160 That's just common sense. That's just being on the right side of history. That's just not being nasty.

00:25:51.000 So the funnel ends up being curtailed in ways that they don't even notice it being curtailed. They're

00:25:56.240 like, Josh isn't allowed to have his crazy opinion because that's a crazy opinion, but our beliefs

00:26:00.640 aren't opinions. Our beliefs are just the truth. Well, so you need three things to make the

00:26:05.660 constitution of knowledge work, and you need all three. And the first and most obvious is free

00:26:10.400 thought, free inquiry, marketplace of ideas, enough said. The second is you need the discipline of fact.

00:26:16.560 You need a lot of people who are willing to follow a lot of very difficult rules governing

00:26:22.060 who is allowed and not allowed to claim this or that as fact, and under what circumstances. When is

00:26:29.500 an experiment considered replicated? When does a newsroom go with the story? Under what circumstances

00:26:35.340 does it correct it? And all that discipline of fact is super hard and requires years of training.

00:26:39.620 But then there's a third, and that's diversity of viewpoint. If everyone in a room is coming from

00:26:47.540 the same place ideologically and sharing the same assumptions epistemically, then no learning will

00:26:55.600 take place because these people will not be able to see each other's mistakes. The whole system works

00:27:01.980 because diversity of viewpoint allows me to see your biases and you to see mine because we can't see our

00:27:08.640 own. And yes, one of the problems that I worry about, and I know you worry about in journalism, but

00:27:18.120 especially in sectors of academia like the social sciences and humanities, is the lack of viewpoint

00:27:25.500 diversity. And the first symptom of that is when everyone agrees that something which is in fact quite

00:27:32.000 contentious, for example, that human sexes are on a spectrum, not binary, for example, when they see

00:27:40.060 that as not even contestable, that's telling you there probably aren't enough voices in the room.

00:27:47.200 But that's a solvable problem, right? That's not inherent to the model of journalism. That means that

00:27:52.920 you alluded to your newsroom earlier, I guess maybe I shouldn't call out any particular

00:27:57.680 outlet. But the implication is that those people you were working with need to hire some people from

00:28:04.920 different educational backgrounds with different ideological priors for the sake just of professionalism,

00:28:11.560 just of doing the job correctly. And yeah, we've fallen down on that. There has been an effort

00:28:16.080 in American newsrooms to diversify intellectually. But we've got a long way to go.

00:28:22.220 It's funny that you use the word diversify, because diversity is the lodestar, the goal of all of this.

00:28:27.460 But the diversity that they're looking for is a diversity of skin color and genitals,

00:28:31.660 not a diversity of thought. Or class or economic background. Editor at a

00:28:35.240 major magazine you all heard of told me a couple of years ago that he gets the resumes of which are

00:28:42.280 many come to him through a funnel of some sort. And he said he gets 25 or 50 versions of the same

00:28:48.780 resume. And that's hard to change. Isn't there some explanation for a weird class filter in

00:28:57.760 journalism in particular? Because to become a journalist is often the first rung on the ladder

00:29:04.460 is sort of the unpaid or underpaid internship at some wonderful institution. And the only people who

00:29:11.560 can do that are the people who are taking their summers between their years in an Ivy League

00:29:16.880 institution and it's all funded by their rich families and et cetera?

00:29:21.440 Well, you're cutting close to the bone, Sam, because in 1981, I started my journalism career

00:29:26.920 as a summer intern and was unpaid for that summer here in Washington, D.C. And I could afford to do

00:29:33.860 that. And yes, shame on unpaid internships. You know, I guess I'd be curious for your views on that.

00:29:41.920 In some ways, we're better in that respect because there's so many more paths in now.

00:29:49.020 You know, there are all these 20-somethings that have substacks and podcasts and get noticed through

00:29:55.760 these alternative channels that don't require you to be well-heeled. I think the problem has more to do

00:30:04.220 with the kinds of people who are attracted to journalism and for that matter, you know, anthropology

00:30:09.480 and some of the self-selection that's going on there. It's going to take positive effort to go

00:30:16.320 out and look at state schools that you've never hired from and where you're not getting referrals

00:30:22.240 from professors and saying, okay, who here could be a journalist? Maybe someone with an unconventional

00:30:28.280 background. When I entered journalism in—my first job was in North Carolina now 40 years ago—there

00:30:35.280 were still the last remnants of what we thought of as blue-collar journalism. I don't know if

00:30:39.800 you've heard that phrase. But journalists, reporters were not always people with Ivy League

00:30:44.820 degrees or, you know, Swarthmore humanities backgrounds. They were just good writers who

00:30:51.300 showed up and did the work. And there was this wonderful old reporter named Jesse Poindexter

00:30:56.600 who covered the courts. He'd been covering the courts for like a generation. And he knew where

00:31:02.420 everybody in the county was buried. And he knew what was going on with every corrupt cop and judge.

00:31:07.500 And he wrote like a dream. But I can tell you, he was not the product of Yale. And we were better for

00:31:15.340 that. It seems to me there's a tension between this call for diversity and another point, which I think

00:31:23.900 you make in your book, which is that at least at some layer of the liberal epistemic order relies on elite

00:31:33.960 consensus, right? We need elites who are qualified to judge the truth claims in, you know, in their

00:31:43.220 area of specialization. We need institutions that create the norms that allow that machinery of truth

00:31:50.300 testing and fallibilism to operate, you know, intergenerationally. And we need a population

00:31:57.080 of, you know, by definition, non-elites with respect to any specific area of specialization

00:32:04.320 that trusts those institutions, to trust their products. It's not to say that they're not capable

00:32:10.360 of error, but the error correction within physics is going to come from physicists, you know, and people

00:32:16.860 who have taken the time for, you know, on the basis of whatever advantages they've had, but, you know,

00:32:22.900 intellectually above all, quantitatively above all, to actually play that language game to the point of

00:32:29.340 being able to produce some work product that the rest of us can rely upon. Again, to a first

00:32:35.720 approximation, all the while knowing that, you know, again, you make this point beautifully in the book

00:32:41.180 at some point where, you know, truth is not a destination, it's a direction. It's like a north

00:32:46.000 on the compass. It's not that you arrive at the North Pole and you're done. It's just you have to

00:32:51.680 navigate. So we need people who are adequate based on their expertise to provide a conversation about

00:32:59.460 reality that is directionally correct. And you have another sentence in the book, which I underlined as

00:33:06.300 really, it sums up more or less everything that concerns me intellectually, ethically, politically,

00:33:14.340 even spiritually. And it's such a simple sentence, but it's when I hit upon it, I just, you should

00:33:21.000 have seen my face. And the sentence is, there is only one reality-based community, right? And that is

00:33:28.040 such a deep insight. It says everything about the situation we are in and the degree to which it's

00:33:35.340 misconstrued in so many fashionable disciplines. And it says everything about the unity of knowledge

00:33:41.640 and the possibility of consilience between disciplines, however disparate. And yet, I think

00:33:47.460 we're now living in a world where, you know, based on the algorithmic derangement of more or less

00:33:55.020 everybody, we're losing our connection to that even as an ideal. I mean, we're certainly losing our

00:34:02.840 grip on a shared civic reality. And largely, I mean, I think social media is to blame, but I think

00:34:07.880 alternative media is largely to blame. And what I continually call podcastistan, it's not functioning

00:34:14.900 by the same norms and scruples of traditional journalism. I mean, people are just freewheeling

00:34:21.340 in front of the microphone and platforming anyone who has an opinion. However, you know, and they're just,

00:34:27.320 they're in no position to debunk the confabulation of maniacs in real time. And therefore, this stuff

00:34:35.180 just gets believed at scale. And so it does seem like a new moment to me where you have,

00:34:39.880 and we can talk about it through the lens of any specific problem. I think I'd like to talk about

00:34:43.940 how you both view what COVID has done to us so we can get to that. And I think we should cover

00:34:50.420 politics as well. But, you know, feel free to react to what I just said. Well, to which part of what you

00:34:57.540 just said? The two of you are at least as well positioned as I am to assess kind of how we're

00:35:07.260 doing at scale on the big question of society's attachment to reality. When I look at it, I see a

00:35:15.040 landscape in which you still have large, large parts of the reality-based community, the legal

00:35:22.080 professions, lots of academics who are not corrupted, lots of mainstream journalists, lots

00:35:27.920 of lawyers, as we saw in the Trump administration, who really are hanging on and trying to defend the

00:35:34.140 norms of the constitution of knowledge. Simple stuff, but important stuff, like you don't go into

00:35:38.740 court and lie and you get sanctioned if you do. Ask Sidney Powell. So there's still a lot of

00:35:44.380 institutional integrity that is trying to defend itself. It often doesn't know how to defend

00:35:51.100 itself. As exhibit A, I would submit three university presidents who bombed in Congress who said the right

00:35:59.600 thing about what their policies were, which is it depends on context to know if the speech is allowable,

00:36:06.020 but did not know how to make the case behind that statement. So that's on us. It's on us liberals

00:36:13.380 to do a better job of defending these principles and understanding these principles. And that's why I

00:36:18.920 wrote the book. But then you have all that other stuff out there, which you allude to, Sam. And that's

00:36:25.300 the big, bewildering, blooming, buzzing, chaotic, anarchic world of social media and blogs and the fact

00:36:34.300 that anyone on Twitter can project a voice. And there you have a problem which is not new. It's

00:36:42.460 very old, but it's been amplified by these technologies, which there are a lot of ways to

00:36:48.220 manipulate humans cognitively. Even, by the way, very smart humans, such as the three of us. We can

00:36:56.060 be manipulated in all sorts of ways that our attention can be hijacked. That's what trolling does.

00:37:01.640 You know, if I say enough terrible things about Sam Harris, he's going to have to respond or his

00:37:05.960 reputation will be damaged. Or things like just repeating lies and so forth. Firehose of falsehood

00:37:13.560 disinformation campaigns. There are just all kinds of things you can do in an environment that's

00:37:19.260 completely unregulated by institutional norms. And people are doing them. It's not the first time this

00:37:25.300 has happened. It takes a while for institutions to figure out rules of the road and how to re-norm.

00:37:32.660 And I'm not completely sure how that happens this time or whether it happens this time. But I agree

00:37:40.500 with you that the environment in which those committed to the constitution of knowledge are swimming

00:37:46.580 is, it's very challenging right now. I find it somewhat terrifying, the media landscape

00:37:55.220 that I'm entering, I suppose. Because, John, it's not just that, it's not, the problem is not just the

00:38:01.620 way that you articulate it, which is that there is, you know, we're in an environment that's unregulated

00:38:07.040 by institutional norms, by the kinds of productive fact-checking that you talk about in your book.

00:38:12.940 It's not an unregulated environment. It's an environment regulated by precisely the wrong

00:38:17.980 incentives. Algorithms are encouraging us to produce content that maximizes people's time spent

00:38:25.240 on apps. That means that they want us to engage. That means that they want us to like posts,

00:38:31.720 share posts, comment on posts. And that is agnostic as to whether or not we're doing those things

00:38:38.140 because they reinforce what we already believe, or because they caricature and demonize things that

00:38:43.400 we don't believe. But it has to be one or the other. If you're in the nuance game, if you're in

00:38:48.220 the game of truth is not a destination, it is a process, then you are leaving a lot of listeners

00:38:54.660 on the table who you could be getting. I mean, Sam and I could both have bigger audiences. I don't know

00:39:01.420 how you get a bigger audience than Sam's. But we could have a bigger audience if we decided to

00:39:05.780 try to poke at elite consensus a bit more and be really edgy and follow these dissenting voices who

00:39:12.260 are sticking it to the man and raising things that nobody else is brave enough to talk about.

00:39:17.420 I mean, I think there are legitimate conversations, and clearly Sam does as well, that we need to be

00:39:21.320 brave enough to talk about. You just alluded to there being two sexes, John, which is going to

00:39:25.440 get us all fired and canceled, obviously. But, you know, so there is a space in which there are blind

00:39:30.760 spots that the legacy media has that we can step in and constructively fill. But the majority of

00:39:36.100 what's going on online is being driven by, like, if you're a young journalist starting out, just to

00:39:41.560 come back to the question of an unpaid internship, for example, if you're starting out on YouTube or

00:39:46.000 podcaster stand, the easiest thing to do is to try to point out how shady and suspicious elite

00:39:53.020 institutions are, including the mainstream media, and to have on a bunch of people who are conspiracy

00:39:59.360 theory adjacent. I mean, the last time of one of the few times that I've accidentally blown up the

00:40:05.540 internet was I've done Joe Rogan's show seven times. And the last time I was on here, and I got into a

00:40:10.560 spat about vaccines and about whether vaccines cause myocarditis in certain populations at a rate that

00:40:18.000 is higher than COVID does. And it was one of these just arcane moments that momentarily everybody

00:40:23.820 looks at because there's a conflict about a subject where there hasn't been an honest reckoning in

00:40:29.520 podcaster stand. There's like these two rival points of view. One is the mainstream media and elite

00:40:35.680 institutions are shutting us up, which to some extent is true because legacy media, when it feels

00:40:40.920 threatened by alternative narratives, like lockdowns are going too far, or there are problems with

00:40:46.420 vaccines that aren't being properly articulated by public health bureaucrats, then the legacy media

00:40:52.600 responds by circling the wagons and closing ranks and trying to insist that it has the one truth,

00:40:57.260 which just makes people more suspicious and makes them go to non-legacy independent media outlets that

00:41:02.520 are then cashing in people's curiosity and desire for salacious conspiracy theories by feeding them

00:41:08.700 nonsense. So you've got the constitution of knowledge funneling people towards their everlasting

00:41:14.460 gobstopper of truth. And then you've got this reverse funnel, which is pushing people into a climate of

00:41:20.820 bullshit. And the in-between space is one that we have to foster and water and tender and grow.

00:41:27.580 And that garden is withering. And I'm not sure how to empower it without completely changing the

00:41:32.660 economics of social media. Well, so Josh, why do you do it the way you're doing it if you could get

00:41:39.620 more followers and make more money and be more famous by, I don't know, trolling Sam Harris and me?

00:41:46.380 Because I'm not a whore. And why not? I mean, there must be some incentives that are driving you to try

00:41:54.320 to, to stick to norms out there. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation,

00:41:59.600 you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length

00:42:05.520 episodes of the Making Sense podcast. The podcast is available to everyone through our scholarship

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - January 23, 2024

#350 — Sharing Reality

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