Making Sense - Sam Harris - #365 — Reality Check

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

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00:00:45.440 Okay, well, my friend Dan Dennett died about 10 days ago. I was traveling, and then I got sick,

00:00:53.980 and couldn't record, so I'm just now getting an opportunity to say a few things about him.

00:01:00.140 As I'm sure all of you know, Dan was an extraordinarily productive philosopher.

00:01:05.080 He really distinguished himself among philosophers by taking science seriously. This is evident

00:01:11.380 throughout his books, but his book Darwin's Dangerous Idea, in which he argues that Darwin's

00:01:18.620 notion of natural selection was simply the best idea anyone has ever had, is really a wonderful bridge

00:01:24.860 between philosophy and science. And it's among many that Dan built. One often hears philosophy as a

00:01:32.860 discipline denigrated, especially by scientists and technologists. And there's even an implicit

00:01:39.520 denigration in some of Dan's work, and in some of mine as well. I think it's worth clarifying this.

00:01:46.780 Dan often approached philosophy as a kind of handmaiden to science, and he was definitely

00:01:53.320 not alone in doing this. On this view, the chief purpose of philosophy is to clear up conceptual

00:02:00.520 confusion and to spot the many forms of learned error and well-trained ignorance that develop,

00:02:09.420 even in science, so that we can get on with the work of actually understanding the world.

00:02:14.180 The philosopher Bernard Williams once said that the problem with this approach to philosophy

00:02:19.580 is that philosophy can't do what science does, that is, produce new knowledge. So it gives the

00:02:27.340 impression that philosophy is just what scientists sound like when they're off-duty. And I understand

00:02:32.840 this criticism as well. It's a little hard to say what philosophy is or should be, really. It's been

00:02:40.800 many things historically. And I agree that as an academic discipline, there are many backwaters

00:02:46.900 and dry patches that one need not explore. Or exploring them, one shouldn't get stuck there.

00:02:54.840 Generally, my view of philosophy is that it's not so much its own discipline at this point,

00:03:00.580 as it is clarity of thought with the special purpose of making sense of our lives and of our knowledge

00:03:07.820 of the world. Its purpose isn't to do the work of science or of history or of journalism or of any

00:03:14.820 other field in which we produce knowledge. Its purpose is to think clearly about what the

00:03:19.680 discoveries in those fields mean or might mean. The point of philosophy is to see how all the puzzle

00:03:26.220 pieces fit together. I'm not sure that Dan would have agreed with that, but he certainly spent a lot of

00:03:31.260 time working on the part of the puzzle that contains biology and psychology and cognitive science.

00:03:37.700 I didn't get to spend that much time with Dan in person. We attended several conferences together

00:03:43.620 over a couple of decades. Perhaps the first was the second Beyond Belief conference at the Salk Institute

00:03:50.920 in 2007. We went to TED together and Ciudad de la Cidez in Mexico, where we participated in a weird debate,

00:04:01.920 which pitted him and me and Christopher Hitchens against Rabbi Shmuley Botiak, Robert Wright,

00:04:10.840 Dinesh D'Souza, and Nassim Taleb, none of whom made a bit of sense. Really, if you want to see some brains

00:04:19.120 totally misfire, watch what those guys had to say on that occasion. The podium was set in a mock

00:04:25.920 boxing ring, and we were standing in front of 5,000 mostly religious and, I think, mostly bewildered

00:04:32.620 Mexicans. Needless to say, it was an honor to share the stage with Dan and Hitch. Dan and I also went to

00:04:39.040 various atheist and free thought conferences together. Actually, before Mexico, we taped a conversation

00:04:45.360 with Hitch and Richard Dawkins in Hitch's apartment. That was before an atheist conference

00:04:52.160 in D.C. Video of that conversation is still available on YouTube, and the transcript got worked up into a

00:04:59.580 book titled The Four Horsemen, to which the inimitable Stephen Fry wrote a preface. I think the last time I

00:05:08.060 actually saw Dan might have been eight years ago at TED, and he was always great company. Beyond wanting to

00:05:15.800 discuss serious ideas, he just loved life. He loved good food, and wine, and music, and the beauty of

00:05:24.220 nature. He was a big guy with a very big appetite for living, and it was infectious. However, like many of

00:05:33.220 my professional friendships, most of my relationship with Dan took place over email, and I spent the better

00:05:40.360 part of a day and night last week rereading this correspondence going back 20 years. It was frankly a little

00:05:48.400 alarming to see how much I'd forgotten, and reading this had a strange effect, because I realized at some point

00:05:55.600 that it was not so much reminding me of Dan as it was allowing me to relive my primary experience of him, because

00:06:05.500 again, most of our relationship was a matter of exchanging these emails in the first place.

00:06:11.020 So I read through hundreds of emails, and relived a lot of fun and not-so-fun moments with Dan. I saw

00:06:19.880 the moment Dan, Richard, and I consciously inducted Hitch into our circle. Apparently people had been

00:06:25.600 referring to the three of us as the three horsemen of the apocalypse, which I don't actually remember,

00:06:30.760 and we decided that Hitch would be the perfect fourth, which of course he was. I saw the planning that went on

00:06:38.600 for a wonderful dinner we had at Hitch's apartment in Washington, before which we recorded that two-hour

00:06:43.660 conversation, and I was amazed to see how excited Dan was to be doing this. He really was having a lot of fun.

00:06:52.200 So reading this correspondence gave me a second helping of my friendship with Dan, and with many others, with

00:06:58.060 Steven Pinker, and Richard Dawkins, and Hitch. In many cases, there were several of us on various threads

00:07:03.740 together. I just came away so grateful to have had these guys in my corner. Looking back at all these

00:07:11.840 exchanges, I can see that I was often tempted to be more pugnacious than would have been useful,

00:07:18.000 and Dan especially came to my rescue. And I'd forgotten pretty much all of these interventions.

00:07:24.800 Dan was in his mid to late 60s, when we had most of our correspondence, and I was in my early 40s.

00:07:32.820 As I said, there were often others on the thread, Richard and Steve, and sometimes our mutual agent,

00:07:37.720 John Brockman. Richard and I tend to be pretty similar in wanting to say things as intemperately as we think them.

00:07:45.080 And Dan was always the voice of moderation, and there were definitely times when I needed to hear that voice.

00:07:50.180 And the encouragement, and the criticism, and the congratulations when things went well.

00:07:56.340 All of these guys gave me a lot. And Dan gave me a lot. And I'd forgotten how much.

00:08:04.540 As I said, most of our correspondence came earlier on, during the Four Horsemen slash New Atheist 0.98

00:08:12.160 period, where we had a bit of a good cop, bad cop routine going. Dan was the good cop,

00:08:18.740 and Richard, Hitch, and I were the bad ones. And I think he liked it that way.

00:08:24.440 Needless to say, he still caught a lot of our bad press. Most people treated us like a four-headed

00:08:29.200 atheist. However, in truth, Dan's contributions to new atheism were different. In his book, Breaking the

00:08:37.100 Spell, his purpose wasn't to prove religion wrong or to denounce its evils. Rather, he wanted to explain

00:08:44.540 why so many people persist in defending the indefensible. He argued that it wasn't that so

00:08:50.020 many people sincerely believe in God, but rather they believed in belief, and even many atheists

00:08:56.400 believed in belief. Now, Dan and I were both capable of overreacting to criticism and to what we

00:09:04.560 perceived to be unfair attacks. As I review our emails, I see we each admonish the other to be

00:09:10.900 more measured in our responses than we often managed in our first drafts. We would occasionally

00:09:16.300 show each other essays and letters to the editor. Needless to say, all of this admonishment is

00:09:22.940 somewhat adorable, given that when we fell out over free will, we gave each other both barrels,

00:09:30.020 both in public and in private. And you can read the public version of that on my blog somewhere.

00:09:38.360 I believe it's all there, including his initial review of my book, Free Will, to which I reacted

00:09:44.540 badly. It took us about two years to bury the hatchet, and you can hear how fully we did that in a

00:09:52.640 conversation I recorded at the TED conference in 2016, which again, I think might be the last time

00:09:59.580 I ever saw Dan in person. And you can hear that conversation on episode 39 of this podcast.

00:10:07.640 Dan and I didn't agree about free will. I'm not even sure we agreed about what we disagreed about,

00:10:13.400 nor did we agree about other topics in the philosophy of mind, like the hard problem of consciousness.

00:10:18.420 And like many of my smart friends, Dan had no interest in meditation. But we both loved

00:10:25.220 reason and science and the other principles that produce real intellectual life and political

00:10:32.040 freedom. And I will definitely miss Dan's voice. My heart goes out to Susan, his wife, and the rest of

00:10:39.200 his family, and to his many friends and students who were much closer to him than I was. I am very sorry for

00:10:45.900 your loss. Okay. There are just a few things going on in the world at the moment. Campus protests,

00:10:56.580 Iran. No doubt I will talk about all of that soon. Today I'm speaking with David Wallace-Wells.

00:11:04.800 David is a best-selling science writer and essayist who focuses on climate change, technology,

00:11:10.860 and the future of the planet and how we live on it. David has been a national fellow at the New

00:11:16.720 America Foundation, a columnist and deputy editor at New York Magazine. Previously he was at the Paris

00:11:23.040 Review, and now he is a regular columnist for the New York Times. He is also the author of a much

00:11:29.860 celebrated book on climate change titled The Uninhabitable Earth. We covered a lot of ground here.

00:11:37.200 We talk about the pollution of our information landscape, much of it through the lens of COVID.

00:11:45.060 We discuss the false picture of reality that so many people acquired during COVID, how the various

00:11:51.400 countries fared during the pandemic, our preparation for future pandemics, how we naturally normalize

00:11:58.140 danger and death. Then we move on to climate change. We talk about the current global consensus,

00:12:03.600 the amount of warming we can expect, the effects of air pollution quite apart from warming, global

00:12:10.420 versus local considerations, Greta Thunberg and climate catastrophism, growth versus degrowth,

00:12:17.640 the role of market forces, carbon taxes, the consequences of political stagnation, the U.S. national

00:12:24.660 debt, the best way to attack the candidacy of Donald Trump. I thought David had a very good idea on this

00:12:31.100 front, as you'll hear, and we cover a few other topics. And now I bring you David Wallace-Wells.

00:12:44.260 I am here with David Wallace-Wells. David, thanks for joining me.

00:12:48.320 My pleasure. Great to be here.

00:12:50.140 So, how did you get into journalism? I associate you with New York Magazine and the New York Times.

00:12:57.520 Are you currently affiliated with both, or is it just the New York Times?

00:13:01.940 Just the Times, yeah. I write a weekly piece for the opinion sections, basically a column that goes

00:13:07.580 out as a newsletter, and I write a column for the magazine once a month and some features too.

00:13:12.160 And I've been there for about almost two years now.

00:13:14.640 Right.

00:13:15.040 A long time before that at New York. And before that, a somewhat bumpier road. I worked at Slate,

00:13:21.940 I worked in book publishing, I worked at the New York Sun, this neocon newspaper in New York.

00:13:27.800 And yeah, just in the Paris Review as a deputy editor at the literary magazine for a while.

00:13:33.340 Oh, cool. I like the Paris Review, especially those iconic interviews with writers.

00:13:39.300 Yeah, they're incredible. That was, you know, one of the best part of the job was,

00:13:43.080 I did one with William Gibson, but I edited a bunch of them. And

00:13:45.440 they're also much more collaborative than you may think at the outset. So,

00:13:49.400 you're basically writing it with the writer who's being interviewed all the time.

00:13:52.620 Hmm. Nice. And how would you describe your political orientation?

00:13:58.980 You know, about 10 years ago, I was writing a profile of this guy, Ben Kunkel, who was one of

00:14:07.440 the founders of N Plus One, and is a pretty left-wing guy. And as it happens, also pretty

00:14:12.200 concerned with climate, which I became later on. And he asked me the same question during the

00:14:16.020 reporting. And I said, you know, I think I'd have to call myself a neoliberal. And he just like rolled

00:14:22.100 out of his chair laughing, thinking like how ridiculous it could be for someone to call 0.83

00:14:25.700 themselves a neoliberal. You know, I'm a child of the 90s. I grew up in, I was born in 82 and grew 0.58

00:14:31.400 up in New York in the 90s. And I think on some animal level, I processed all of the meta-narratives

00:14:40.660 of that era quite deeply. So, I was, you know, a sophisticated enough teenager to think that

00:14:46.200 progress wasn't inevitable, you know, prosperity and justice weren't laws of the universe.

00:14:51.740 But that over long enough timelines, we were kind of moving in the right direction, and

00:14:56.420 that the U.S. was part of that story. And I've had like a lot of people, a kind of a

00:15:01.720 bumpier last decade or decade and a half, where a lot of those assumptions seem much less safe

00:15:07.460 to me to make, and the world seems much messier and more complicated than I had thought it

00:15:12.240 was, both domestically and internationally. And probably it's also meant that I've moved

00:15:17.080 quite a bit to the left of where I was when I described myself as a neoliberal 10 or 12

00:15:22.140 years ago. But I also think of myself as someone who is pretty resistant to tribal thinking and

00:15:30.420 like team-based thinking about the world, and spend a fair amount of time, I think, trying

00:15:36.860 to interrogate anything I see in myself as a kind of doctrinaire position or perspective.

00:15:41.500 And that means often getting irritated and frustrated with people who I think of as political

00:15:47.340 allies, because I don't think they're being quite serious enough about, you know, asking

00:15:51.820 themselves the hard questions.

00:15:54.440 Yeah, so I want to cover a bunch of topics here, which are, you know, on the surface, they

00:16:00.820 seem unrelated, but they're all connected to our, what many of us perceive to be our degrading

00:16:08.780 capacity to talk about problems and implement solutions. There's a political dysfunction,

00:16:17.360 there's a failure to converge in any kind of reasonable timeframe in a fact-based discussion

00:16:25.220 on a statement of, you know, what's happening in the world. I mean, it's kind of a shared reality.

00:16:31.240 So let's start with the information landscape, which you probably agree, many of us perceive

00:16:39.160 it as just astonishingly polluted at this moment. And the one problem is that any attempt

00:16:45.500 to clean it up is considered to be censorship by at least half of our society. I mean, now

00:16:52.100 we're taking an American perspective here, although this is probably true across much of the world.

00:16:57.280 And, you know, I wouldn't say that censorship is never a problem, but many people consider

00:17:02.740 any effort to contain algorithmically amplified lies and however consequential as a step toward

00:17:11.020 some kind of dystopia. And even to worry about misinformation and disinformation, as I've begun

00:17:18.680 to do in these previous sentences, among Republicans, certainly, is just to be branded some kind of

00:17:25.480 elitist stooge at this point, right? This is just, these are just not problems. So I'm just wondering

00:17:30.740 how you view, I mean, there's sort of the media and social media side of this and then the political

00:17:36.780 side, right? And the rise of populism, especially. How do you view the current moment and what's it

00:17:44.000 like to navigate it as a journalist at The Times?

00:17:46.780 I think it's a big mess. When my colleagues or, you know, people in the sort of mainstream

00:17:53.220 establishment media talk about these issues, they often do talk about, you know, disinformation and

00:17:59.340 they're talking about the distortions of social media and the way that it inflames many of our sort

00:18:06.060 of intuitive tribal feelings about the world and the state of the world. I tend to think that the changes

00:18:14.020 that we've seen over the last five years are kind of bigger and more fundamental than that.

00:18:18.660 I, you know, 20 years ago, people worried a lot about American culture trending in a, you know,

00:18:25.280 kind of idiocracy, dystopia direction. We worried about the dumbing down of our population, of our

00:18:32.600 culture. And, you know, I think there are certain ways in which that's undeniably unfolding. On the other

00:18:38.080 hand, I think in the last five or 10 years as this incredible explosion of pretty high-minded,

00:18:45.220 pretty serious curiosity, you know, in other parts of the new media landscape. So you can see certain

00:18:52.320 algorithmic problems when you're looking at, you know, Twitter or TikTok. But when you look at what's

00:18:58.560 happening on YouTube or in podcasts, it seems to me like we just have a huge new population of people

00:19:04.940 who demographically and professionally a half generation ago would not have been really

00:19:10.900 intellectuals now playing the role of intellectuals in public, but also many of them just processing

00:19:17.220 news from the world on their own. And, you know, on some level that has to be progress and it has to

00:19:25.260 be a good thing. When I think about, you know, just imagining the equivalent like Silicon Valley elite

00:19:31.580 from 20 years ago, they were just not, you know, listening to three-hour podcasts about,

00:19:37.640 you know, some 17th century event or like, you know, the path of the plague through Europe or

00:19:43.140 whatever it is. It just was a very different kind of more business-centered culture. And that's true

00:19:49.080 of more traditional business centers too. And now I think almost everyone of some education and sort of

00:19:56.380 status thinks of themselves as a thinker and thinks of part of their job as figuring out the state of

00:20:02.860 the world in the future. And that is, you know, like I said, you kind of have to count it as progress.

00:20:09.020 On the other hand, it's meant that it's possible for many of us to treat those conversations,

00:20:15.540 which are in many ways abstracted and separated from the way the real world is unfolding, as though

00:20:23.540 those conversations are the real world and not to confront ourselves or be confronted with contrary

00:20:29.640 facts or contrary arguments. And so we have this combination of forces where we have many people

00:20:35.180 thinking and talking in much more sophisticated and informed ways, but producing just an awful lot of,

00:20:41.960 I think, pretty damaging narrativization and mischaracterization of all the shifts that we're

00:20:49.420 living through. And, you know, it's maybe because of what I cover and what I write about. It's also

00:20:54.840 because of, you know, the recent history that we've all lived through. But I think of this, I guess,

00:20:59.700 primarily in terms of the pandemic, where it almost seemed like every month I was both arguing with

00:21:06.940 journalists at places like the New York Times about how they were describing the pace of the pandemic

00:21:11.400 and the course of the pandemic and what it sort of required of us. And also arguing with

00:21:16.060 contrarians who seem to be far too extreme in their rejection of establishment wisdom and 1.00

00:21:22.460 establishment understanding. And I don't know, given the information landscape that we've landed in

00:21:28.380 now in 2024, against the political backdrop in which all of that's unfolding, whether we can get

00:21:34.480 back to a place where, you know, we have to argue from real facts with one another. But it does seem like

00:21:41.440 a quite, quite distressing situation where, you know, you have pretty prominent people with pretty

00:21:50.020 large followings and whose followings have grown a lot over the last five years talking about the net

00:21:56.820 harm that vaccines have done to the population or, you know, on any number of points about the course of

00:22:03.920 the pandemic. Really, really, I think, over-correcting for some of the real oversights

00:22:10.740 and shortcomings of conventional public health messaging, but over-correcting in ways that I

00:22:16.920 think are, you know, have left us in a worse place. And, you know, we could talk about some of the

00:22:22.320 particulars there, but in the big picture, it's like half of states, I think, have passed laws

00:22:26.380 restricting the ability of public health officials to impose any behavioral restrictions in the face of a

00:22:33.260 future pandemic, independent of how transmissible or lethal that pandemic might be. You know,

00:22:40.540 reasonable people can say, can take issue with the way that the American pandemic was handled.

00:22:45.860 But like, the idea that we should do absolutely nothing in the face of all possible future pandemic

00:22:52.000 threats just seems to me to be just a horrible over-correction and a real indictment of how, you

00:22:57.360 know, how narrow-minded, narrow-mindedly we're all thinking about what we just went through and the

00:23:01.500 lessons it really offers us. Yeah. Well, let's look at this through the lens of COVID because I think

00:23:07.020 that's, it was transformational on multiple fronts and, you know, I think diagnostic of much that ails

00:23:15.420 us. I mean, you sound more sanguine about the signal that's in the noise than I feel on most days. I mean,

00:23:23.740 when you, you know, when thinking about, you know, what I continue to refer to as podcastistan and

00:23:29.360 Substackistan, you know, the main places of alternative media where you can see the virtually

00:23:37.820 complete erosion of trust in, in our institutions, you know, more or less, you know, just the evidence

00:23:44.220 of it just clocks in, you know, minute by minute, you know, in all of these conversations.

00:23:49.240 Um, and so that even, uh, you know, uh, the most esteemed journal on earth, which you work for the

00:23:57.060 New York times has very little status out there in the, in the wilds of podcasts and, and YouTube.

00:24:05.040 And I mean, it's just, it's, or it has negative status. Yeah. I mean, it's, it really is, it,

00:24:10.820 you know, it would be referred to as, you know, sneeringly as a source. I mean, just to tell you,

00:24:15.680 so COVID is a good place to start because I think it is true to say that if you polled the audiences

00:24:21.320 of the biggest podcasts, I mean, you start with Joe Rogan and work your way down. I think you would

00:24:26.940 find a totally bewildering inversion of reality and it would be believed with, you know, something

00:24:35.820 like, you know, religious zeal, which is to say that if you, I mean, I don't, obviously I don't have

00:24:41.840 these data, but I would bet, you know, if you could find me a casino, I could, where I could place this

00:24:45.920 bet, I would, I would wager a lot on it. If you polled Rogan's audience, I think you would find that

00:24:51.360 a majority believe that COVID was basically a non-issue. It was just, at the end of the day, not really

00:24:59.540 much worse than the flu. And, you know, who knows really how many people died from it. I mean,

00:25:06.260 surely the data are massively exaggerated. Lots of people died, you know, with COVID and not from

00:25:12.580 COVID, including people getting hit by buses. Whereas many, many people, possibly many millions

00:25:19.820 of people have been killed by the vaccines, right? I mean, the vaccines have been a, just a disaster.

00:25:26.900 And one that was really just engineered to not only harm us in some strange way and, and produce

00:25:36.820 windfall profits for the nefarious pharmaceutical companies, but really it was, they were tools of

00:25:42.640 social control, right? Somebody over in Davos just decided one day that they were going to figure out

00:25:49.460 how to subvert democracies globally and get people to bend the knee to all kinds of Orwellian

00:25:56.020 strictures that we acquiesce to perversely and just maddeningly and to our shame. And, you know,

00:26:04.360 what you need are the, you know, the renegades like RFK Jr. to reboot the system from someplace

00:26:11.300 outside it where all establishments are distrusted, you know, eternally. We need, we need the Snowdens

00:26:17.620 of the world to leak everything and the Vivek Ramaswamis of the world to drive out the moneylenders.

00:26:24.120 And this is just, it's just corruption, institutional corruption as far as the eye can see. And the

00:26:30.560 whole COVID story, the lesson to learn from the pandemic is that it was just a colossal act of

00:26:35.900 self-harm and nothing, literally nothing is as the New York Times would say it is, right? That I think

00:26:46.060 is well over 50% of the audience believes something like that. I mean, you know, feel free to react to

00:26:51.840 that, but I just, and this is an audience that is, you know, arguably this is an audience that is on

00:26:56.560 any given day considerably bigger than any other audience that you could name. These are podcast

00:27:02.940 episodes where the numbers of listeners, you know, at the end of the week or at the end of the month

00:27:08.200 exceed, you know, the finale of Game of Thrones, right? I mean, these are just enormous numbers of

00:27:14.140 people listening to these long form conversations.

00:27:16.660 Yeah. And I, you know, at a, at a baseline, I would say, I agree with just about everything

00:27:21.840 you've said and your, and your perspective on, on it all. And I think it's really, you know,

00:27:27.360 damaging and, and worrisome. A few things to mention. One is, you know, a lot of these fears

00:27:35.620 as they were expressed, especially early on in the pandemic about this sort of Orwellian takeover

00:27:40.400 really have not come to pass in any meaningful way, which is to say, even taking seriously the

00:27:46.980 possibility that somebody might've been trying to get you to take a vaccine for some nefarious

00:27:51.920 future purpose, or they were trying to lock you in your home for some, you know, out of some sense

00:27:57.600 of, you know, social control. All of that pressure disappeared relatively quickly. We are not living

00:28:04.580 in the world that, you know, Naomi Wolf warned us about. We're not living in a world in which we're

00:28:09.540 being pinned down and syringes forced into our arms every six months. We're not being tested as we

00:28:15.260 walk out the door. We're not being told that we can't leave our homes. We're not being told we can't

00:28:20.300 go to school. The long-term vision that was offered as this kind of, this is a stepping stone,

00:28:27.020 a global stepping stone to a kind of new totalitarian order, just as obviously not come to pass.

00:28:34.320 There was a period of time in 2020 when our lives were restricted to some degree. But I think

00:28:41.040 even in remembering that history, we often overstate how significant and how intrusive those

00:28:46.740 restrictions really were and how politically divisive they were. If you look at the data,

00:28:53.480 all through 2020, red states and blue states across the board imposed roughly the same level

00:29:00.440 of restrictions. They all closed schools at the same time. They all restricted social gatherings

00:29:04.340 at the same time. They all issued mask advisories at the same time. By the fall of 2020, there was some

00:29:10.920 difference starting to emerge between red states and blue states, but it was relatively small. And if

00:29:15.880 you look at the mobility data that Google and others have assembled, people were still moving around at

00:29:21.020 somewhere between 90 and 98 percent of what they'd been doing before the pandemic. We remember that time

00:29:28.160 now, so many of us, as a period of intense government-directed lockdown. And mostly,

00:29:36.340 it wasn't that. Mostly, it was a culture of fear, partly cultivated by public officials,

00:29:43.860 I think for good reason, but partly cultivated by them, but also embodied and instantiated by individuals

00:29:51.040 who were largely scared. And I think in retrospect, we've made this collective mistake. And this is

00:29:58.200 the big point I want to make is this is not just like an information problem about what Joe Rogan says

00:30:03.940 about the pandemic. It's a problem at the level of the consumer too. So many people have revised their

00:30:12.620 own memories of the pandemic or have a distorted memory of that period and think of it as a much more

00:30:18.320 progressive, much longer lasting, much more restrictive regime than we really had. I think

00:30:25.140 to sort of pin the blame for all of the disruption on someone else, as opposed to really reckoning with

00:30:32.520 what it meant that given the facts, and we all basically did know the facts, we did know roughly

00:30:37.380 what the fatality rate was, we did know what the age skew of the disease was, all of those things were

00:30:41.640 publicly available in the winter of 2020. You know, as early as the first data coming out of China,

00:30:46.480 all of that has been really quite remarkably vindicated in the years since. Responding to

00:30:51.440 that set of facts and that set of data, most of us had a really quite panicked response.

00:30:57.900 Even if we knew that, you know, I'm 41 years old, even if, and I was, you know, whenever 37,

00:31:03.380 when the pandemic hit, even if I knew that the risk of dying given an infection was incredibly low

00:31:07.760 for a healthy 37-year-old male, I was still scared to get the disease. And part of that was because I was

00:31:13.520 spending time with my father-in-law who was immunocompromised and older, but part of it was

00:31:16.680 just pure pandemic fear. And I think a huge amount of what we remember as the emotional, social,

00:31:23.520 and political disruptions of 2020 are, or were projections of that fear, which we don't want

00:31:30.580 to acknowledge and we want to blame someone else for. And so we've kind of collectively decided,

00:31:35.200 and again, this is not just, you know, in Substackistan, it's among, you know, good liberals I know in

00:31:40.460 Brooklyn, we decided that we went too far and that if we had the chance to do it again,

00:31:45.400 we would do things differently. We'd be much more open and much more voluntary. And, you know,

00:31:51.620 that is, I think, a bad lesson to take going forward, especially if we're going to apply it

00:31:57.060 to potential future pandemics that could be considerably worse. But it's also just at the

00:32:01.420 level of truth-telling, delusional.

00:32:03.760 But the audience I'm talking about, for the most part, didn't feel that same fear. I mean,

00:32:09.940 they were not afraid of the disease or they were not as afraid of the disease as you were in Brooklyn

00:32:17.660 or wherever you were, but they were quite afraid and remain so of the vaccines. That was the thing

00:32:24.540 that really spooked them, the idea that these novel vaccines who are doing who knows what to your DNA,

00:32:31.440 which now may have yet killed millions, even tens of millions, and that information is being

00:32:37.320 suppressed by the powers that be. I mean, that's where this has gone for that audience.

00:32:43.100 I think that's absolutely true, but I think it also tells you something about the timeline,

00:32:46.140 which is to say that the real partisan gaps opened up with behavior and response to the disease,

00:32:51.200 not in 2020, but in 2021. You started to see them in the fall of 2020, but then they really opened up

00:32:58.360 with the arrival of vaccines. And then there was another bump when there was a consideration,

00:33:02.200 they were never really implemented, but a consideration of vaccine mandates later on in

00:33:06.280 2021. And I agree that that is the thing that now dominates. It's the sort of, it's the looking

00:33:12.800 glass through which our memory of, or the prism through which our memory of the pandemic has been

00:33:18.920 distorted. And I think it's, I think it's, I mean, from my perspective, the vaccines are and were a

00:33:27.020 miracle. We could have actually gotten them a lot faster, but even getting them within 10 months or 11

00:33:32.780 months counts as one of the great achievements in human history. When you look not just in the U.S.,

00:33:38.260 but all around the world, whenever the vaccines arrive, they, you know, if they were taken in great

00:33:42.920 enough numbers, they essentially eliminated the pandemic in one, in one go. In the U.K., for

00:33:48.580 instance, they had much worse, two big initial waves that were much worse than we had in the U.S.

00:33:53.760 And they got the vaccines and basically haven't had anything comparable since. The U.S. is a little

00:33:58.540 bit of a murkier picture because we, we had, you know, less successful vaccine uptake. And yeah, to your

00:34:04.320 point, it's just, you know, it's just, if we, if we can tell ourselves stories that involve something

00:34:12.820 like 10, 15, 20 million vaccine deaths, if we can even entertain that idea without feeling like the

00:34:21.200 world is contradicting us, we're in a really bad place. And that's the place that we're in right now.

00:34:26.960 Um, and I think some of the natural features of COVID played a role here. I think that, you know,

00:34:34.280 it's significant that the fatality rate was something like 1% at the population level. It's

00:34:39.060 changes based on the demographic structure of the population, but something like 1%,

00:34:43.100 which means that even if you knew a hundred people who got sick, probably you may only know one or two

00:34:47.980 people or even zero people who actually died from it. And it allows you, especially as a survivor

00:34:52.860 on the other side of the pandemic, to look back and think it was not that big a deal.

00:34:57.500 But of course we know, we know not just from official COVID deaths and death certificates.

00:35:01.960 We know from the excess mortality studies that the U S has lost something like 1.1, 1.2 million people

00:35:08.560 that we would not have lost in the absence of the pandemic. We know that it's almost entirely driven

00:35:14.700 by COVID-19 because the waves of those excess deaths matches perfectly the wave of the waves of

00:35:21.460 infection as they pass through the country, as they pass through states, as they pass through local

00:35:25.260 communities. You know, there's no reason that if the problem were lockdowns, that we would be having

00:35:29.920 huge surges when there was a wave of infections and not a week later when people were still locked

00:35:34.620 in their homes, but the number of infections were lower. It's just indisputable that this was

00:35:39.800 a major disease. It was primarily punishing us because of how novel it was, how inexperienced our

00:35:45.800 immune systems were. But you know, it proved at the global scale to be incredibly punishing.

00:35:50.900 Best estimates are something like 25 or 30 million people died. And best estimates are that those

00:35:55.020 vaccines, as they rolled out, saved several multiples of that number of lives, which means

00:35:59.760 this is really one of the great medical, biomedical, and political and social interventions in the

00:36:05.980 history of the world. And exactly why the people who turned against it turned against it is an incredibly

00:36:12.520 complicated, deep question. I'm sure you have lots of thoughts, but I would just start by saying,

00:36:17.000 you know, as a counterfactual, it's interesting to consider the possibility that the vaccines were

00:36:23.580 approved before the election, before, you know, before the Biden-Trump election. You know, there's

00:36:29.360 some reporting, I think, plausible that the approval was delayed out of fear that it would be used in a

00:36:35.220 political way, but probably the original timeline would have meant the vaccines were given approval just

00:36:40.200 before the election. It's possible, given the margins of that election, that Donald Trump might have

00:36:45.240 benefited, you know, to the, to, to a reelection on the basis of those approvals. And then how the

00:36:51.560 country, particularly the sort of, you know, I don't know exactly how you want to characterize on the

00:36:56.580 political spectrum, what you're calling Substackistan. It's, you know, it's some mix of center-right and

00:37:01.540 fringe, including, and, you know, and some just, just fringe independent of a particular political

00:37:07.000 ideologies, but exactly how those people would have responded to, to the vaccine if Donald Trump was

00:37:12.480 president and his people were designing the rollout is, I think it's a really important and interesting

00:37:17.500 counterfactual history to consider. I think it's quite possible that we'd be living in a much less

00:37:22.820 pandemic divided nation than we are now. But that's not to say that there's much that we could do now,

00:37:27.980 or even in retrospect, if we could take a time machine back in time to really change the course

00:37:32.960 of that, or that we might want to, I mean, would it have been worth a second Trump, you know,

00:37:37.700 second Trump term to have, you know, support for vaccines among Republicans at, you know,

00:37:43.400 75 instead of 55 percent? I don't know. Yeah. Although the few times that Trump has tried to

00:37:48.340 take credit for the vaccine in front of a loving audience, he was instantly rebuked by that audience.

00:37:54.520 Which is most, even more remarkable because it's, he is such a tribune of the whole movement that

00:38:00.000 almost anything he says becomes a cause for them. Yeah. And the fact that they can't, they can,

00:38:05.760 they can like follow him almost anywhere, but not to the vaccines is really quite remarkable.

00:38:11.380 On the other hand, you know, I would just say as a, as a baseline, important to keep in mind,

00:38:16.940 95% of American seniors got at least one shot by the end of 2021. And we know it's, it's probably 0.55

00:38:23.900 higher than that, but the CDC actually stopped counting at 95% because they, they don't want to

00:38:28.180 like over promise. And they think that the data might get a little unreliable at that level,

00:38:32.320 but it was, it was, it surpassed the threshold of 95% of American seniors. The, the risk of this

00:38:37.500 disease was concentrated in seniors in a quite dramatic way. The age skew is, you know, for an

00:38:41.680 eight-year-old, it's like thousand times more deadly than for an eight-year-old. Right. And so

00:38:46.740 like in a certain logical way, those are the people that we needed to get. And we got almost all of them

00:38:51.680 in the calendar year in which we, we began rolling out vaccines. And so we can compare ourselves

00:38:56.920 to other countries in terms of vaccination uptake, especially among the middle-aged, we fell way

00:39:01.420 behind, which is why when Delta came so many more Americans died than other, in other countries.

00:39:05.880 But on some level, like our first job here was to protect the elderly. And even in spite of the

00:39:10.860 partisan dynamics, even in spite of the vaccine skepticism, we got the vast, vast, vast majority

00:39:17.120 of the most vulnerable people, some protection on a relatively fast timeline. And so one of the

00:39:23.180 things that we're talking about, I think, or at least I'm talking about, is the way in which

00:39:27.720 these questions and these debates almost separate from the facts on the ground, not just in terms of

00:39:34.800 do we acknowledge how many people died of COVID, do we acknowledge how, how many people took vaccines,

00:39:39.540 but how many of the people who are expressing vaccine skepticism now took the vaccines? The data

00:39:44.740 suggests quite a large share. And, you know, and are we treating the distortions of our discourse,

00:39:51.780 the sort of ugliness of our, of our public discourse around these issues as a substitute

00:39:56.480 for the data that we know we have about who actually got the shots. And I'm just as appalled

00:40:03.780 and horrified and scared about what the state of, you know, scientific discourse and public

00:40:08.280 trust is as you are. But I also think there's some reasons to think that when you look at the

00:40:13.060 actual, you know, behavioral data, not just with vaccines, but how much people were moving

00:40:17.140 around, how much social distancing people were doing at various points of the pandemic, there was

00:40:21.300 actually less division and less hostility to behaviors that we could take to protect ourselves

00:40:27.260 and protect those around us than, than it seems on the sort of narrative surface.

00:40:31.160 Hmm. And do we still think the punchline was that something like 1.2 million Americans died

00:40:38.620 unnecessarily or that we wouldn't have died from COVID, something like 300,000 more died than

00:40:47.660 needed to die based on vaccine hesitancy and something like three to 4 million lives were

00:40:54.820 saved in the end by the vaccine. Is it those numbers square with what you think you know?

00:41:00.440 Yeah. The one, the, what the first number is the one that I think is a little complicated

00:41:03.460 to assess. It was like, how do we think about that death toll? Was that, how much of that was

00:41:07.020 avoidable? You know, how much, who do we, what other countries do we compare ourselves to in the

00:41:12.820 heat of the spring and summer of 2020? A lot of people were willing to say that the entire pandemic

00:41:19.400 was Trump's fault and that every American death was, was on his desk and on his responsibility.

00:41:25.980 You know, Joe Biden said, you know, any, any president who's presided over a couple of hundred

00:41:30.100 thousand American deaths does not deserve to be president. And Joe Biden has now presided over

00:41:34.560 about 750,000 American deaths. So I think a lot of those narratives that we told ourselves at the

00:41:39.660 outset of the pandemic were politically naive, epidemiologically naive. And it means that many

00:41:45.720 of, you know, many of the deaths that we saw were probably on some level unavoidable. We shouldn't look

00:41:51.360 at the scale of COVID death and say, all of that is a sign of our national failing. The question of

00:41:56.820 exactly what share of that 1.2 million is, was avoidable. I think people are going to be debating

00:42:02.460 for generations. My own sense is, yeah, probably something like, something like the share that you

00:42:07.220 suggested, maybe a little bit more if it's, if it's, you know, maybe 500,000 of the 1.2 million

00:42:12.180 could have been avoided. But, you know, hardly any country in the world really thrived and succeeded

00:42:18.360 in ultimately containing the disease, even until the arrival of vaccines. Those countries, which were

00:42:24.160 celebrated in 2020 as being the most successful at limiting the spread of the disease, they ended up

00:42:29.360 in a better place than the US did or the UK did, but they didn't end up in a place that, you know,

00:42:33.120 they had defeated the pandemic. They, everybody suffered. And one of the things that's most

00:42:37.860 remarkable to me about that is that you see, you know, political blowback, even for those leaders

00:42:41.560 in those countries who, who did quite well. So just into Ardern and in New Zealand, you know,

00:42:46.220 had to resign. I mean, not just because of her COVID policies, but, you know, she, she was incredibly

00:42:50.760 popular in 2020. And then by 2022 was incredibly unpopular in that country. There was a political

00:42:55.860 backlash against Xi Jinping and China that was powered in part by the COVID lockdowns there,

00:43:00.680 just from an epidemiological level, like China did well in containing the virus, but there was,

00:43:05.800 he, he suffered a huge backlash there, you know, and across, across the world, Canada did relatively

00:43:10.780 well, but Trudeau has suffered, you know, it's, there's almost nobody who came out a hero at the

00:43:15.680 level of national leader, almost anywhere in the world, whether they were somebody who suffered through a

00:43:20.040 brutal pandemic or someone who managed a relatively easy one, no matter what level of suffering or

00:43:24.640 what kind of suffering countries went through, almost all of them looked at their leaders and

00:43:28.760 said, like, we don't like this guy's running things. And I think that gets back to something

00:43:33.020 I was saying earlier, which is the way in which we are trying to make sense of the disruptions and

00:43:37.680 suffering that we all went through over the last couple of years, in part by pinning blame on

00:43:40.960 someone, some discreet authority, partly out of hopes that we could get them out of office or

00:43:46.200 kick them out of power, or at least learn our lessons so that in the future, we wouldn't listen

00:43:50.500 to people like them. And, you know, I think the universality of that feeling across the world

00:43:54.980 shows that it doesn't say all that much about how individual leaders manage things. It says a lot more

00:44:00.700 about how hard it is to live through a pandemic, how much we don't actually want to do that and how

00:44:05.060 much we want to pretend that it was possible to avoid.

00:44:07.200 But what about the response of Sweden, which was much maligned at the time as being reckless and

00:44:15.720 then much celebrated as being at worst equivalent to what we did? I mean, they did not lock down in

00:44:22.580 the way that we did. And as far as excess mortality viewed from this distance of hindsight, what do we

00:44:30.160 think about Sweden?

00:44:30.860 Well, I would say for sure, the initial criticism was overstated. It turns out that even in 2020,

00:44:38.160 before the arrival of vaccines, Sweden died a lot less than the United States did. And I think that

00:44:44.040 is a really important distinction to make in thinking about all of these questions. It's like,

00:44:47.760 how did we do before the vaccines? And how did we do after the vaccines? Because in the big sweep of

00:44:52.580 the pandemic, the most important factor in determining a country's outcomes was how many people got sick

00:44:58.960 before they were vaccinated and how many people got sick after they were vaccinated. And in 2020,

00:45:03.960 Sweden did considerably worse than its neighbors, which are its natural comparisons by every measure

00:45:09.720 of COVID and excess mortality. So I think 10 times as many Swedes died as Norwegians, something like

00:45:15.500 that level compared to Denmark. And Finland and Iceland are also much better. After the arrival of

00:45:22.280 vaccines, you know, things leveled out so that depending on the database that you look at,

00:45:27.340 the ones I trust, they're still a little behind those countries. They're still doing a little bit

00:45:30.980 worse than their peers, but it's in the same rough band. There are other analyses, including ones that

00:45:36.340 the Swedish government has put together that suggests that they actually outperformed their

00:45:39.860 neighbors. But like I said, I think the better models there suggest something like slightly below the

00:45:45.440 performance of their peers. But there are a lot of complications and caveats that are important to

00:45:51.920 acknowledge when telling the story. One is the one that I mentioned that, you know, you really do need to

00:45:56.220 divide the experience before vaccines than the experience after. Because if you get the whole

00:46:01.080 population vaccinated on day one, and the pandemic goes on for several years, like that's going to

00:46:05.140 make a big difference. Another is that Sweden talked about its pandemic response as hands-off.

00:46:10.860 And it was in some ways, most of their guidance was offered as guidance. But some schools did shut

00:46:17.640 down in Sweden. Some stores did shut down. There were travel restrictions. People did move around a lot

00:46:22.760 less. Much of that was voluntary in the sense that the police weren't going around ticketing people

00:46:27.600 when they left their homes in the same way that they were in other parts of Europe. But they also

00:46:30.880 weren't doing that much in the United States. There are isolated incidents here and there of people

00:46:34.840 getting ticketed for being in parks or beaches. There was a period of time in the late spring of

00:46:39.480 2020 when in some U.S. states and municipalities, there was some sort of surveillance of that kind.

00:46:45.500 But by and large, we did the same thing. We told people that they shouldn't move around much or

00:46:51.460 socialize. And then we didn't do much to enforce those rules. When you look at some of the data

00:46:55.840 that's been examined by the Oxford Blavatnik School of Government, they've done an international

00:47:01.200 comparative study of COVID mitigation measures. And they look at, I think it's like eight or 10

00:47:06.340 different categories of restrictions. You know, Sweden is not unusually open in the spring and summer

00:47:11.760 of 2020. It's a little bit more open than some of its European neighbors. It's about as open as the

00:47:16.940 U.S. is. And so their experience there was less confrontational. It was less patronizing in certain

00:47:24.240 ways than the U.S. was. But at the level of individual behavior and how it was guided and

00:47:29.880 policed, I think there's actually considerably less difference between the two countries than we've told

00:47:34.840 ourselves there was. And they had other natural advantages that, you know, they don't have a ton of

00:47:38.200 people coming in and out of the country in the same way that the U.S. does. They have high levels

00:47:42.860 of social trust. All those things played a role too. But I think in the big picture, you'd have to say

00:47:47.760 Sweden did not have the disaster that was predicted at the time. But it is also not necessarily a model

00:47:53.240 for how a country like the U.S. could operate, in part because we're not so far from them and their

00:47:59.300 policies as some of the Sweden advocates want to make us believe. And in part because the U.S. is just

00:48:04.960 a different and more complicated country to manage than Sweden is. And in thinking about

00:48:10.060 the comparison of the U.S. and Sweden, I just want to raise one particular anecdote, which I think is

00:48:14.840 really illustrative. And that is that in May of 2020, in May, Anthony Fauci was interviewed on CNN

00:48:22.960 by Chris Cuomo. And Chris Cuomo said, you're losing the argument. People are getting tired. They're sick

00:48:29.020 of staying at home. They're not going to do this much longer. What do you say to them?

00:48:34.120 And Fauci said, you're right. We are. We can't do this indefinitely. And everybody ultimately has

00:48:40.160 to decide for themselves when they return to their normal life and what level of risk they're

00:48:45.140 comfortable with. And this is not in 2022. It's not even in 2021 after the vaccines. It's in like month

00:48:52.640 three of the pandemic. I think fewer than 100,000 Americans had died at that point. And you have

00:48:58.940 the person who is the face of the quote unquote lockdown saying very publicly, this is all voluntary.

00:49:05.640 And I know that I'm not going to convince everyone. Now we all took messages from Fauci later on as more

00:49:12.460 hard line and more confrontational than that. Absolutely. And he was not always that deferential

00:49:18.840 to the judgment of individuals. But it's a reminder that a huge amount of this pandemic

00:49:24.080 timeline that we remember as, you know, authoritarian dictatorial lockdowns directed from the top by Tony

00:49:30.780 Fauci, it just wasn't that way. You know, I hear Bill Maher talking about a two-year lockdown. It's like

00:49:38.540 he didn't miss recording a single show. And yes, he did it for a while without an audience, but

00:49:43.720 that's a way of keeping one another safe and adjusting to a, you know, epidemiological environment

00:49:48.940 that's threatening. And maybe we, maybe we wouldn't want to do it in exactly the same way the next time

00:49:53.700 we can talk about those lessons. We can talk about what we might've learned or what we could do better.

00:49:57.380 But I think as a, just a baseline, we should remember that the country as a whole navigated

00:50:03.780 this pandemic as libertarians, not as, you know, figures in an Orwellian nightmare. And many of us

00:50:12.360 chose to stay at home and live in fear. And some people still are staying at home and living in

00:50:16.440 fear. And some of them even have good reason to. But overall, we made decisions on our own. We

00:50:22.720 processed information on our own. And then we got really angry because we weren't happy with the

00:50:28.560 world that we were living in. Not because someone like Anthony Fauci or Donald Trump, who was the

00:50:34.660 president at the time, was coming around to our houses, locking thousands of people up, you know,

00:50:40.040 nailing doors shut like they did in China. Nothing like that happened here. And we may feel that our

00:50:46.760 lives were really restricted and limited. In many ways they were. But to your point earlier, it was

00:50:51.760 not an Orwellian nightmare in the same way that I think many of us kind of falsely now remember it to

00:50:57.080 be. Do you think we learned anything from the pandemic that would allow us to respond better

00:51:04.460 next time? Or do you think it actually degraded our capacity to respond next time?

00:51:10.700 If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at

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00:51:40.700 Bye-bye.

Making Sense - Sam Harris - May 01, 2024

#365 — Reality Check

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