Making Sense - Sam Harris - #389 — The Politics of Risk

Nate Silver joins me to talk about his new book, On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything, and why he thinks Kamala Harris should lose the presidential election. We talk about why the polls are so close, what s going on with the Harris campaign, and why we should all be worried about it. And we talk about how to prepare for a presidential election that is so close that we can t even begin to predict who s going to win. We also talk about the state of American politics and why it s important to be prepared for the possibility that Donald Trump could still win the election, and what that means for the future of the country and the country s political discourse. This is a great episode to listen to, especially if you ve been paying attention to the polls and wondering what s happening with the race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. We don t run ads on the podcast, and therefore it s made possible entirely through the support of our listeners. If you enjoy what we re doing here, please consider becoming a supporter of the podcast by becoming a subscriber. You ll get access to all the great shows on the network, including The Making Sense Podcast, The FiveThirtyEight blog, The Signal and the Noise, The Silver Bulletin, and The New York Times Magazine s election forecasting blog The Upshot. Thanks to Sam Harris for helping us make sense of this episode. Sam Harris and Nate Silver for coming up with his perspective and perspective on the politics of the election and why the election is close and how it s possible for Donald Trump to win the White House in 2020. And much more complicated than we thought it would be a good time to be a better choice than it really is a good one to vote for the next time, right? Make sense of it all. - Sam Harris - to make sense in this episode of Making Sense: What's going to happen in 2020 and why you should vote for Hillary Clinton? - by Nate Silver by on the election prediction model and why she s running for president in 2020? by The Signal & the Noise? . and is a new book: On the edge: The art of risking everything by the art of risking everything? in The Art Of Risking It All? and more! by On The Edge: for a better 2020 election model by Sam Harris.

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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00:00:45.080 Well, we've got 11 days left until the presidential election, and I must say I am concerned at this

00:00:52.780 point. I know the polls still have it more or less even, but it's not feeling that way somehow.

00:01:01.300 What has worried me about the Harris campaign from the beginning still worries me. For some reason,

00:01:08.340 I can't understand. She and her campaign have not found a way for her to explain her changes of 0.91

00:01:15.740 position. On border security, on crime and policing, on trans activism, and the result is that many

00:01:24.940 people don't know what her views are, or they think they do know, and they suspect that she's some kind

00:01:31.000 of woke Manchurian candidate who will govern like a far-left activist. Now, I'm not even slightly

00:01:38.600 concerned that that's true, but it really seems that there are millions and millions of people

00:01:44.580 who are worried about this, and she is not saying much to put them at ease. She can't put them at ease

00:01:54.780 unless she articulates how her views have changed. Whenever she's asked about a position she held in

00:02:02.620 2019 or 2020, she just looks evasive. She looks like she's, above all, trying to not acknowledge

00:02:11.020 that she changed her mind, and then she seems desperate to change the subject. This has produced

00:02:17.480 a long series of own goals that she seems condemned to score on herself again and again and again. I don't

00:02:25.500 understand it. Needless to say, there's not a lot of time left to make sense on these topics.

00:02:34.860 And we turn our attention to the election today, because today I'm speaking with Nate Silver.

00:02:40.960 Nate Silver has been a professional poker player for quite some time, but he's famous for being the

00:02:46.360 founder of FiveThirtyEight, which is an election forecasting website, and he's also a New York Times

00:02:53.160 best-selling author. He wrote The Signal and the Noise, and he has a new book titled On the Edge,

00:03:00.060 The Art of Risking Everything. And he also has a substack where he publishes his most current

00:03:05.120 election model, and that is The Silver Bulletin. Anyway, Nate and I cover a lot of ground here.

00:03:11.740 We talk about cultural attitudes toward risk and the state of American politics. We discuss the

00:03:18.300 erosion of trust in liberal institutions, polling and political narratives, two different camps of

00:03:24.840 cultural elites, the influence of Silicon Valley, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Sam Bankman-Fried and the

00:03:31.920 fall of FTX, Gail Mann amnesia, Christopher Ruffo, why Kamala Harris can't admit to having changed

00:03:39.700 her views, a problem with strict utilitarianism, AI and existential risk. Then we turn fully to the

00:03:47.880 election. We talk about what people misunderstand about election forecasting, which news events have

00:03:53.860 affected the 2024 race, how the current polls might be misleading, public versus private polling,

00:04:01.220 undecided and marginal voters, Gen Z, the gender divide, the likelihood that Trump won't accept the

00:04:08.560 election results if he loses, election integrity in the swing states, the chance of a landslide,

00:04:14.560 the prospect of public unrest, and other topics. And now I bring you Nate Silver.

00:04:27.900 I am here with Nate Silver. Nate, thanks for joining me.

00:04:31.500 Sam, excited to be on. Thank you.

00:04:33.320 So we are two weeks out from the presidential election. I don't have to tell you that. You

00:04:37.600 started the FiveThirtyEight blog, the election forecasting blog, and now you have the Silver

00:04:43.740 Bulletin on Substack, where you have recently published an article titled 24 Reasons that Trump

00:04:49.100 Could Win. And I want to get into that. I definitely want to talk to you about the election. But first,

00:04:55.020 we should talk about your book, which is fascinating. The book is titled On the Edge,

00:04:59.980 The Art of Risking Everything. And it's a book about risk and cultural differences in risk

00:05:07.140 tolerance. It looks at those issues through the lens of poker and game theory and venture capital.

00:05:13.520 You talk about cryptocurrency and effective altruism and AI and other topics that are of interest to

00:05:19.240 me, certainly, and much of my audience. Let's jump into, I guess, some of the background concerns that

00:05:26.000 all of us feel, and which you discuss at various points in the book. We have this sense of real

00:05:32.860 fragmentation in our culture politically. There's a kind of secular stagnation, the economics of which

00:05:39.680 I guess can be somewhat debated, but you discuss it a little bit. You had this image that struck me

00:05:46.300 as interesting. It actually connects with your experience as a poker player and the time you

00:05:51.300 spent in Vegas. But you have this image that really kind of stratifies society across variables

00:05:57.540 like wealth inequality and status and opportunity and much of what people care about. And it's the

00:06:03.780 image of people walking into a casino. And there are those who get stuck on the slot machines and

00:06:08.980 addicted to the dopamine there. And they're just playing a bad game and gradually, but inevitably losing

00:06:15.080 their money. And then there are the people who walk right past those machines and go to the great

00:06:20.300 restaurants and see a show and maybe even play high-stakes poker. And there's just a very different

00:06:27.080 world within the same world. Before we get into your book, and I want to track through it, how concerned

00:06:36.440 are you about this moment for us in what should be a purely auspicious world of progress and relative

00:06:46.260 wealth? I mean, we just think of all the promise of America, speaking specifically now, but maybe the West

00:06:51.880 generally. Yeah.

00:06:53.040 It seems somehow precarious. What's your view from 30,000 feet?

00:06:56.600 Yeah. I mean, it kind of depends on how far you want to zoom out. If you zoom way out compared to

00:07:01.040 how life was 100 years ago or 500 years ago, lifespans are greatly increased. Poverty is greatly

00:07:06.040 decreased. We have creature comforts we could never have imagined. If you look at a closer track,

00:07:11.740 maybe the past 10 or 20 years, it's a bit less clear. In Europe, for example, GDP growth per capita

00:07:18.040 is very slow. In the US, life expectancy is barely growing, especially for men. It's about the same as

00:07:24.100 it was 10 years ago, even though we've now mostly recovered from high COVID deaths. You could argue

00:07:29.940 that the pace of technological innovation has slowed. I'm not sure I buy that or not. You can

00:07:34.860 argue that democracy is on the decline. If you look at various democracy indices, then there are more

00:07:39.700 people living under authoritarianism than there were 10 years ago. So I do think there are a lot of

00:07:45.220 problems, not to mention political instability. Maybe it's a euphemism, right, in the US and other

00:07:51.780 countries. How do you view our loss of trust in liberal institutions and the market economy in

00:07:58.980 some sectors and even democracy? I mean, it seems like everything has been turned upside down. Again,

00:08:05.080 I'm looking at this through an American lens, especially. I mean, like, you know, we have a

00:08:10.400 Republican Party that now can't figure out what stake America has in helping to maintain global order.

00:08:18.780 You know, there's an America first approach to foreign policy that is reminiscent of Charles

00:08:25.880 Lindbergh that, you know, on the left, obviously, there's profound doubt about the viability of

00:08:30.660 capitalism. And everyone seems to have found reason to just distrust our institutions. As we get

00:08:37.160 into the book, we're going to meet various characters who have amplified and capitalized on

00:08:43.200 those sentiments. But how do you view that erosion? I mean, do you think it's a symptom of being too

00:08:51.020 online to see it as being this salient? Or do you think it's as problematic as many think it is?

00:08:57.100 That finding is very robust in the polling, actually. Gallup just came out with data showing

00:09:01.180 decline, yet another decline in trust in the news media, which is now at its lowest levels ever.

00:09:05.920 Basically, every institution except the military, ironically, but from the church to, you know,

00:09:11.300 higher education has seen its ratings decline a great deal. So has big business. So has the tech

00:09:16.900 world, for example. And in the book, I kind of look at it through the lens of the prisoner's dilemma,

00:09:21.320 which is a famous kind of thought experiment in game theory, where basically, if these two prisoners

00:09:26.880 are able to cooperate, they wind up collectively better off. And the game theory dictates that unless

00:09:31.580 they can communicate ahead of time and have some reason to trust each other, then they won't

00:09:35.780 cooperate, they'll be selfish and wind up collectively worse off. And so, you know, from an economist

00:09:40.440 perspective, when you have a loss of trust, you have deadweight loss. I mean, you can imagine in

00:09:45.040 neighborhoods where things are frequently stolen, that there's a lot of measures taken to prevent

00:09:49.680 crime, burglaries, robberies, et cetera, that cost money. I mean, hiring good police officers cost money,

00:09:55.240 or putting extra locks in your doors costs money. And I'm not quite sure how to reverse this,

00:10:00.640 in part because, you know, I'm someone who I describe myself as a liberal kind of in the way

00:10:05.080 that term is used classically more than meaning of the left. But I sometimes criticize the left too,

00:10:10.220 because, you know, Donald Trump has done many, many things to undermine trust in democracy and the

00:10:15.620 media. You know, January 6th was a horrifying event. And it's amazing that he may be on verge of

00:10:21.520 getting reelected again, despite that. But sometimes the autoimmune response from these institutions is

00:10:27.040 poor. So I thought, for example, that there was a lot of partisanship that motivated certain

00:10:31.640 behaviors, certain discussions of certain behaviors around COVID, for example, or I don't know,

00:10:37.560 you know, I think some of the loss of trust in higher education has been earned. You know,

00:10:41.860 I'm not a big, I'm not super into like discussing affirmative action and things like that, but the

00:10:46.500 way it was being implemented was often very cynical, where if you were, you know, if you were an Asian

00:10:50.660 applicant, for example, you were just kind of very obviously penalized in the name of some higher

00:10:55.720 goal. And so, you know, and the media too. I mean, I, I, I think, you know, two out of the three

00:11:00.620 stories they cover for Trump are perfectly fair. And probably one of those three doesn't go far

00:11:05.080 enough, but you know, the amount of column inches devoted and newscast footage to, to the Russia story,

00:11:12.100 which is not, I could articulate many problems I have with Donald Trump. I think the Russia stuff

00:11:17.000 was not among the foremost five or 10 most important problems. And so look, voters who aren't reading the

00:11:23.040 news every day and listening to podcasts and reading sub stacks and things like that, they may not quite

00:11:28.820 have all the kind of detailed facts at their disposal, the way someone, you and I, you know,

00:11:34.760 our job is to consume information, but they have some, they have some intuition that like the elites

00:11:39.480 are not working in their best interest, which I think is probably basically correct with many

00:11:45.260 caveats and, and provisos. Now, I don't think Trump is, is working in their best interest either

00:11:50.120 necessarily, but I think I'm not surprised that people feel betrayed because when you have a lack

00:11:55.260 of trust, it creates a downward spiral where because you're less trusting, maybe you become

00:11:59.520 more partisan. You don't trust that, Hey, I'm going to just lay out information. You know, the New York

00:12:03.940 Times has been in trouble recently because they say, Hey, our job actually is to be a fourth estate,

00:12:09.720 not a partisan institution. And we still believe that if you just do accurate reporting and facts,

00:12:14.660 then that's good for the world. And I think some people don't believe that. Right. And in some ways,

00:12:18.580 the Times is, is saying, we trust that when there's more information that people will behave

00:12:23.280 more rationally or more generously or more smartly. And maybe that's not true. That's, that's,

00:12:28.560 you know, the notion that we get so much, this cornucopia of free information, basically all the

00:12:32.320 time, a public square like none other on Twitter. And it doesn't seem to have worked as, as well as

00:12:38.380 the idealist, I guess, including me might've hoped. Yeah. Well, there are a few reasons,

00:12:43.460 I think obvious reasons why it's working to fracture our view of the world rather than

00:12:49.600 getting everyone to converge on the same set of facts and the same interpretation of the facts.

00:12:54.400 I mean, one, one is just that the information is now endless and can be endlessly segmented in a

00:13:01.200 bespoke way so that you can, if confirmation bias is your thing and it's almost everyone's thing,

00:13:06.220 there's no end to it, right? You can just silo yourself and discount anything that seems to

00:13:12.720 go against the grain of your cherished opinions. And the level of tribalism that is, is amplifying

00:13:19.940 this segmentation to say nothing of the, the algorithms at the bottom of it that are born of

00:13:25.640 this perverse business model, which is, you know, not selecting for truth or, you know, social

00:13:32.040 health, but for just time on device, you know, at any really at any apparent cost,

00:13:38.400 it's pretty easy to see how we're, we're in a kind of doom loop with respect to our consumption

00:13:43.860 of information online. Yeah. I mean, look, I see this with respect to political polling because

00:13:49.460 polls relatively speaking are, are simple facts, you know, Trump plus two in Arizona or Harris plus

00:13:54.460 three in Pennsylvania or whatnot. And people's ability to like, Hey, just confirmation bias and

00:13:59.980 cherry pick the data without even pretending not to be with being very uncomfortable with any

00:14:04.400 information that doesn't fit their prior. So if you're a Harris fan, then any poll having

00:14:08.600 Harris behind in any poll in any state, you might reasonably hope her to win has to be 1.00

00:14:13.540 disproven. It's kind of a very Victorian attitude. It's dirty. It has to be cast out somehow. And of

00:14:18.980 course, the Trump people are absolutely no better at this, maybe worse. So that, you know, just being

00:14:24.040 involved in that little thing where the facts are, I mean, we don't know who's going in the election,

00:14:28.020 right. But you know, a poll is a fact unto itself. Um, even if not an accurate representation of the

00:14:33.600 electorate, the fact that people are so unwilling to just kind of look at a consensus and say, I mean,

00:14:39.020 that's the whole thing. My model does just puts the numbers in an average and, and calculates the

00:14:43.860 error bands around them, which are often larger than what the margin of errors in polls is, but we

00:14:47.840 don't have to get into a polling discussion. It's just been kind of very frustrating. Um, and even

00:14:53.320 thing, I mean, people will tweet stuff about me that is like literally conspiratorial. You know,

00:14:58.200 I got into like a spat with the actress, Bette Midler a few weeks ago. Cause she's like, who got 1.00

00:15:03.160 to Nate Silver? Uh, because at that point our forecast at hair is slightly behind. And so being

00:15:08.320 at the forefront of this, I mean, every year I kind of forget how bad election years are. And then,

00:15:13.140 but now that I'm in the thick of it, I don't know. I always say this is the last one. And then,

00:15:17.220 and then don't manage to quit. Well, I want to save our discussion of polling and your model and your

00:15:23.300 gut feelings and all the rest, uh, for the second half of this discussion when we, when we've cleared

00:15:28.060 the topic of your book, but just one question related to what you just said. Do you think that

00:15:33.980 there are, um, seemingly reputable entities that present polls, not as their best effort to accurately

00:15:42.900 depict public sentiment, but as actually just met, you know, as efforts to message into the,

00:15:48.740 the election space and, and sway voters. I mean, do you think there's, there is, is there a,

00:15:54.340 do you detect or have you detected in previous elections, dishonest polling?

00:15:59.340 So there's a bit of an asymmetry here, which is that Republicans tend to believe that if you win

00:16:04.200 the narrative and create momentum, then that helps you in real life. So in some sense, I think that

00:16:09.460 good polling results report on as good polling results for Trump by the media will translate

00:16:13.340 into more probability of actual success. I'm pretty skeptical of that for various reasons,

00:16:17.760 but there are some GOP aligned polls that are basically designed to, to influence the narrative.

00:16:24.460 I mean, one polling firm called Rasmussen reports was, was actually caught in leaked emails coordinating

00:16:29.400 with the Trump campaign and they're supposed to be nonpartisan. So that's, that's quite bad.

00:16:34.020 Now the models have ways of adjusting for them. Basically, if you label a poll as a partisan poll,

00:16:38.920 then the model makes different assumptions about it. It weights it less and kind of assumes that

00:16:42.500 it's biased and tries to de-bias it. But yeah, that, I mean, absolutely. I mean, I, I think there

00:16:47.560 are, you know, some polls that are a lot more worthwhile than others.

00:16:52.540 And do you think this is just confirmation bias or do you think it's actually a nefarious

00:16:56.680 act of disinformation?

00:16:59.480 I think somewhere in between. I also think sometimes people start out saying,

00:17:03.560 LOL, ha ha. I'm just going to like troll with people a bit and then, and then, and then they

00:17:08.060 become true believers. Right. I mean, you've seen this adaptation with Elon Musk, for example,

00:17:13.300 where he kind of flirts with some more conservative right-wing ideas and then gets in all of a sudden

00:17:17.820 after a year, he's like literally jumping up and down on stage with, with Donald Trump and things

00:17:22.920 like that. Look, I think when you're doing a poll, just like building any type of model,

00:17:27.600 it's not as simple as just kind of calling people anymore on the phone and then recording what they say.

00:17:32.220 Most people don't answer polls at all. And so therefore you have to do a lot of

00:17:36.960 waiting, modeling, data massaging to get the poll to be at least somewhat accurate.

00:17:42.860 And anytime you have those decisions and you're inserting a human being in the process and their

00:17:47.500 political views or their sense of the narrative or the sense of the vibes can, can influence what

00:17:53.240 they say. Okay. Well, we'll come back to polling and the election, but let's talk about your book

00:17:59.500 for a bit here. You have a framing with respect to two cultures that does a lot of work in your book

00:18:06.620 and that you describe one as the river and the other as the village. I know you've spoken about

00:18:12.560 this a lot, but it's very useful to describe these two camps. What is the river and what is the village?

00:18:18.140 Yeah. So the river and the village are rival groups of elites who are competing for cultural

00:18:24.280 and economic, I suppose, superiority. The village is a term, it's not entirely original term. Other

00:18:29.020 authors have used similar terms to describe the establishment. So the New York Times and Harvard

00:18:34.400 University are kind of the quintessential institutions of the village. It's on the East Coast. It's politically

00:18:41.080 progressive and really more democratic party than anything else. It's very collectively oriented,

00:18:46.960 not necessarily collectivist, probably kind of center left on average, but in the sense that like

00:18:51.080 you're standing within the community matters a lot and you might be afraid of cancellation

00:18:54.920 or ostracization. And it tends to be risk averse. These are people, for example, that were really,

00:18:59.520 really careful about COVID. And I've even turned a little bit on free speech because free speech is

00:19:05.660 risky. Free speech can upset people. You can think about Charlie Hebdo or things like that. And free speech

00:19:10.400 can have consequences and they tend to be more risk averse. The river, by contrast, is the world of

00:19:15.880 analytical risk takers. So Silicon Valley, Wall Street in Las Vegas, both the casinos themselves

00:19:22.660 and some of the gamblers, probably not most. It's very risk on. It's very analytical. It's very,

00:19:28.160 very, very individualistic and usually capitalistic, very competitive. These are people who are playing

00:19:33.380 to win. And the argument of the book is that the river is becoming the dominant entity in terms of

00:19:39.160 the economy, at least, that finance and tech continue to grow as a share of the economy.

00:19:45.140 Meanwhile, gambling is not a huge, huge business. It's a medium, big business, but more money is

00:19:50.500 being gambled in the United States today than ever before, probably in the country's history.

00:19:55.940 And so, you know, I consider myself really kind of originally from the river in the same sense,

00:20:02.680 some people might say, oh, I'm from the South or whatever. It's kind of my cultural orientation.

00:20:05.260 When I meet a poker player, we have the same vocabulary. We almost assuredly can have a

00:20:10.520 good conversation about a few things, whereas I've never quite fit in with the village. You know,

00:20:15.880 I kind of cover politics because actually Congress basically passed a law to essentially outlaw

00:20:21.140 online poker, which was my main source of income in the early 2000s. And that's what got me into

00:20:26.460 politics. And so I take that kind of, I suppose, handicapper's, even gambler's mindset

00:20:30.920 to making forecasts, looking at things probabilistically kind of as a Bayesian rather

00:20:36.440 than as a political partisan, which, you know, look, I have preferences. I mean, I've said in

00:20:43.000 other shows I plan to vote for Kamala Harris, but that's not my goal. I'm not trying to do

00:20:47.480 partisan combat. I'm trying to give people accurate information.

00:20:50.140 So how useful, I mean, it proves very useful in your book, but I'm wondering if you think there

00:20:58.160 are limits to this analysis. The frame of gambling and poker in particular, that you lay over this

00:21:05.840 conception of risk. I mean, in poker, you're using a strategy that is designed to work out over

00:21:13.580 many, many, many trials, right? And it's so it's, you know, you're guided by a concept of expected

00:21:20.700 value. And yet many of the people who are in the river, the real risk takers, don't seem to be

00:21:26.920 placing their bets with an especially sound poker mindset. I mean, first of all, there's just not that

00:21:31.980 many trials. I mean, even if you're Elon Musk, you can only start so many companies, right? And so perhaps

00:21:38.880 one way to track through this is to actually talk about some of the, the prominent people you

00:21:44.500 profile in the book and, and just, and you can tell me what you, you learned from each of them.

00:21:49.700 I mean, let's, perhaps let's start with Peter Thiel. If looking at this landscape through Peter Thiel's

00:21:56.260 eyes, what did you see? So Peter Thiel is fascinating in that he is kind of actually anti-probabilist

00:22:03.280 and that makes him unusual in, in the river where, you know, Peter had a pretty religious

00:22:08.100 upbringing. Um, there's a good book by Max Chafkin or Chafkin of Bloomberg about him called

00:22:13.500 the contrarian. And like, he grew up very conservative and I think remains very conservative.

00:22:18.580 He sometimes says he's libertarian, but, but somewhere on the right side of the spectrum,

00:22:22.360 I think beneath that libertarian, there's a Catholic, I think for sure. And the first question I asked him

00:22:28.080 was kind of like a, a softball question I've used to loosen people up, which is like, okay,

00:22:32.360 if you simulated the world a thousand times, how often would you wind up roughly in a position like

00:22:36.540 you're in now? Right. And most people do the politically correct response. Like, oh, I know

00:22:41.260 I'm very lucky, maybe once or twice out of a thousand, but I'm very fortunate. Right. Whereas

00:22:45.700 he like really objected to the question, right? He's like, if the world's deterministic, then a hundred

00:22:51.920 percent of the time, right? If it's probabilistic, then it's kind of a poorly formulated question

00:22:55.980 because just the question of how much are you perturbing? How many disturbances are you inserting

00:22:59.780 into this hypothetical? Right. And he thought it didn't really make a lot of sense, but like,

00:23:04.460 but you get the sense that like, I mean, first of all, if you are Peter Thiel or Elon Musk or Sam

00:23:09.400 Altman or one of these people or Sam Bikman Freed, and you become one of the, you know, 10 most

00:23:14.480 influential or wealthy people in the world out of how many people have relived, I think 50 billion

00:23:18.300 or something. I mean, it's got to feel, it's got to feel pretty weird, right? If you wake up and

00:23:21.860 you're Donald Trump, it's got to feel pretty weird, I think. So I think some of these guys actually do

00:23:26.260 have, uh, you know, are spiritually, yeah. And so, you know, I mean, there's a simulation argument

00:23:33.840 that I'm sure you're familiar with that some people think, Hey, am I, is this just kind of

00:23:36.680 like a simulation design for me? Or am I like, kind of like the, the chosen one somehow, you know,

00:23:42.540 one of the areas where I agree with the left is that I don't think people realize how much the top

00:23:47.180 of the scale is still growing in wealth and, and, and influence, right. Um, that the top 10 people

00:23:54.160 in the world, not always the same top 10, but if you look at the top 10 richest billionaires in the

00:23:58.640 world, those are getting, uh, increasing by about twice every decade, right? So if you compound your

00:24:04.560 growth two X every decade, that really, really compounds, you see the influence on the, on the

00:24:09.260 election this year where you have like Elon Musk, perhaps illegally offering to just give a million

00:24:14.300 dollars every day to somebody who registers to vote in a particular way, um, or signs a petition,

00:24:19.560 I guess I should say among registered voters. So I, I know I do worry a lot about that, but

00:24:24.640 cause it used to be that a few years ago, people in Silicon Valley would kind of take pride in being

00:24:31.200 politically aloof, right? Um, Scott Alexander, the wonderful blogger called it like the gray tribe. 1.00

00:24:36.180 And you say, Oh, I'm apolitical. What's going on in Washington, DC doesn't really concern me.

00:24:40.860 We're doing interesting things here in Silicon Valley. And so, you know, hopefully won't be

00:24:44.820 over-regulated, but apart from that, we're not so concerned about politics. Although they probably,

00:24:48.640 you know, they also mostly just kind of vote democratic for cultural reasons. And now that's

00:24:53.120 all changed and I'm not sure that's good for Silicon Valley in the long run or for politics.

00:24:59.100 Yeah. Well, it, it, it sort of matters which of these figures you're talking about because I think

00:25:03.200 Peter and Elon and Sam Bankman Freed and Sam Altman is another one you talk about. These guys are all

00:25:10.580 impressively different in many respects. I mean, I only, I can really, I'm actually, I've spoken to all

00:25:17.040 four of them and knew Elon fairly well. I can't say that I know him. I can't say that I quite recognize

00:25:24.800 him now and we've had a spectacular falling out. But, you know, I think certainly Peter and Elon

00:25:32.480 are as allergic to the wokeness and the identitarian moral panic that happened on the left. And there's,

00:25:41.680 there's allergic to that as anybody. So I, you know, on some level, you know, their, their economic

00:25:47.220 interests aside, their behavior with respect to Trump is almost perfectly foreseeable as a result

00:25:53.940 of that. I mean, just that, you know, for Elon, it's the, the trans issue and immigration. I mean,

00:25:58.740 that's, these are, these are just super stimuli at this point. You know, where someone like Sam

00:26:03.380 Altman and his aspirations to build out AI that, you know, it's, I don't know, I don't know what he

00:26:10.260 said about his political engagement this time around. I don't know who he's voting for, but

00:26:13.740 he's a kind of a different object. How do, is, is there more to say about Peter's view of the

00:26:19.400 situation? No, look, these are impressive people. They are people who have accomplished a lot. And,

00:26:24.820 you know, Peter in particular is a very intellectual guy who will give you these, you know, half an hour

00:26:30.900 long, very well considered with lots of literary references, kind of answers to, to what seemed

00:26:36.440 like throwaway interview questions. Look, there's another reading too, which is that it's just in

00:26:41.420 their economic self-interest. Uh, if you read some of the background on Elon, he was very annoyed

00:26:47.400 that, that Joe Biden was dealing Tesla out of some of these early electric vehicle initiatives

00:26:53.500 because they weren't sufficiently unionized, I guess. So he felt snubbed by Biden. And then,

00:26:58.760 you know, like a lot of people, he has a strong reaction to the, to the wokeness,

00:27:03.620 whatever you want to call it. Think of those two things, those interests combining, right? And then

00:27:07.760 all of a sudden it's confirmation virus all the way down where everything else looks like it's a,

00:27:11.980 you know, rigged by the Democrats, et cetera. Well, in his defense, it was absolutely insane

00:27:18.580 that Biden held a, I think it was a summit at the white house for, you know, American automakers

00:27:26.240 celebrating the success of American ingenuity in the EV market. And, you know, Tesla was,

00:27:32.780 is the, the shining example of success on that front. And they weren't invited to the summit.

00:27:39.580 It's not really Elon's financial interests that were besmirched there. It's just, it's just

00:27:45.920 reputationally. I mean, it was just, I mean, he took it personally, obviously. And, but it's,

00:27:50.140 it's understandable because it's completely outrageous and, and idiotic to have held such a 0.99

00:27:55.240 summit and not have invited Tesla. No, look in, in some ways, if Kamala Harris loses, 0.98

00:28:00.900 we'll be looking at a lot of mistakes that were made early on in the Biden Harris administration.

00:28:06.960 So particularly with respect to some degree, probably of overspending on the economy. I mean,

00:28:11.560 inflation has complex causes. It's not all of it, but maybe it's part of the high inflation we had

00:28:15.520 having a lax border policy. And then due to pettiness or peak, I guess, not inviting the richest

00:28:21.920 man in the world to your EV summit when that's his kind of main occupation. And then he,

00:28:25.320 you know, turns around and spends $300 million of his own money against your candidate in the

00:28:30.760 campaign. Yeah. And look, there are some bread and butter, you know, Lena Khan has been more

00:28:35.740 aggressive at the FTC about going after big tech. Taxation is very high in California. They're

00:28:41.420 winning some battles, by the way, the fact that Gavin Newsom vetoed the California bill on AI regulation

00:28:47.320 that many people in the river even thought was a very reasonable regulatory effort.

00:28:52.740 Even Elon did.

00:28:54.240 Even Elon did. He's been consistent about that, about genuinely being concerned about AI risk.

00:28:58.920 The fact that bill was vetoed because of now people fear the power of, of the tech space as a

00:29:05.180 political entity. Even the crypto people have spent a lot of money on this particular election

00:29:10.660 campaign. And so, and so it's starting to have an influence very quickly.

00:29:13.620 Well, let's, um, let's jump over Elon. I spent a fair amount of time bashing him and it's,

00:29:18.980 it always makes me uncomfortable because, uh, he used to be a friend, but it's, he's just

00:29:22.760 unavoidable at this point. You spent a fair amount of time with Sam Bankman Freed. I only spoke to him

00:29:29.280 once on this podcast before things completely unraveled for him and, um, really just focused on

00:29:35.720 effective altruism. What did you learn from his case study, his curious case study? He's really,

00:29:42.920 there's so many intersecting issues with him that are surprising. What, what, what was, uh, the,

00:29:48.560 you, you, you started speaking to him before there was any obvious sign of a problem, right?

00:29:54.360 Well, that was going to say just the opposite thing, actually. I think what's kind of remarkable

00:29:57.660 about Sam, Sam S, Sam McMinfreed, not Sam Altman, is that he was saying all these crazy things and no

00:30:04.780 one was really flagging it and being sufficiently worried about it.

00:30:08.100 But I mean, in terms of the timeline where you, you, you had your first conversation with him,

00:30:12.420 was there any common knowledge that the wheels were going to come off at FTX?

00:30:18.200 No, in fact, so, um, this was in January or February, 2022. So this is close to when Bitcoin

00:30:23.780 is at, uh, I guess it's first all time high since surpassed it. And he's kind of like, you know, Nate,

00:30:29.100 you know, there are two basic scenarios, one where Bitcoin continues to go up and then one where it

00:30:33.000 just stays at, at 50 K per coin. Right. And I'm like, well, I can think of a third scenario,

00:30:38.000 Sam, like, what if it goes down? And he seemed to have not really processed this very much. Um,

00:30:44.200 yeah, the irony is like, he is not known as a terribly good assessor of risk, right? What I

00:30:49.680 heard from people that had worked with him is that like, he's good at, at his initial instincts are

00:30:54.080 pretty good and he's fast. He's fast at calculating speed, but he's not a particularly deep thinker.

00:31:00.440 I don't think, I mean, I think it was him who said, Oh, no one really ever needs to read,

00:31:04.200 no one ever needs to read a book, just read articles and blog posts and tweets and things

00:31:07.840 like that. And honestly, that's, that's one thing you run into with a lot of these guys. You, you,

00:31:13.520 I mean, speaking about many of the people who are prominent in Silicon Valley, I mean, they're,

00:31:18.120 everyone is bearing the, the scars of being an autodidact on almost every topic that they've

00:31:26.140 touched, right? I mean, these are not people who came out of the center of the village for the

00:31:30.160 most part and, and have a kind of institutionally acquired a lot of knowledge. A lot of people got

00:31:35.640 CS degrees or dropped out of college and read Ayn Rand and a lot of science fiction, and then

00:31:42.520 just took everything else in, on the menu of human understanding a la carte. And they just,

00:31:50.440 you get this, these strange weightings of influence, right? Where the, you know, you'll, somebody,

00:31:54.440 somebody will recommend a book, like it completely changed their, their worldview. And it's, there's

00:31:59.280 some really peripheral tract. And then you've got all of these neo-reactionary quasi-lunatics who are

00:32:07.280 very influential, but, you know, under, underneath the hood here where, you know, people who I've never

00:32:11.960 spoken to on the podcast, but, you know, people like Curtis Yarvin. And it's, it's a mess and it's an

00:32:18.880 anti-institutional mess and a contrarian mess. And then you dump hundreds of billions of dollars

00:32:23.960 into this clockwork and you get a lot of weird convictions, uh, that, that have a lot of energy

00:32:31.620 behind them. Yeah. Look, you can go case by case. I mean, I think there are some people in Silicon

00:32:36.640 Valley. So, you know, Patrick Collison, the founder of Stripe is a guy who is, uh, quite well-read and I

00:32:42.680 think quite well-rounded, right? He strikes me as a very balanced thinker. Yeah. But less, less fun

00:32:48.720 for the book. I had a great conversation with him, but he's not saying these provocative

00:32:52.300 things that make for good soundbites necessarily. So there's a little bit of selection bias there

00:32:57.120 and who kind of gets written up more or less, but for sure, you know, I think they feel like,

00:33:02.840 Hey, no one really has credibility or trust anymore. So therefore I can just kind of like

00:33:07.260 make it up as I go. Right. And look, I, I, you and I have both probably had issues where we have

00:33:12.680 different from the mainstream. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation,

00:33:18.020 you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length

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00:33:53.920 Thank you.

Making Sense - Sam Harris - October 25, 2024

#389 — The Politics of Risk

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