Making Sense - Sam Harris - #400 — The Politics of Information

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast.

00:00:08.800 This is Sam Harris.

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00:00:46.060 I'm here with Helen Lewis.

00:00:47.740 Helen, thanks for joining me.

00:00:49.620 Thank you for having me.

00:00:50.780 So I've been a fan for quite some time.

00:00:53.280 I have not read everything you've written

00:00:56.340 or heard everything you've said,

00:00:57.540 but I've been following you.

00:00:58.840 I think it's been four or five years or so.

00:01:02.900 How long have you been at The Atlantic?

00:01:04.200 Yeah, since 2019, so about then.

00:01:06.360 Yeah, yeah.

00:01:07.280 So maybe we can start with your background as a journalist

00:01:10.140 before we launch ourselves into the whole catastrophe,

00:01:13.480 which is modern politics and culture war issues.

00:01:17.200 How would you describe your focus as a writer and journalist?

00:01:20.940 These days, I'm more and more interested in reporting.

00:01:23.820 I don't know about you,

00:01:24.680 but I kind of went through a phase

00:01:26.040 where I felt like I'd gorged on opinions.

00:01:28.640 I sort of thought everyone in the world has many opinions.

00:01:30.840 I have many, many opinions.

00:01:32.740 But actually, to me, the hard work of journalism

00:01:34.460 is going out there, talking to people,

00:01:36.800 finding out facts, writing them down, publishing them,

00:01:39.860 all of which are, I think, a lot more difficult

00:01:41.580 than sometimes people would think.

00:01:43.340 You know, I always think of sort of Rashomon

00:01:44.780 as being the model for journalism.

00:01:46.000 You can get the same event that is reported

00:01:48.020 by people who are there in the room

00:01:49.980 into you completely different ways.

00:01:53.060 And that is really hard intellectual work to do

00:01:56.120 to try and sort out what actually happened

00:01:58.400 from among this conflicting mess

00:01:59.880 of all the people's versions of reality.

00:02:02.200 So that's the stuff I'm most interested in doing

00:02:04.080 at the moment.

00:02:05.020 The Atlantic gives me a birth to do that.

00:02:07.080 It also gives me a birth to do commentary,

00:02:08.800 which is my kind of natural home.

00:02:10.800 I started out as a copy editor,

00:02:12.300 but I became a writer now over a decade ago.

00:02:15.880 And I've always been somebody who has been quite free

00:02:19.220 with their opinions.

00:02:20.240 But yeah, I think you can overdose a bit, can't you?

00:02:23.300 Do you write pieces that are, in your view,

00:02:27.240 ever free of commentary and opinion,

00:02:29.680 and it's just actually straight reporting?

00:02:31.300 Or you're always, you're definitely,

00:02:33.340 everything I've read from you,

00:02:34.340 it seems to be on the,

00:02:36.100 at least has a foot in the opinion side of the journal.

00:02:39.440 Yeah, I can't do that.

00:02:40.460 I really respect people who are just hardcore reporters,

00:02:43.000 you know, and they really work a beat really hard.

00:02:44.960 And they go in and they just, you know,

00:02:46.920 try not to put any of themselves into it.

00:02:49.140 But I've never managed to do that.

00:02:51.580 I think, you know, my natural tendency is often towards snark.

00:02:54.840 So quite often snark creeps in there.

00:02:56.540 But I don't think that's necessarily a bad response.

00:02:59.480 You know, my model of journalism is the being the boy

00:03:02.180 in the emperor's new clothes, right?

00:03:03.540 You're the one who has to stand in the middle of everyone else.

00:03:05.340 And everyone else is saying that they're having a wonderful time

00:03:07.160 and everything's brilliant.

00:03:07.820 And you have to be the one that points out,

00:03:09.620 no, the emperor's naked.

00:03:10.600 So having a kind of snarky British sensibility,

00:03:14.460 I think, kind of helps.

00:03:15.820 I mean, maybe some of the stuff we'll come to talk to you about later,

00:03:17.660 but I feel like journalism has been kind of eaten alive by influencers.

00:03:21.600 And these influencers are often very credulous.

00:03:23.780 They're very happy to be near people who are powerful.

00:03:26.780 And that to me is not the model of, you know,

00:03:28.720 I'm not saying journalists should be sociopaths exactly,

00:03:31.740 but you certainly shouldn't be in it in order to have a kind of nice life

00:03:35.480 and hang out and for people to like you,

00:03:37.580 I think is a really big problem.

00:03:40.740 Yeah, yeah.

00:03:41.460 So there are certainly several podcasters of late

00:03:43.900 who've interviewed very prominent people,

00:03:46.300 starting with the current president.

00:03:48.280 And I see all the scars there of people imagining that

00:03:54.700 if you simply maintain a good feeling during the conversation,

00:03:59.220 you have done your work as a host,

00:04:01.360 even given this rare opportunity to interview

00:04:03.600 the incoming president of the United States.

00:04:05.820 And therefore, they don't ask a single skeptical question.

00:04:10.500 Yeah, it seems to me that the norms of journalism

00:04:13.300 somehow have to be plowed into the most influential influencer venues,

00:04:19.480 podcasts and, you know, other contexts.

00:04:22.760 I don't know how that happens apart from just complaining about it.

00:04:25.560 Well, let's try that one.

00:04:27.440 Yeah, I think I've been trying that one for some time.

00:04:29.380 It hasn't worked yet, but it might do.

00:04:30.840 How would you describe the difference between U.S. and U.K. journalism at this point?

00:04:37.480 Maybe it's journalism and political culture.

00:04:41.020 I mean, how would you, what could one side learn from the other

00:04:45.280 or which are you more worried about,

00:04:48.340 which is showing the signs of erosion of our ability to make sense of the current moment more?

00:04:55.800 Oh, I mean, I think my work in America has definitely helped by having one foot still in Britain.

00:05:00.740 And I know it's very easy to be jingoistic and assume that your country is sort of doing everything right

00:05:05.640 because it's what you grew up with.

00:05:07.320 But just think about our last election here we had last year

00:05:11.080 in which we went from a, you know, conservative majority government.

00:05:14.020 We'd had conservatives in power for 14 years to a big swing to the Labour Party.

00:05:18.360 But, you know, absolutely nobody called that as being, you know,

00:05:21.700 the most important election of our lifetimes.

00:05:23.500 It's an existential election on which democracy depends.

00:05:26.580 If the other side get in, you know, either it's communism or it's fascism.

00:05:29.840 Where are those things that I heard when I travelled round Pennsylvania in October?

00:05:34.460 You know, once I genuinely thought that Kamala Harris,

00:05:36.820 I would talk to people who genuinely thought Kamala Harris was a communist or a Marxist or whatever it might be.

00:05:41.480 And I would talk to people who thought Trump is bringing in fascism.

00:05:44.660 And when that's your opinion of the other side,

00:05:46.500 it's very hard to see why anyone would vote for that person

00:05:48.980 or why you might ever switch your party allegiance.

00:05:51.020 And so you get into the same situation that you have with the problems of party corruption

00:05:55.760 in much more religiously sectarian societies, right?

00:05:58.820 Where if you never, you know, if your family's Protestant and you always vote for the Protestant Party

00:06:03.660 and there's nothing on earth that can make you vote for the Catholic Party,

00:06:06.640 that is not an invitation to the Protestant Party to behave really well.

00:06:09.960 You know, they know that they've got a certain level of block votes.

00:06:12.420 And I think something similar feels very true to me about US politics.

00:06:16.620 If you kind of, if the number of swing voters is so small, that is fundamentally very unhealthy for the parties.

00:06:23.560 I mean, do you think that the nature of the candidates justified that level of hyper-partisanship this time around?

00:06:30.480 Or are the differences as stark in the UK and that just the response culturally around them is not as hysterical?

00:06:39.200 I don't think there's any world in which you can say that Kamala Harris or indeed Joe Biden are communists, right?

00:06:45.540 Which was literally in some cases the accusations or even Marxists.

00:06:49.400 And I think that's just from people who use those as a kind of boo word for very left-wing.

00:06:53.820 What I think they actually meant by that is, you know, what you might call quote-unquote wokeness.

00:06:57.900 They meant that they were identity progressives.

00:07:00.060 They didn't really think that they wanted to, you know, expropriate the means of production

00:07:03.220 and put everybody to work on collective farms.

00:07:06.080 But, you know, I do think that the media in America is more extreme, the politics is more extreme, more polarized.

00:07:12.400 And I don't have a particularly good explanation for why that is,

00:07:17.320 apart from one of the things I'm guessing is happening is people are sorting themselves out

00:07:20.940 into, you know, into communities that are less mixed than they once were.

00:07:25.620 And I think particularly in terms of the media, so the BBC is our state-funded broadcaster.

00:07:30.940 Everyone has to pay their license fee of £160 a year.

00:07:34.060 What you do there is you have political programs that have a duty to be impartial,

00:07:37.720 a duty to present both sides.

00:07:39.380 You know, I've sat on question time panels with people who are on completely different places

00:07:43.360 from the political spectrum to me, and I have to listen to them,

00:07:45.940 and their opinions are given equal weight.

00:07:47.980 And you don't really get that in American media.

00:07:50.540 You know, I would watch CNN a lot during the election,

00:07:53.100 and they would have, you know, Scott Jennings, who's their kind of Republican,

00:07:56.200 vastly outnumbered, and everyone would scream when he said something.

00:07:58.860 And then you'd watch Fox News, and then maybe occasionally they let a liberal creep through

00:08:03.680 the door, but then they'd say something and would immediately kind of get screamed down.

00:08:07.620 And so you just don't have that tradition of listening, of being forced to listen to the

00:08:12.240 other side.

00:08:12.680 And then social media obviously allows you to opt out completely of listening to the other side.

00:08:16.940 My boss at the Atlantic, Jeff, did an interview with Obama a couple of years ago,

00:08:21.300 in which he said he watched the change happen even during his runs for president.

00:08:25.080 He said he used to go to a little town in a swing state, and there'd be a guy with a bowtie

00:08:28.940 who edited the local newspaper, right?

00:08:30.620 And maybe he was a Republican, but he knew that he had a district that had all kinds of

00:08:34.360 different people in it, and he'd give you a fair shake.

00:08:36.900 And those people got, you know, those local papers have just been obliterated, replaced

00:08:41.100 by very opinionated talk radio, and now very opinionated conservatives.

00:08:45.540 And so the number of places in the media that see their duty as talking to a wide spectrum

00:08:49.880 of people has really dwindled.

00:08:51.580 And that hasn't happened in the UK to the same degree?

00:08:54.900 It hasn't happened to the same degree.

00:08:56.520 It's definitely happened.

00:08:57.460 We've had in the last couple of years the launch of two very, I mean, technically under

00:09:02.320 broadcasting regulations, neutral, but in practice, right-wing TV channels.

00:09:05.840 One of them folded.

00:09:07.060 It ended up just as Piers Morgan's YouTube show, and then he kind of left.

00:09:10.880 And then 1GB News has become a kind of Fox News of Britain, really.

00:09:15.560 Its viewership is relatively low, but it's definitely had an effect on British politics.

00:09:20.000 I mean, you must notice sometimes where you see these memes kind of creep through, and

00:09:24.700 it's like everybody's been issued a kind of order.

00:09:27.480 Like there's some events that everybody now cares about, or something that you say that

00:09:31.740 just gets thrown at you, and you just can't quite work out where it's come from.

00:09:34.720 Like it's like overnight, everybody has sort of heard the same phrase or the same argument.

00:09:39.420 And quite often I find that those come from those very partisan media sources.

00:09:43.200 And there is an almost kind of like droid-like way that suddenly they kind of crest and they

00:09:48.300 go into the public consciousness and then they move on and everyone's talking about

00:09:51.120 someone else.

00:09:52.340 And it's very hard if you're outside of them to kind of get an insight into how those

00:09:56.840 things are happening and to understand why everybody's talking about this.

00:10:00.080 And because of the BBC, there is still a sense in Britain that you do, you know, you are

00:10:04.160 more likely to hear what the other side are talking about rather than these memes arise that

00:10:08.160 you just, you know, like sort of invasion of the body snatchers, suddenly everyone is

00:10:12.320 talking about something you've never heard of before, like it's always been there and

00:10:15.460 it's the most important thing in politics.

00:10:17.420 Yeah.

00:10:17.700 Yeah.

00:10:17.880 I mean, there are phrases where you have almost a whole orientation toward not just politics,

00:10:24.840 but information online crystallized in a phrase.

00:10:28.220 I mean, if someone uses the phrase Russiagate hoax without scare quotes around it, I think I

00:10:35.160 know everything about their political worldview at this point, right?

00:10:38.780 I mean, it's just, it just condenses so much and it has been reiterated with such a slavish

00:10:44.540 loyalty now for, for years.

00:10:47.660 Right.

00:10:47.780 When I'm writing about youth gender medicine, for example, there's a couple of ones that

00:10:50.480 come up recently.

00:10:51.440 So, and you, you heard them in the congressional hearings on, um, on girls sport, the idea that

00:10:56.020 actually what Republicans want are genital inspections, you know, and people just go, of course,

00:11:00.840 the, what the right one to genital inspections and you go, well, actually the way that

00:11:03.640 they sex test in sport is through a cheek swab and then through a blood sample, right?

00:11:07.400 This was, genital inspections used to happen in the, in the sixties, but then a lot of

00:11:11.000 bad stuff used to happen in the sixties.

00:11:12.700 That's not what actually we are asking for now, but I presume they've had a briefing from

00:11:16.780 some charity or governmental lobby group or whatever it might be, or there has been something

00:11:21.620 that's been in, you know, some very prominent influencer in their social media feeds has been

00:11:25.240 putting this in.

00:11:26.120 And then suddenly everyone kind of goes, of course, what the right really wants are genital inspections.

00:11:29.540 And there's a question for me as a journalist is always about how much do you spend, how

00:11:33.640 much time do you spend rebutting stuff versus how much do you spend actively trying to make

00:11:38.280 the points that you want to make?

00:11:40.180 And I think, I still don't know where the balance is for that because actually there

00:11:44.680 is still a merit in somewhere like the Atlantic writing stuff down.

00:11:48.780 And, and if it's not true, saying that it's not true, but you also do get this feeling

00:11:52.920 that you're spending an enormous amount of time chasing phantoms.

00:11:55.680 And actually, is it stopping you from doing the good work that you would otherwise be

00:11:59.760 doing?

00:12:00.620 Yeah.

00:12:00.700 I mean, there is also a perverse psychological effect where merely discussing something in

00:12:07.040 order to debunk it kind of ramifies it in people's memory as being true.

00:12:11.840 And it was, it's just, it's called the illusory truth effect.

00:12:15.240 I don't know.

00:12:15.940 It could be one of these things that will not replicate when further studied, but there's

00:12:20.380 this asymmetry in information warfare, which is if you can force people to keep talking

00:12:25.580 about something, you're doing the damage, even if they're spending all the time debunking

00:12:29.500 that something.

00:12:30.620 And these are many topics we will, however, regrettably cover here.

00:12:35.720 Before we do, is there anything that you in your daily life as a journalist are just refusing

00:12:41.580 to touch because of the hassle or perceived hassle of touching that topic?

00:12:46.520 I mean, for me, it has always been, I noticed you got here way before me, but for some period

00:12:51.060 of time, I was avoiding the transgender activist debate just because I saw other people dealing

00:12:58.940 with it and it just seemed like it was more trouble than it's worth, right?

00:13:02.920 I mean, it really had this outsized negative impact on everyone's life who touched it.

00:13:09.520 You know, I just saw what happened to Jesse Single and I'm sure there are many people who

00:13:13.180 are in his orbit who shared some of that pain.

00:13:16.540 And J.K. Rowling, obviously, is there anything like that that is still out there that you

00:13:22.080 are just inclined to ignore, though it's a real issue that could be talked about in good

00:13:27.340 faith?

00:13:28.340 I think there are issues that I don't think about it exactly like that.

00:13:31.400 I don't mind sticking my fingers in the plug socket, mostly because I kind of feel like

00:13:35.540 if you don't, someone else always will, right?

00:13:38.200 This is the kind of, the idea that there is any way that the media can gatekeep what people

00:13:43.020 talk about.

00:13:44.080 You know, if the media doesn't talk about illegal immigration, then no one will think

00:13:47.600 it's a problem.

00:13:48.260 You know, that has just obviously turned out to be, you know, that's been very demonstrably

00:13:51.640 proved to be not true.

00:13:52.920 I take a different approach, which is, I think this is probably how you maybe felt more about

00:13:56.840 the transgender issue, which is there are some issues on which I don't necessarily have

00:14:00.980 the expertise to add a lot.

00:14:02.880 I don't think my voice necessarily is the one that's needed.

00:14:06.280 There's that and also just that there is a perceived sense that just personally, it's

00:14:12.320 just the hassle factor is too high.

00:14:14.520 I mean, I distilled this once myself, you know, in a piece of advice that I never wound

00:14:19.340 up taking, which is not everything worth saying is worth saying oneself, right?

00:14:24.820 I mean, there's enough of a hassle associated with certain views, however valid they might

00:14:29.820 be, that you just spend way too much time cleaning up the mess that everyone is eager

00:14:37.000 to make on your behalf, right?

00:14:38.540 Your people are going to willfully misunderstand what you said, even if it was only, you know,

00:14:43.000 for two minutes on a podcast and you could spend the next year of your life having that

00:14:48.080 be the first question you're ever asked in every context.

00:14:51.860 And it just was, in hindsight, it just wasn't worth it because either the point wasn't important

00:14:56.260 enough, the topic wasn't important enough, or it's just so easily misunderstood that,

00:15:00.580 you know, albeit important, it's, you know, you've got better things to do.

00:15:04.300 I do feel like that about Israel and Palestine.

00:15:07.140 You know, I'm not a foreign policy expert by any means and I have, you know, my own views

00:15:11.560 on it.

00:15:11.920 But I think that what happens with that debate is you get sucked into having to say every

00:15:16.020 bad thing that has happened on every other side dating back almost to the Middle Ages,

00:15:20.200 right?

00:15:20.380 You need to kind of say, of course, we need to see this in the context of the displacement

00:15:24.440 of the Palestinian people.

00:15:25.320 Of course, we need to see this in the context of the Holocaust. 0.67

00:15:27.220 Of course, we need to see this in the context of October the 7th.

00:15:29.240 Of course, we need to see this.

00:15:30.660 And I think you can end up being just derailed out of being able to say absolutely anything

00:15:36.580 to the extent that I think that that's the closest I think I come to the mere hassle idea.

00:15:42.420 The other one is probably IQ.

00:15:44.760 So I've been writing this book about genius, which is out in the summer.

00:15:47.620 And I've gone a little bit through the history of IQ.

00:15:50.180 And I went and obviously I read, you know, lots of the debates about the hereditarians

00:15:55.220 versus the environmentalists.

00:15:56.960 And I, you know, and I asked two friends of mine with very different views on the subject

00:16:00.500 to see whether or not they would both read those chapters.

00:16:03.520 But I've taken a policy decision with that, that if I'm asked about that in interviews

00:16:08.000 and off the cuff, I'm going to say, I'm sorry, you're going to have to read the book.

00:16:11.160 I just think that is a subject on which it is absolutely not worth taking an idea for a walk

00:16:15.860 in a kind of casual way, right?

00:16:17.860 You know, and I don't think that's necessarily such a bad thing.

00:16:21.120 There are subjects for which discussing them in a debate format or in a podcast format absolutely works.

00:16:26.720 And there are others where actually just, you know, I think I more and more appreciate

00:16:30.920 that feeling of just having time to sit down something and say, do I really think this?

00:16:34.860 Can I absolutely sure I support this?

00:16:36.620 Have I got all the footnotes ready?

00:16:38.460 And that being an okay way to approach some subject, I'm not sure.

00:16:42.000 Tell me, do you think, I mean, is that cowardly or is that responsible?

00:16:45.060 I just don't, I don't know.

00:16:47.500 Well, I do think you have to pick your battles.

00:16:49.080 I mean, you only have so much time.

00:16:51.060 So it's, it is a bit of a triage question with anything you do, right?

00:16:57.720 I mean, and insofar as you can foresee the outcome, I mean, often you can't, right?

00:17:01.120 So you don't know what, just how much having touched a topic is going to eclipse every other

00:17:06.320 thing in your life for a period of time and prove to be a massive opportunity cost.

00:17:11.360 So I recognize most of those things in hindsight.

00:17:14.040 I know what you mean though.

00:17:15.140 I went, I went through a phase, you know, I interviewed Jordan Peterson for GQ back in

00:17:18.460 2018.

00:17:19.220 Yeah, yeah, I remember that.

00:17:19.840 And I went through a phase where every time I did an interview on any kind of podcast,

00:17:23.720 someone would ask me about it.

00:17:25.560 And it was obvious what was happening, which was that everybody wanted their little spice,

00:17:29.360 you know, slice of the controversy pie, right?

00:17:31.240 They wanted to get me saying something about Jordan Peterson.

00:17:33.880 They could put it on YouTube where his name was, you know, instant karma.

00:17:37.940 And I just thought this is going to make me look like some weird monomaniac who's just

00:17:42.300 going around the internet talking about something that happened to me now years ago.

00:17:45.820 But you also feel that you can't be, you know, it's impolite to say, I actually don't want

00:17:49.760 to talk about this, like you'll kind of share, you know, in your 19th interview of the day.

00:17:54.320 So I think that happens too.

00:17:56.960 Yeah, I had a similar thing with Ben Affleck.

00:17:59.020 I think that took about a year for that not to be the first thing that I had to talk about

00:18:04.960 in every context.

00:18:06.440 And it's, yeah, I feel your pain.

00:18:09.340 Although I'm probably going to ask you about Jordan Peterson in about five minutes.

00:18:12.400 So let's start with the internet.

00:18:17.120 This has to be the layer at which much of this mad work is being accomplished on our brains.

00:18:22.720 What is the internet doing to us, in your view?

00:18:25.860 The thing I keep thinking about is the fact that we used to live in geographic communities

00:18:30.500 and they were, you know, people obviously sort themselves into people who live like them.

00:18:35.720 You know, if you are rich, you can go and make sure that you only live near other rich people.

00:18:40.200 Lots of people end up living soft lives of racial segregation by the places where they choose

00:18:45.060 to live.

00:18:45.920 You know, that is all possible.

00:18:47.720 But nonetheless, your neighbours were much more likely to be varied in age and political

00:18:52.260 temper and actually just personality terms, right?

00:18:54.900 You have this kind of just mixture of people around you.

00:18:58.620 But what the internet has done, as far as I can see, you know, and I'm somebody who's

00:19:01.860 been online since I was a teenager, is it's allowed people to sort themselves by interest.

00:19:07.480 And that's had just some incredibly weird effects on us, I think.

00:19:12.020 You know, we've ended up over-indexing on people who are very like us in particular ways.

00:19:16.800 And you see some very unhealthy communities.

00:19:18.840 I don't think it'd be so easy to form in real life.

00:19:20.920 So my friend, Hadley Freeman, for example, she wrote a brilliant memoir about being anorexic

00:19:25.340 and she talked about how unhealthy being on a hospital anorexia ward was for her because

00:19:29.880 it was full of anorexic women competing with each other to who could eat the least and who 1.00

00:19:34.020 could weigh the less, you know.

00:19:35.780 And that's really, those things are really unhealthy, but that's a quite a specific environment.

00:19:41.820 But if you go onto the internet, you can find pro-ana forums.

00:19:44.720 You can find very unhealthy situations for teenage girls to be in, you know, who we know

00:19:49.400 are really prone to social contagion.

00:19:51.460 And they are just absolutely everywhere.

00:19:53.760 You know, you want to find somebody to get into competition with about your dissociative

00:19:57.660 identity disorder or your, you know, your alts or whatever it might be.

00:20:01.440 Like, that's just something that, you know, is just lying in the middle of the road for

00:20:05.180 you to pick up.

00:20:06.460 And I think those things, you know, and you see it now.

00:20:09.180 I think that what's happened with Twitter is a really fascinating example of this, which

00:20:13.080 is that it's gone in the space of two years from an unrepresentative left-wing echo chamber

00:20:17.340 to unrepresentative right-wing echo chamber.

00:20:20.360 And people have just aggressively sorted themselves into the place that they want to be with only

00:20:23.840 people who are very much like them.

00:20:25.360 You know, I've just finished writing a piece about Ayala, who is, who does these kind of

00:20:29.100 massive sex work research surveys and people's fetishes and even things like that, even at the

00:20:34.220 level of human sexuality, people have now got ideas about things that they could do that

00:20:37.840 they probably never would have met someone in normal life in the 1990s who was into that

00:20:42.780 thing.

00:20:43.500 And I think, I just don't, we don't really have a way of kind of conceptualizing that.

00:20:46.620 We don't really have a way of talking about that.

00:20:48.220 But if the way that people organize themselves has just become narrowed in these ways, never

00:20:53.940 mind the fact that now we're interacting with these things one-on-one, it's just you

00:20:57.420 and this, you know, black screen that you stare at for hours and hours a day.

00:21:01.380 All of that is really changing.

00:21:03.640 You know, I think I've been writing a bit about young men and their, you know, their approach

00:21:07.140 to the presidential election and it really just struck me how ready-made the kind of

00:21:11.640 whole lifestyle from, from those podcasts is, you know, you have your Zin pouches, you

00:21:15.800 have your protein powders, you have your crypto, the ice baths, you have your day trading, you

00:21:21.660 know, your gambling and it's like a whole pre-packaged consumer lifestyle that you kind of buy off

00:21:27.800 the shelf, but it's kind of sands a lot of the rough edges off.

00:21:31.680 And I, when I see people kind of complaining about, you know, online dating and stuff like that,

00:21:35.580 a lot of the, you know, the complaints seem to be about it feeling so much like a marketplace,

00:21:40.080 but then everything online feels like a marketplace or a slot machine.

00:21:43.420 And you just don't get these kind of baggy, messy human interactions in the way that, you

00:21:48.260 know, I think if you had to live in a small village somewhere, even though you'd be seeing 0.74

00:21:51.500 any very limited number of people, they'd all be kind of weird in different ways rather

00:21:55.300 than you finding all the people who are weird in the same way.

00:21:58.000 Yeah.

00:21:58.480 Yeah.

00:21:58.780 No, I think that's a very interesting insight.

00:22:00.360 I mean, there's something about the internet that also filters the social idiosyncrasies

00:22:08.040 and pathologies that would disqualify a person as a source of information too.

00:22:13.280 As I remember seeing this in a family member now, almost 25 years ago with the 9-11 truth

00:22:19.860 conspiracy theory stuff.

00:22:21.560 So this is like the early internet phenomenon, at least in my world, where I saw someone go

00:22:26.220 down the rabbit hole with 9-11 trutherism.

00:22:29.780 And one thing was clear is that if he had had to go to a conference, a physical conference

00:22:35.300 out in the real world and meet the people who were similarly obsessed with this idea that

00:22:40.200 9-11 was an inside job and that all those voicemail messages from the doomed passengers on

00:22:46.680 flight 93, those were faked by CIA voice faking technology.

00:22:51.180 And those people, that plane landed and those people were brought off and murdered and

00:22:54.100 et cetera, et cetera, it gets as crazy as you want it to get.

00:22:57.520 If he had gone to a conference and met the people who were manufacturing these ideas, in

00:23:04.580 many cases, he would be able to see at a glance the dysfunction in their lives, the fact that

00:23:10.200 this was, you know, that their attitude toward what was passing as journalism for them was

00:23:16.000 born of, you know, psychological and social pathologies in many cases that were quite stark,

00:23:22.980 right?

00:23:23.400 And what you get with the internet is a webpage or a, you know, now a feed on X, which is

00:23:31.860 exactly as the person wants it to be.

00:23:34.080 I mean, some of them are shrieking psychopathology, you know, despite the best efforts of the person

00:23:39.480 involved.

00:23:40.000 But still, you can't tell that this, that the person who made, to go back to 9-11, the documentary

00:23:47.600 loose change that deranged the brains of a generation on that topic was, I think at the

00:23:52.340 time, you know, 18 years old and living in his mother's basement, right?

00:23:55.840 Like what you saw was the product online and it was radicalizing because it was just a pure

00:24:03.000 information vector of, you know, ideological contamination.

00:24:06.840 And yeah, now we're living in a context where if you want to stay on the anorexia ward, surrounded

00:24:14.000 by the most persuasive anorexics on planet earth, you can stay there forever now on the

00:24:20.420 internet.

00:24:20.640 Whereas in the real world, that kind of thing would have a natural half-life.

00:24:25.400 And that's what Hadley writes about, about the thing that finally sort of snapped her

00:24:28.740 out of it was watching somebody who was 32 having a tantrum because they put butter on

00:24:33.100 her toast and she thought, you know, she was then in her teens, do I really want to be

00:24:37.160 32?

00:24:37.960 And my entire world, the scope of it, the largest thing that's happening in my life is

00:24:41.860 whether or not they put butter on my toast.

00:24:43.620 No, I want to go to university.

00:24:44.900 I want to live.

00:24:45.600 I want to have kids.

00:24:46.260 I want to have a life.

00:24:46.960 And I think that that mechanism, that really important mechanism of there is something

00:24:51.960 bigger than this has been slightly broken by the internet because there doesn't have

00:24:56.200 to be anything bigger than this.

00:24:57.560 You can sit home and get DoorDash and, you know, and game and crypto day trade.

00:25:03.420 And you can just have, you know, and that's, the world is set up for you to do that.

00:25:07.840 Okay.

00:25:07.900 So let's talk about the two sides of our politics.

00:25:10.980 I mean, I hesitate to put too much stock in the notion of left and right at the moment

00:25:15.440 because there, you know, we have horseshoe theory and other variables now that make it

00:25:19.640 a less than useful schema.

00:25:21.560 But something like that is my way into this.

00:25:24.560 I mean, there's kind of the failing liberal order, right?

00:25:27.240 Where we have this loss of trust in institutions, in many cases for obvious reasons.

00:25:31.900 Some of those reasons are exaggerated, but, you know, I share, you know, many right of

00:25:36.500 center concerns around DEI and trans activism.

00:25:39.960 We, we mentioned, I worry about how we reboot in the U S context, how we reboot the democratic

00:25:46.260 party into a, a sane platform for politics and a, an antidote to the populism we're seeing

00:25:52.980 on the right.

00:25:53.400 But let's take the, the nominally left side of this before we talk about the right.

00:25:58.620 How do you view the, the loss of trust in mainstream journalism and other institutions?

00:26:05.180 And what do you think we can do to regain that trust?

00:26:09.580 I really worry about it because I know what you mean.

00:26:11.280 The difficulty in talking about it is about keeping the correct sense of proportion between

00:26:15.740 the, the errors, you know, and I, you know, I've written a lot about errors in journalism.

00:26:19.960 There are some, but it's, you know, it's the same procedure as with science is that what

00:26:24.580 really matters is not the idea that you're never going to get anything wrong.

00:26:27.440 What matters is what you do when you get it wrong and what the correction mechanism is.

00:26:31.820 And journalism does have a correction mechanism.

00:26:34.520 It should do.

00:26:35.200 The idea of a free and diverse press is that everybody scrutinizes each other.

00:26:39.160 And yes, you won't get a complete picture of reality from the New York times or the Atlantic

00:26:43.080 or Fox news.

00:26:44.260 But if you have all of them in the same environment, then you are hopefully, you know, if you want

00:26:48.240 to getting somewhere closer to the, to a kind of complete picture of the truth.

00:26:52.860 And so, you know, I, that worries me that people don't seem to care about that.

00:26:56.980 And I, and I do wonder how much of that is about a feeling of just the fact that the,

00:27:00.580 the world is very overwhelming and people want a kind of simple narrative.

00:27:04.880 You know, conspiracy theories are very simple usually, right?

00:27:06.960 There's a bad guy who did it or a load of bad guys in a room who did it.

00:27:10.220 And it's very obvious and the solutions are very obvious.

00:27:12.540 And that's what strongman politics is.

00:27:14.160 So I think I see some of those things as being a reaction to what people feel is just overwhelming

00:27:18.880 complexity in the world.

00:27:20.940 But from my point of view, you know, all, you know, all of us are only kind of stonemasons

00:27:26.520 who can only build our own little houses one by one, right?

00:27:29.380 I just, I don't think it's possible to, to fix everything at once.

00:27:32.880 What I can do is kind of keep going out and doing the work that I think is important.

00:27:36.580 And I suppose, you know, that doesn't feel very meaningful, but this is, I don't, tell

00:27:41.480 me whether or not they should think this is unbearably bleak or if it is in fact actually

00:27:44.440 quite hopeful at the end of the day, which is that I just think that we're also an incredibly

00:27:48.280 complacent society.

00:27:49.500 And I think that's true of both Europe and America.

00:27:51.600 I'm primarily talking about, you know, professional middle class people.

00:27:56.820 You know, when Louis Pasteur invented pasteurization, people were absolutely delighted.

00:28:01.920 When they got the smallpox vaccine, people were absolutely delighted.

00:28:04.960 The measles vaccine, they were absolutely delighted because they knew what the alternative was like.

00:28:09.780 At the end of the Second World War, when we built all of these liberal institutions, people

00:28:13.640 knew what it was like to experience a world war, to experience, you know, the idea that

00:28:18.540 your son wouldn't come home or that, you know, your entire family was murdered.

00:28:22.440 And I think we've just been coasting for a really long time on things getting a little

00:28:27.040 bit worse, but for most people still extremely tolerable.

00:28:31.120 And so I think when I talk to people, and this is true on both sides of the political aisle,

00:28:35.320 there is a kind of great deal of complacency about how bad the world can get and how bad it's

00:28:39.640 still is in lots of places.

00:28:42.020 Something I think about a lot is the fact that Michael Lewis wrote, I think, in The Fifth

00:28:45.260 Risk about these awards they had for civil servants, you know, who'd done really great

00:28:49.800 bureaucratic things, or they'd come up with great initiatives.

00:28:53.200 And he found that a hugely disproportionate number of them were from first, I think, and

00:28:58.320 second generation immigrants.

00:28:59.960 So if you've come to the US from Somalia, then you are not complacent about the fact that

00:29:04.940 it's nice to have drinking water and not to have a militia come around in the middle

00:29:08.340 of the night.

00:29:09.360 And I wonder if some of that, you know, this is what I cling to as Trump passes ever more

00:29:13.780 kind of crazy executive orders, is that when things do get bad, that's the necessary

00:29:18.540 mechanism for people to react against it.

00:29:20.840 And what has happened at the moment is that people have had things a little bit bad, but

00:29:24.020 not actually that bad.

00:29:25.420 And therefore, you know, when I talk to people, I talked to a young woman who was very interesting

00:29:29.300 in Pennsylvania, and I asked her about, she was a Trump supporter, and I asked her

00:29:32.500 about January the 6th, and she said, well, you know, if he didn't respect democracy, why

00:29:37.660 is he running for president?

00:29:39.320 And I thought that was a really great and insightful thing to say, because from her point of view,

00:29:43.400 there was nothing that I could say that would, you know, that would counteract that.

00:29:46.280 He was paying deference to the electoral system by participating in it.

00:29:51.060 And I thought, yeah, you know what, we're right. 0.55

00:29:53.200 She, you know, she believes that if he was a maniac, the Republican Party would have stopped

00:29:57.580 him, and the Republican Party didn't stop him, and that's the failure there.

00:30:01.720 But it's not, she doesn't have a bad understanding of politics, it's just that politics has let

00:30:05.660 her down in some profound way.

00:30:07.740 Yeah, I think complacency is part of it, although when you look at the real, the extremity of

00:30:13.520 the problem, I don't know that the complacency covers the nature of the error.

00:30:18.880 I mean, like, I wouldn't think of the January 6th rioters as especially complacent, right?

00:30:24.680 I mean, they actually, you know, many of them traveled halfway across the country.

00:30:27.580 To attack the Capitol.

00:30:29.960 And so it is with, you know, people who go all in on, you know, anti-vax, you know, religiosity,

00:30:36.560 essentially, right?

00:30:37.160 I mean, they're completely subsumed by this concern, and they're spending a tremendous

00:30:41.800 amount of time trying to find, you know, all of the nefarious clues online that reveal,

00:30:48.540 you know, how dangerous vaccines are, or how corrupt the pharmaceutical industry is, or,

00:30:52.260 you know, they've listened to scores of hours of RFK Jr.

00:30:56.100 spread his misinformation and half-truths and, you know, genuine lives in some cases.

00:31:03.120 So there's a massive, in many cases, there's a massive investment of time and even resources

00:31:09.280 in becoming kind of actively misled, you know, or what we would consider misled based on having

00:31:17.700 a sense of what the ground truth reality is on any one of these topics.

00:31:22.440 I mean, no, Donald Trump did not win the 2020 election.

00:31:26.360 It was not stolen from him.

00:31:28.500 And, you know, all of your QAnon-inflected ratiocination on that topic is, in fact, a

00:31:35.900 waste of time.

00:31:36.960 The problem, I think, is that whenever you find a kernel of truth to any of these conspiracy

00:31:43.020 theories, right?

00:31:44.280 I mean, the real, you know, background incidents of vaccine injury or the actual case where DEI

00:31:51.780 has led to some horrifically bad outcome.

00:31:54.580 I mean, to take this recent plane crash in Washington, in D.C., you know, Trump's first

00:32:01.820 allegation is that, you know, DEI explains this plane crash, whether it was on the FAA side

00:32:08.100 or the, you know, the military helicopter side or both.

00:32:11.020 It seemed an utterly grotesque and, you know, borderline psychopathic thing to say in the

00:32:19.800 moment when your job is really to restore people's sense of normalcy and assure them

00:32:26.840 that you're going to get to the bottom of the problem.

00:32:29.360 And it was obviously, it was before any of the facts were in, so he couldn't possibly know

00:32:33.360 if DEI was the real reason for it.

00:32:35.500 He certainly couldn't know that at that point.

00:32:36.980 But if, in fact, it proves to be true that the FAA had some, as is now rumored at the

00:32:44.480 time we're discussing this, the FAA had some aggressively and, in hindsight, probably patently

00:32:51.680 insane DEI program that was selecting not for competence but for skin color for some considerable

00:32:58.580 period of time, that will seem to confirm everyone's worst fears about everything on that

00:33:04.280 topic, right?

00:33:05.080 And so, again, this comes back to something like asymmetrical information warfare, whereas

00:33:11.060 when you can find the half-truth or the single conspiracy that is, in fact, true, then that

00:33:17.720 gives people more or less carte blanche to believe anything on insufficient evidence as long as it's

00:33:23.300 to their taste in that vein, you know, for years to come.

00:33:26.860 And you have to do so much extra work to debunk any of that misinformation because what's always

00:33:33.520 lingering, and we have this with the, you know, the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab leak issue now,

00:33:39.380 right?

00:33:39.520 I mean, because that was stigmatized as a racist conspiracy theory within 15 minutes by the

00:33:44.560 left, and now it has proved an all-too-plausible thesis, although, albeit one for which the jury

00:33:50.000 is still out, now the New York Times is no better than Fox News or even, you know, paradoxically

00:33:55.500 worse, et cetera, et cetera.

00:33:58.080 And you're now dealing with people who won't believe anything that the normal gatekeepers

00:34:03.080 say, whether it's the government or media.

00:34:05.240 There's an awful lot of Mott and Bailey, though, isn't there?

00:34:07.040 And that's, you know, that term for the argumentation strategy where you go out on a limb and say

00:34:10.580 something really crazy and then in challenge, you know, withdraw back to your castle.

00:34:14.640 And, you know, some of the claim about that was that COVID was a bioweapon developed in a lab,

00:34:19.300 right?

00:34:19.520 And that's not what anybody who's now saying, well, look, we don't know what was happening.

00:34:23.360 So that, you know, that's, and I think the same thing is possibly true with the case of

00:34:26.980 the air crash in that Tracing Woodgrains, who used to be a reporter on Blocks and Reported,

00:34:31.580 did some really interesting reporting on the FAA under Obama changing the regulations.

00:34:37.200 But what that's turned into is the fact that, you know, the relatives of the female pilot who

00:34:40.900 died were afraid to have her name released because they thought she'd be, you know, torn apart

00:34:45.180 as a kind of tokenistic hire.

00:34:46.920 But people will kind of just throw this sort of chaff up into the air.

00:34:50.660 And then if any tiny bit of it is true, they claim victory.

00:34:54.800 And I think that's the bit where I really struggle because it does make you feel very,

00:34:59.560 you know, like the kind of ground shaking beneath your feet in that, you know, that

00:35:02.540 you can point out the facts all you want, but the vibe is just so much stronger.

00:35:06.660 I had a friend who described the point of journalism as the war of facts against narrative.

00:35:11.140 And I think that is the kind of, that is the big challenge now today for journalism is

00:35:15.960 saying, yes, this, there might have been this going on, but it's actually a little bit more

00:35:20.100 complicated than that.

00:35:21.200 And that bit of that you believe isn't true.

00:35:23.180 Whereas what people want it to be is, you know, yeah, is it, was it, was it a Chinese, 0.65

00:35:27.640 you know, was it a Chinese plot?

00:35:28.640 Yes or no.

00:35:29.100 And you kind of go, well, it's a bit more complicated than that.

00:35:31.900 You know, was it DEI?

00:35:32.860 Yes or no.

00:35:33.320 Well, actually, yes, you know, it might be a bit more complicated than that.

00:35:36.900 And no one really kind of wants that.

00:35:38.720 And I think it leads to a lot of faulty thinking because people just apply that heuristic,

00:35:42.420 don't they?

00:35:42.660 They just apply the frame that they want, that they are now used to thinking of everything

00:35:46.680 through to every new situation.

00:35:49.260 Sometimes that frame is right, but as a shortcut, inevitably, sometimes it's wrong.

00:35:52.880 Well, what do you think the sanest way is to thread the needle on DEI and transactivism

00:35:59.160 and intersectionality and all of these other ways of framing or misframing?

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - February 06, 2025

#400 — The Politics of Information

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