Making Sense - Sam Harris - #468 — More From Sam： Gratitude, Bad Conversations, Conspiracy Addiction, Waffle House Teleportation, and More

00:00:00.000 You're listening to Making Sense with Sam Harris.

00:00:04.280 This is the free version of the podcast, so you'll only hear the first part of today's

00:00:07.980 conversation.

00:00:09.160 If you want the full episode and every episode, you can subscribe at samharris.org.

00:00:14.240 There are no ads on this show.

00:00:16.140 It runs entirely on subscriber support.

00:00:18.640 If you enjoy what we're doing here and find it valuable, please consider subscribing today.

00:00:24.300 Welcome back to another episode of More from Sam.

00:00:26.480 Once again, we are taping this live in front of subscribers where anything goes.

00:00:31.040 We've had them submit questions in advance of the show, and I will try to get to as many

00:00:34.220 of those as possible.

00:00:35.400 And then we've asked them to provide any follow-ups using the chat feature so that Sam can address

00:00:39.780 their feedback in real time.

00:00:41.540 This worked really well last week or last episode, I should say.

00:00:44.280 And it's very helpful to have a bunch of smart people feeding me lines.

00:00:47.400 So please keep those comments coming.

00:00:49.980 All right.

00:00:50.400 Before we get to our first topic, I just want to give a quick rundown of the guests you'll

00:00:54.180 be recording with on the podcast over the next few weeks.

00:00:56.260 we have Tristan Harris, Lloyd Blankfein, Rahm Emanuel, Francis Fukuyama, Ben Shapiro,

00:01:01.980 Michael Pollan, and Siddhartha Mukherjee. And that's just April.

00:01:05.580 Yeah, a lot coming up. Yeah.

00:01:07.180 Yeah. So if anyone wanted more content from you, got a lot coming up. And I'm hopeful that

00:01:12.020 you'll have another essay for us soon. Nobody does them quite like you do. And I'm certain

00:01:16.620 the audience agrees with me. All right, let's get to our first topic. We're going to get your

00:01:21.500 updated thoughts on Iran, AI, and other concerns. But first, a lot of people feel overwhelmed

00:01:26.120 by many things these days, including the pace of change and the fear of being left behind in an

00:01:30.660 increasingly AI-driven world. Yet, even with some legitimate fears, there's still so much to be

00:01:35.420 grateful for, but it feels like no matter how much better things get, things feel worse. Maybe

00:01:39.840 you could remind us what we still have to be grateful for and how to best navigate this moment.

00:01:46.580 Well, I think it's just useful to ask yourself the question. Even if your job in some sense is

00:01:52.540 to pay attention to risk or the downside of things or to criticize bad. I'm just thinking

00:01:58.360 personally how I navigate this. I spend a lot of time thinking about what's wrong and the needless

00:02:04.760 own goals we score on ourselves as a society. All of that can be depressing, but the filter I use

00:02:11.660 to do that is to ask myself, how unhappy do I have to be in the meantime? Is my being unhappy

00:02:17.660 contributing anything useful you know on the side of my own motivation to do any of this work or

00:02:23.100 my ability to communicate well about it or i mean just is it useful and you know almost always the

00:02:30.540 answer is no right so like there really is a potentially a radical disjunction between even

00:02:36.400 paying attention to scary and depressing things and being scared and depressed in one's life

00:02:42.960 moment to moment i mean i just i just think that second piece isn't actually necessary i'm not i'm

00:02:48.840 not saying there's there's never bleed through but it's um there can be surprisingly little when

00:02:53.540 you reflect on just how lucky you are moment to moment even with all the things you might be

00:02:59.220 concerned about so and obviously there are many people whose jobs are nothing like mine and they

00:03:04.120 they can withdraw their attention from current events and from you know things like existential

00:03:08.840 risk and they can do it knowing that for the most part they can't do anything about those

00:03:13.840 things right they're not they don't have a job that requires them to be up to the minute on

00:03:18.900 whatever it is you know pandemic risk or you know or nuclear proliferation or any other sort of

00:03:24.400 damocles that's hanging over our heads there is no good reason to um simply become morbid in the

00:03:31.240 way you pay attention to the world right i mean it's just not it's not useful right and so i really

00:03:37.000 think only mindfulness gives you the capacity to make these choices moment to moment i mean if you

00:03:42.140 really and if you don't know what i mean by mindfulness then there's really nothing there's

00:03:45.560 no um there's no foothold to grab there i mean you really just have to learn something about it

00:03:50.260 but if you can notice the moment to moment consequences of paying attention to things and

00:03:56.320 and and how you use your attention being consequential it allows you to decide you know

00:04:02.440 to kind of wisely curate the contents of your own consciousness and withdraw your attention

00:04:08.300 from things when that when your attention on them serves no good purpose and i don't know

00:04:12.940 just kind of break the addiction of being unhappy in the usual ways right i mean many of us get sort

00:04:17.760 of stuck in the rut of conforming to various patterns of attention and you you can just

00:04:23.840 decide to break break those habits so yeah obviously you can think in the stoical vein of

00:04:28.740 all the people in the world whose prayers would be answered if they could simply be in your exact

00:04:32.620 situation right now. I mean, think of all the bad things that haven't happened to you that if they

00:04:36.120 had, you know, what you'd pay just to get back to where you are right now. I mean, those are useful

00:04:40.240 reflections. But, you know, it is just in fact true that life is very, very good for so many of

00:04:45.460 us. And it's very easy not to be aware of that moment to moment. So how do you help people

00:04:50.200 navigate the anxiety around their jobs if they think that their job's going to be going away?

00:04:54.940 I mean, so many people are talking about right now, is it going to be months?

00:04:57.640 Is it going to be weeks?

00:04:59.200 Maybe a little bit longer before I lose my job.

00:05:01.240 And if you're looking out there looking for a job right now, if you're a young kid out

00:05:05.340 of college, it's great if you have expertise in good taste because AI sort of plays like

00:05:10.800 this infinite boardroom for you of experts.

00:05:13.560 But if you don't have the experience and the higher skilled people aren't going to hire

00:05:18.300 you, the anxiety is real.

00:05:21.100 I mean, how does mindfulness help those people who are looking to...

00:05:23.600 Well, so specifically on that point, I mean, I think, I don't think you can, you can boycott

00:05:27.980 AI at this point.

00:05:28.920 I mean, I just, I think the right thing to do is figure out how to use it in beneficial

00:05:33.420 ways, you know, for your career and for your personal life.

00:05:36.140 I just think it's, I mean, some people can ignore it, but for the most part, certainly

00:05:40.340 if you're in any kind of job or hoping to be in a job that focuses on information, I

00:05:45.760 mean, if it's a job you can do sitting behind a desk, I think AI needs to become your friend

00:05:50.660 leaving aside all of the other issues we might have about it and the other concerns about

00:05:54.880 alignment and all of that. I think in the limit, when we start to see the real evaporation of

00:06:02.380 jobs because of how good AI is getting, we as a society are going to have to figure out how

00:06:07.940 to navigate that. And that I think is probably coming sooner than many people expect. I think

00:06:13.760 it is definitely coming. Many people expect that it's not coming. AI is just going to create a

00:06:18.200 bunch of new jobs that we don't have names for yet. And really, there will be no radical

00:06:22.040 displacement. I think that's just happy talk. But there are people who, there are smart people who

00:06:26.300 believe that by analogy to previous breakthroughs in technology. But I do think, I think we as a

00:06:31.600 society are going to have to figure out how to absorb productivity gains that don't ultimately

00:06:37.280 entail people becoming more productive, right? I mean, so that the AI starts doing work that

00:06:43.380 people are doing now and um there's job cancellation i think that's coming people can't solve that by

00:06:49.560 themselves though really i mean once it comes at any kind of scale society has to solve it 0.62

00:06:53.940 well i get that but i'm talking about the delta between where the shit gets bad and before it 0.81

00:06:58.480 gets better and so for people like you say make ai your friend that's great because you have good 0.92

00:07:03.660 taste and expertise so you can tell ai what you want but if you're somebody on the other's other

00:07:08.320 into that and you're somebody whose job it is to do admin or coordination or some of the other

00:07:13.440 tasks, if you're a paralegal or even a junior lawyer or any of the other examples, again,

00:07:20.300 the anxiety is real. How does mindfulness help here? How do people navigate it? Because I mean,

00:07:25.100 again, I understand what you're saying is so much of it, it's in our heads, but there is a reality

00:07:29.620 that this is different. Mindfulness helps with everything because in each moment, there's either

00:07:34.080 There's something for you to do or there isn't, right?

00:07:36.420 So if there's something for you to do, well, then you just do that thing, right?

00:07:40.540 I mean, again, this applies even in emergencies, right?

00:07:42.840 The house is on fire, and you now need to get your kids out to safety, and so you have

00:07:48.460 to escape, right?

00:07:49.260 So action's required, and you don't need to suffer over performing that action.

00:07:55.400 You just have to do the thing, right?

00:07:57.080 Now, if there's nothing you can do to change your situation or to change the risk you're

00:08:02.220 confronting, well, then your misery is adding nothing to that occasion either. Now, in either

00:08:07.620 case, your misery is extra, right? Now, this can be a high bar to clear for people who don't have

00:08:13.840 a mindfulness practice, but once you do, you can actually differentiate these components to your

00:08:19.580 engagement, you know, with your life, moment to moment. I mean, you can have a highly energized,

00:08:26.560 you know, motivated, even adrenalized experience that isn't a miserable one, right? You can be

00:08:31.820 responding to an emergency and not be miserable. You can be making decisions over a longer time

00:08:36.860 horizon that entail a lot, that are, you know, kind of scary decisions, right? It's like you

00:08:40.820 could say, okay, now I need a surgery and it's, you know, in two weeks I'm going to have a surgery

00:08:45.220 which I'm, you know, anxious about, right? But, you know, all things considered, it is just the

00:08:49.720 right decision and now I've got, now the surgery's on the calendar and now I've got this thing looming

00:08:54.020 and so, okay, so now, but now the question is, over the next 14 days, how much time are you going

00:08:59.080 to spend being miserable because you're anxious about the surgery. All of those moments are

00:09:04.640 discretionary once you know how to be mindful. Once you've decided what you have to do, there

00:09:09.700 really is no more to think about, really, right? Now, you will helplessly be knocked around by

00:09:14.900 your thoughts, but that's where mindfulness comes in. And again, if you don't have a mindfulness

00:09:19.740 practice, you are going to be the mere hostage of those thoughts, right? So you'll be as anxious

00:09:24.580 and as fearful and as worried and as sleepless as you'll be because your mind is completely out of

00:09:30.940 control for the next two weeks. But there simply is no alternative to mental training once you

00:09:38.720 get into a situation like that. I mean, the time to develop a mindfulness practice is before you

00:09:43.120 really need it, not when you're in the middle of that maelstrom. But it really, I mean, it is there

00:09:48.740 this is a capacity you can develop and it really does provide relief. I mean, every time you find

00:09:56.820 yourself suffering, you can recognize that you're thinking without noticing that you're thinking

00:10:01.920 and then wake up from that dream. And it doesn't change the fact that you still might have to have

00:10:05.880 surgery in two weeks, right? But again, all of the suffering that precedes it is unnecessary

00:10:10.880 and the same will be true afterwards, right? I mean, again, you're just going to be in the

00:10:16.220 company of your thoughts 99% of the time. Well, speaking of relief, the New York Times reports

00:10:21.080 that after decades of religious decline, people have stopped leaving churches. Now, it doesn't

00:10:25.160 point to a revival necessarily, but maybe people like the feeling of something familiar in uncertain

00:10:30.760 times. How does that sit with you? That might be, yeah. I just don't know how durable that

00:10:36.440 change is. I mean, the larger trend is of kind of a massively secularizing change in our culture

00:10:44.140 over the last you know quarter century but um no i could well imagine people want community and they

00:10:50.560 want you know real world experiences and it's comforting to be inside a church and i love

00:10:55.720 churches right you know i love sitting in churches so i get it but yeah i don't know i don't know what

00:11:01.800 to draw from that headline well i want to play a video for you and get your thoughts on this can

00:11:06.400 we play the um rubio clip speaking of religion here we were all created every single one of us

00:11:14.560 before the beginning of time by the hands of the god of the universe an all-powerful god did you

00:11:19.960 see this no and created us for the purpose of living with him in eternity god this is rubio

00:11:25.580 the atheists don't make content anywhere near this inspiring 1.00

00:11:29.320 took on the form of a man and came down and lived among us i don't find this inspiring this is oh

00:11:35.840 that music died like a man all right i think we'll see enough yeah okay yeah i i mean i haven't

00:11:41.240 really tracked uh rubio's level of religious fanaticism i mean you know i want to when i

00:11:46.780 think of someone like pete hegseth i get quite worried because he clearly is someone who's

00:11:51.560 making decisions based on his bible thumping but well i was going to ask you that because i thought

00:11:56.340 like if you had to pick one Republican to take over in 2028, if you had to do that, I would have

00:12:01.100 assumed it would have been someone like a Rubio. And then seeing this video, I thought, wait a

00:12:05.360 second, where did this come from? But even with this video, I'd still think. I mean, who knows

00:12:09.960 what this guy believes, right? This is very few people have shown themselves to be this malleable

00:12:16.800 in the face of, you know, political imperatives. You know, he is someone who rightly identified

00:12:24.140 had Trump as a con man who was destroying conservatism, and now he's secretary of state 0.96

00:12:29.640 and just a odious lickspittle. I mean, so I think the only reason why I view him differently 0.65

00:12:36.620 from someone like Pete Hegseth is that he was a sort of normal politician with a normal degree

00:12:43.660 of qualifications for his role, right? So he's not egregiously unqualified to be secretary of

00:12:50.980 state or president or any other. I mean, he's just, he's a normal, normal candidate for these

00:12:56.060 kinds of roles. Whereas, you know, Pete Hegseth is mostly a Fox News personality, though he can

00:13:02.660 bench press 300 plus pounds, which is genuinely impressive and just a proper religious maniac 0.99

00:13:08.240 by all appearances. So he seems quite a bit scarier to me, but yeah, maybe this is sincere

00:13:14.200 from Rubio. I don't know. I mean, he's just, he's just a shape-shifting opportunist as far as I can

00:13:19.520 help speaking of people sound like religious maniacs did you see that um video i want to play

00:13:23.940 this for you of greg phillips from fema who claimed that he had time traveled to a waffle house

00:13:29.740 i forgot who it was yeah i know the story yeah can we play that clip real fast we had a teleport

00:13:36.200 incident two of them um which uh which transported me about uh 40 miles from

00:13:45.220 from where I was in near Albany, Georgia, to the ditch of a church. I ended up at a

00:13:55.240 Waffle House like 50 miles away from where I was. It was an incredibly frightening moment

00:14:01.860 to experience yourself in your car flying through the air. It was possible. It was real.

00:14:09.920 i want to be hanging out with her after that interview ended jesus he's at fema yeah we can

00:14:21.220 all sleep peacefully at night knowing that that our emergencies will be responded to by

00:14:25.400 a man who's convinced of the physics of teleportation who among us hasn't teleported

00:14:31.400 at some point to a waffle house jesus i think 50 miles is reasonable yeah he would have claimed 0.95

00:14:36.740 500 i thought he was shit yes to be unconscious while driving 50 miles that seems normal i think 0.85

00:14:43.440 you've had ambient ambient experiences like that i don't think it's been that far unbelievable 0.96

00:14:48.440 uh the last time we went to the moon you were a kid how do you feel about this latest mission to

00:14:54.100 the moon i'm amazed at how little bandwidth it's taken up for anybody i mean i i haven't seen

00:14:59.680 me in a different time we would see a lot of press coverage of this i haven't seen

00:15:05.200 nearly as much as you know it's sort of at the level of this guy teleporting to a waffle house

00:15:10.160 in my algorithm i mean i think it's great i you know i i think it's amazing that we do this

00:15:15.740 this sort of thing but it's amazing how little bandwidth we have for nice news stories like that

00:15:22.620 yeah we had a very uniting if short-lived moment when the u.s hockey team won the gold medal earlier

00:15:27.780 this year do you do you think this mission will do anything for us on that level uh maybe when

00:15:32.760 they have a parade when they get home or no one's going to care? No, I think we're pretty jaded at

00:15:38.920 this moment and distracted for obvious reasons. I'd be surprised if the ticker tape parade got

00:15:44.480 much coverage. There'll be 100,000 old people on CNN watching it. Right, like the Rose Parade?

00:15:49.340 Yeah. What do you think we could do as a society to bring us closer together? Is there anything

00:15:53.140 we could do right now? Get off social media. I think that would be to uncouple us from all the

00:15:59.100 maniacs from the you know the 10 percent of us that are that are trolls and lunatics and bots 0.71

00:16:03.400 and grifters and uh just dial down some of that noise so that we can get a little more signal i 0.96

00:16:09.760 think that would that would be good if all the social media people pulled the plug on social

00:16:14.880 media i think they would all deserve i told jack dorsey this you know when he was running twitter

00:16:19.680 if he just pulled the plug on twitter saying sorry this just this didn't work out guys he

00:16:24.220 would deserve the noble peace prize and and uh i think that's still true it's probably even more

00:16:28.460 true now. I'm going to shift topics here. It's a great question from a Substack subscriber.

00:16:34.080 You said conversations with people you strongly disagree with can be unproductive, hard to fact

00:16:38.360 check in real time, prone to confusion. But you've also argued that conversations are only

00:16:42.760 alternative to violence. And your early debates on religion showed you engaging calmly and

00:16:47.560 rigorously across deep disagreement. In recent years, many of your guests seem to largely share

00:16:52.360 your views with differences mostly in emphasis. There's a real value in surfacing expertise,

00:16:57.060 reinforcing important ideas, but do you worry it comes at the cost of one of your genuine strengths,

00:17:02.000 modeling how to engage thoughtfully with opposition? Most real-world disagreements

00:17:06.900 are messy and emotionally charged. Isn't there still value in demonstrating how to navigate

00:17:12.280 those well, even if the conversation isn't perfectly clean? Yeah, up to a point. I mean,

00:17:17.640 I think some of those conversations are useful, and I keep looking for the ones that I think will

00:17:21.740 be useful. I mean, I think there's generally greater utility in when there's something to

00:17:27.980 learn about an issue or something to figure out, bringing on someone who really knows their stuff

00:17:32.820 and just, you know, helping me learn more in real time in front of my audience. So I'm thinking

00:17:38.620 about, you know, the consequences of Trumpism and having Trump for a second term, you know,

00:17:42.800 and just the way the rest of the world perceives us and, you know, the loss of American leadership

00:17:47.400 and et cetera, all of that.

00:17:49.240 If I bring on someone who I know I'm going to agree with, but who just knows much more

00:17:54.480 about certain details than I do, I bring on someone like Anne Applebaum, right, who can

00:17:58.160 just give me the view from the other side of the world with much more historical context

00:18:03.500 and who's just deep in the weeds on the way propaganda works and the way democracies unravel

00:18:10.420 and all the relevant historical analogies, right?

00:18:13.240 I'm not going to disagree with Ann about much, if anything, but that's not the point.

00:18:17.600 The point is to hear what she has to say and to learn a little bit more each time I do

00:18:22.420 that.

00:18:22.800 I think that's usually more useful than me getting some person on who stridently disagrees

00:18:30.040 with a position I already have, and I just know going into it that it's just going to

00:18:34.760 be an exercise in my attempting to showcase their errors, which I already understand to

00:18:41.120 be errors.

00:18:41.620 right? So someone who doesn't really understand jihadism at all and doesn't believe in it and

00:18:45.960 thinks it's all economics and politics and bluffing, okay, I can get that person on for

00:18:50.200 another two-hour round of, you know, brain damage. But it really is just brain damage, right? Now,

00:18:56.040 it's not to say that it's not going to be useful for some people in the audience to see me hit

00:19:01.220 those pitches again and again. But I've done it so many times, I'm not sure about the value of

00:19:07.800 continuing to do it and and it also runs the risk of being confusing to some people anyway because

00:19:14.880 certain moves are reliably confusing right well i think people like the conversations you're having

00:19:20.280 i think it's just it feels as though you've been just avoiding the chance at having a bad conversation

00:19:25.300 and they feel that many of them can learn from a bad conversation i just don't see like i like

00:19:31.060 who are we talking about i mean like i'm going to talk to someone like hassan piker would that be

00:19:35.440 fun no not really i mean it just i i don't think i don't think anyone should be listening to this

00:19:40.520 guy right so it's like it just seems like well that's a different point i think what they're

00:19:44.740 saying is there are bad conversations that they're constantly having and they can still learn how to

00:19:50.180 have a good conversation in a bad conversation or how to navigate a bad conversation and with you 0.95

00:19:55.580 lately just saying fuck it i'm not going to have bad conversations anymore because this is not 0.96

00:19:59.520 the best use of my time or i'm not going to spend two hours on this i think that a lot of people 0.98

00:20:04.220 are saying, well, even from those bad conversations, I don't think they mean the

00:20:07.600 Omar Z's conversation examples. Well, I mean, so I'm going to talk to Ben Shapiro. I anticipate

00:20:12.740 that being a potentially bad conversation, at least for half of it. I mean, half of it will

00:20:18.300 agree about certain things, but part of it will be exposing a fair amount of daylight between us

00:20:24.500 around Trump and current American politics. So I'm going to go into that thinking we both might

00:20:30.680 get somewhat uptight in this conversation, at least for part of it. And I'm not avoiding it.

00:20:35.080 I think it's useful because Ben is a serious enough person with a big enough audience that

00:20:40.560 it's useful to try to kind of make some sense in his direction. Would I talk to Candace Owens? I

00:20:46.480 don't think so. I mean, she's got an even larger audience, but she's a total lunatic. And I'm not 1.00

00:20:53.140 sure, I mean, apart from, I mean, I could approach it the way I approached the conversation with

00:20:58.900 Doug Wilson, the pastor who I knew just how far out he was as a fundamentalist, but I

00:21:05.880 approached that differently than I might have.

00:21:09.020 I mean, I was not looking for conflict.

00:21:10.460 I was looking, I trust, in that case, I trusted my audience to understand what's wrong with

00:21:16.260 a pastor who will sign off on maybe one day bringing chattel slavery back because it's 0.97

00:21:21.660 in the Bible, right?

00:21:22.720 So that's obvious enough that I can, I don't have to dunk on that point.

00:21:27.520 i don't have to say oh well like i just hope it's clear that i'm against chattel slavery i mean so

00:21:31.440 it's just you can just be more of an anthropologist there rather than a you know somebody who's going

00:21:36.660 to dig in and really have a debate you know my conversation with ross doubt that right like we

00:21:41.360 did not agree that was had the quality of a debate about religion i think he's more of a

00:21:47.000 religious extremist than people appreciate and i i feel some of that came out in our conversation

00:21:52.800 i mean he's surprisingly extreme in his claims to to you know his faith claims given that he's

00:22:01.100 also trying to function as a normal journalist at the new york times so those are not totally

00:22:06.660 those are somewhat adversarial conversations but they're not to talk to someone like i don't know

00:22:11.900 again i just brought up hassan piker at random someone like him i mean he's just kind of a

00:22:15.940 performance artist. I mean, he's a deeply confused, I think, fairly amoral, fairly juvenile person in

00:22:24.200 his ethics, right? I mean, he's just a, and he's just a bit of a nutcase and dishonest. And so 0.99

00:22:29.260 it's just, it's such a mess. I mean, there's so much bad faith that you have to anticipate going

00:22:34.100 into a conversation like that. My first question is why do it? Because it can stand the chance of

00:22:40.380 being genuinely confusing, certainly to anyone who's sort of in his audience, right? Because

00:22:46.720 there's just so much, it's asymmetric warfare. It's so much easier to make a mess than to clean

00:22:51.140 it up, right? That's why I wouldn't talk to someone like RFK Jr. I mean, RFK Jr. is basically

00:22:55.560 a nutcase, right? I mean, there's something wrong with the guy. He's a liar, absolutely a liar, 0.95

00:23:01.460 but he's also a kind of a confabulator. He's a bullshit artist. And also I just think a little 1.00

00:23:06.640 crazy, right? So he's, you're dealing with all of that. It's very hard to do in real time. Again,

00:23:12.480 for the kinds of things he's crazy about, what you want is someone who's deep in the weeds on

00:23:19.040 the science of vaccines and immunology and just, you know, virology and all of it, right? So I'm

00:23:25.220 the wrong guy to have that conversation. I've always said that. It's not to say I couldn't

00:23:28.840 take a month of my life and get up to speed on some of that, but it's just not worth a month

00:23:32.500 of my life to do that. So all of it is just, at this point, you have to have a life is too short

00:23:39.280 module in your brain and consult it occasionally. And for many of these conversations that people

00:23:44.980 seem to want me to have, I have to say life is too short for many of them. It's not to say, I mean,

00:23:50.360 given the right candidate, you know, I might jump at the chance. Again, I mean, you know,

00:23:55.200 the monk debates, I think, they asked me to debate Tucker Carlson, and I was surprised

00:24:00.640 to find myself saying yes without any reservation, really, because Tucker has become such a fixture

00:24:07.500 in our politics. But that seems to have evaporated. So I don't know what happened there. I'm sure he

00:24:12.780 said no. But so I would do that. I would do something like that. But again, it really has

00:24:18.140 to be worth it. Well, Rogan has said he doesn't want to talk to you publicly until you've debated

00:24:22.460 Brett Weinstein. Is that something you consider doing?

00:24:25.500 Oh, well, no. I mean, for the same reasons, I wouldn't debate RFK Jr. I mean, it's just

00:24:30.640 It's very disconcerting not to know whether someone has lost their mind, right?

00:24:37.160 Because when you look at someone like Brett Speak, he just seems to be the picture of

00:24:42.840 reasonableness, right?

00:24:43.980 He's not getting blown around by his emotional life, certainly not in any obvious way when

00:24:49.280 he's certainly not on a podcast with Rogan.

00:24:52.480 So he's not an Alex Jones-like character where you look at the way he's delivering the lines

00:24:58.620 and you think, okay, this is kind of a case study in, in, you know, chemical imbalance or something,

00:25:04.720 right? Like what we need is a psychopharmacologist before anything else happens here so that we can,

00:25:09.020 we can try to get this guy back to some physiological baseline. That's not happening

00:25:12.760 with Brett at all. And yet the things he says are equivalently crazy and the certitude with which he

00:25:18.940 says them, it's totally indefensible, right? So you take his recent appearance on Rogan and you

00:25:25.040 stick his claims into any LLM and what you get is just a litany of obvious errors. And I did that

00:25:32.640 for Joe. I sent him a link to my chat GPT session. Like, Joe, just here's a sanity check. Listen to

00:25:39.340 what the robots say about what Brett was giving you on this most recent podcast. And he didn't

00:25:43.900 seem to want to do that. So he's still convinced that Brett was right about everything, though

00:25:47.500 Brett thinks that 17 million people were killed outright by the vaccines and that ivermectin is

00:25:52.280 still worth taking. I don't know how to interact with that, but what it requires is if it were

00:25:58.040 going to be done at all. I mean, Brett is just the right, you know, Brett is not someone to take

00:26:01.420 seriously on this topic, but you know, if you were forced to take him seriously because he's

00:26:05.140 made so much noise about it, what you want is someone who's deeper in the weeds on the relevant

00:26:10.540 science than either of us are and let that guy or gal have the debate. And that's what I urged

00:26:17.740 joe to do i mean joe was wrong there i wasn't urging that i do a post-mortem on covid about

00:26:23.320 you know rfk jr or or brett or anyone else any other lunatic he's had on his podcast i was urging

00:26:29.160 that he have the relevant experts do it right i mean is that it's not my wheelhouse right it

00:26:34.600 shouldn't you know i'm not going to unlike many of these guys i'm not going to pretend it's my

00:26:39.060 wheelhouse uh knowing that i can be a quick study and and uh sound like i know what i'm talking

00:26:45.060 about. I'm not an immunologist. I'm not a virologist. I'm not an epidemiologist. You want

00:26:51.340 to be all three of those things. Like everyone else on the internet? Yeah, yeah, to have this

00:26:55.220 conversation responsibly. But I know enough of what mainstream science thinks about what happened

00:27:01.340 during COVID to know that Brett doesn't make any sense on this topic. Yeah, another question while

00:27:06.000 we're on Rogan. You've been critical of Rogan's irresponsibility in the spread of misinformation,

00:27:09.980 but he's taken basically the same approach since he was bullshitting stoned in his living room with

00:27:14.360 an audience of a few thousand. Not his fault. His audience has become huge. Isn't the real problem

00:27:18.980 that the epistemic institutions have trashed their credibility and the audience is lacking

00:27:23.200 discernment? Well, it's both, but I think I sent you this clip of, um, that the algorithm served

00:27:28.440 me of, of Joe talking to Theo Vaughn and Theo was, you know, just kind of melting down around his

00:27:34.040 anxiety about everything. It seemed, um, super worried about the war in Iran and, and, um,

00:27:39.460 worried about Israel, I guess. I mean, I forget about some of the specifics of the clip, but

00:27:45.560 they went on for like 10 minutes, kind of casting doubt on everything. And then they had seemed to

00:27:49.820 have a lot of time for some, I think it was CIA conspiracy theory, which was getting delivered

00:27:55.060 to them on what looked like a short YouTube clip or a TikTok video by someone they liked. And it

00:28:00.680 was probably a rehash of MKUltra or some old story about the CIA putting LSD in the water,

00:28:06.900 or something they did in the 1950s.

00:28:08.900 But, you know, it was a-

00:28:10.220 Which they need to do again now.

00:28:11.620 Yeah, but it was a completely paranoid story 0.97

00:28:13.760 about the CIA trying to make us all dumb 0.99

00:28:16.040 so we'll be more bovine and compliant. 0.99

00:28:19.940 And, I mean, the image I got

00:28:21.880 is just two kind of pyromaniacs 0.58

00:28:24.220 just lighting matches

00:28:25.680 on a landscape that they had spent years

00:28:28.640 soaking in gasoline, right?

00:28:30.820 It's like there's, I mean,

00:28:32.300 and this really is,

00:28:33.300 it's relevant how large the audience is for this. It's relevant just how much cultural damage is

00:28:39.960 being done every time these guys basically play the just asking questions routine on socially

00:28:48.220 combustible topics with tens of millions of people listening, right? It's just, it's completely

00:28:54.440 irresponsible. It is genuinely dangerous. It's genuinely corrosive of our culture. It's genuinely

00:28:59.960 misleading of their audience. And because they're not journalists, they feel no responsibility to

00:29:05.860 get their facts straight. They certainly don't correct their errors. And I mean, they don't

00:29:10.000 have the mechanism by which to correct their errors. It's just not...

00:29:12.860 They'll even admit that this might be some tinfoil...

00:29:16.860 I think Theo said that in the middle of this clip. Yeah, like this might be tinfoil hat time.

00:29:20.640 But still, they're still just flicking matches at everything, right? And the worst thing about

00:29:26.180 all of this, is there addiction to a conspiratorial framing of everything? That is, if you can

00:29:33.360 extract any lesson from what's happened to our politics in the last decade and the role that

00:29:40.060 people like Rogan have played in the unraveling of everything and the way in which social media

00:29:46.400 has weaponized all this and the rise of people like Tucker and Candace and Nick Fuentes and

00:29:51.860 And the fact that we've got Trump a second time around and central to all of it is this

00:29:57.280 addiction to conspiracy thinking and contrarianism and, you know, what I've called the pornography

00:30:04.560 of doubt, right?

00:30:05.660 And Joe has been as addicted as anyone and has brought it to scale perhaps more than

00:30:12.740 anyone.

00:30:13.480 And it's totally unprincipled.

00:30:15.980 It is genuinely confusing to millions of people. 1.00

00:30:18.380 I mean, you've got young people getting raised on a diet of this bullshit. 1.00

00:30:22.560 It's divisive. 1.00

00:30:24.000 It amplifies the worst in us.

00:30:26.560 And it's undermining of, you know, yes, our institutions have done something to lose credibility,

00:30:32.940 right?

00:30:33.140 They have become politicized in ways that they shouldn't have become politicized.

00:30:36.400 Yes, all of that's true. 0.93

00:30:37.620 The remedy for that is not a torrent of bullshit from podcasts and the platforming of proper 0.96

00:30:44.600 lunatics and people who think they were denied the Nobel Prize when they have almost no scientific 0.97

00:30:49.760 reputations to protect. No, the remedy is more good science and good journalism and real

00:30:56.260 intellectual integrity and holding institutions to account in serious ways, not spreading lies

00:31:02.780 and half-truths and cockamamie conspiracy theories. And I mean, really, you'd look at that

00:31:08.820 clip of uh joe and theo who are both good guys i mean i mean that what the paradox here for me

00:31:15.220 ethically is that this what i'm talking about is a species of evil right given its consequences

00:31:20.480 it's a species of evil right it's it is like at the top of the list of what ails us in our society

00:31:27.080 it is the thing that is preventing us from solving real problems in this world there's no question

00:31:32.720 it is getting people killed and will continue to get people killed it is absolutely toxic and yet

00:31:38.020 many of the people participating in this are just good guys who are just having fun, who are just

00:31:42.460 entertaining. They think there's no stakes, right? They're just like athletes, right? They're just

00:31:48.220 having fun. They're just playing a game. Joe's just playing a game. But it's a game with real

00:31:52.580 consequences, right? It's like, how would you play tennis if you knew that every time you lost a

00:31:58.880 point, people would die, right? I mean, that's the kind of game that's being played with information

00:32:04.520 now. And so people like Joe and Elon and people who have audiences in the tens and even hundreds

00:32:11.140 of millions have a real responsibility to get their heads out of their asses. And they're not 0.97

00:32:17.600 showing any aptitude for doing that. I'm going to move to another question. I don't like that

00:32:21.940 you seem to use the term woke in the same pejorative way that those on the right do.

00:32:34.520 podcast player.

Making Sense - Sam Harris - April 07, 2026

#468 — More From Sam： Gratitude, Bad Conversations, Conspiracy Addiction, Waffle House Teleportation, and More

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript