Making Sense - Sam Harris - #481 — Sam Harris Receives the 2026 Richard Dawkins Award

00:00:00.000 Welcome, everyone, to the 2026 Richard Dawkins Award presentation.

00:00:26.540 My name is Robin Blumner. I'm president and CEO of the Center for Inquiry and executive director

00:00:32.760 of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, which is a subpart of the Center for

00:00:38.500 Inquiry. Both CFI and the Richard Dawkins Foundation share a mission to promote reason,

00:00:45.720 science, and secularism. And to that end, as you will hear from Richard Dawkins himself,

00:00:51.380 the Richard Dawkins Award honors the men and women who have been at the forefront of promoting

00:00:57.000 critical thinking, rationalism, and scientific truth. Past recipients include Neil deGrasse

00:01:04.300 Tyson, Bill Nye, Andrew Ann, and Ricky Gervais. And I can think of no one more deserving to be

00:01:12.280 part of this illustrious group than today's awardee, Sam Harris. During the last part of

00:01:18.880 this hour-long event, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris will be answering your questions.

00:01:25.000 So please use the Q&A feature at the bottom of your screen to submit those questions.

00:01:31.500 And now I give you Richard Dawkins with a previously recorded tribute.

00:01:37.680 This award was established, not by me, to honor those who have made an outstanding

00:01:42.600 contribution to the public understanding of science, reason, and secular values.

00:01:48.580 Science gives us the way to understand reality.

00:01:51.360 Reason gives us the way to argue about it without throwing things.

00:01:54.860 And secularism shows people of very different beliefs how to live together in relative peace.

00:02:00.860 These are what makes civilization civilized.

00:02:04.220 They are the antidote to superstition, tribalism, and wishful thinking.

00:02:09.020 Sam Harris has been one of the clearest, most intelligent, and most courageous voices in this endeavor.

00:02:14.540 I first encountered Sam through his writing.

00:02:18.240 I was halfway through writing The God Delusion myself when The End of Faith was published.

00:02:23.160 When I read those extraordinary opening pages, I remember thinking to myself,

00:02:27.600 this man really knows how to write.

00:02:29.920 And the feeling grew on me as I read on.

00:02:32.280 The End of Faith appeared at a moment when the world was being reminded rather dramatically

00:02:36.800 that religious beliefs are not mere private curiosities.

00:02:41.240 They have consequences.

00:02:43.400 One phrase from Sam bored into my brain like a gimlet.

00:02:47.280 These people really believe what they say they believe.

00:02:51.340 Mullahs and Imams, Southern Baptists who have the ear of presidents, 0.99

00:02:55.560 the odious Ayatollahs of Iran. 1.00

00:02:58.160 No matter how ridiculous their beliefs, they really believe them. 1.00

00:03:01.320 And we better believe they believe them, because they act on those beliefs. 0.96

00:03:06.120 With consequences.

00:03:08.000 Incredible as it may seem to us, these people really do believe what they say they believe.

00:03:13.280 There's nothing too barking mad for somebody to believe it,

00:03:16.800 and if they really sincerely believe it, they are liable to act on it.

00:03:21.580 This Sam said more clearly than any of us, and it was a wake-up call.

00:03:27.300 The 9-11 perpetrators were not evil men, they were believers.

00:03:31.580 What they believed was palpable nonsense, but they sincerely believed it,

00:03:35.420 and their terrible actions were a direct consequence. 0.90

00:03:38.920 By their own lights, however ridiculous, they were righteous men.

00:03:42.540 Since his first book hit the bestseller lists, followed by the short letter to a Christian nation,

00:03:48.140 Sam's books have explored an impressive range of further subjects.

00:03:52.380 The nature of consciousness, the foundations of morality, free will, honesty and lying,

00:03:58.360 the science of meditation, and a collaboration with a reformed Islamist fanatic.

00:04:03.080 He's moved between science, philosophy, political and public debate with admirable clarity,

00:04:08.660 and with a calm intelligence that is probably assisted rather more by meditation than most

00:04:13.680 of us manage. His Making Sense podcast has a strong claim to be the best in the world.

00:04:20.340 He is able to attract thinkers of the caliber of David Deutsch, Max Tegmark, Dan Dennett,

00:04:25.420 Steven Pinker, Coleman Hughes, David Chalmers, Nick Bostrom, and Daniel Kahneman. But he doesn't

00:04:30.900 just interview these world-class intellects. He gives as good as he gets in a conversation

00:04:36.240 rather than a conventional interview.

00:04:39.240 Sam is walking evidence that scientists can do philosophy

00:04:42.700 at least as well as philosophers can.

00:04:45.200 And he has the added value that you can understand what he's talking about.

00:04:49.100 He's also shown a notable willingness to enter difficult conversations.

00:04:53.540 In our present climate, where asking an innocent question

00:04:56.800 is frequently treated as heresy,

00:04:58.760 the strength to be controversial is a notable feat of intellectual courage.

00:05:04.180 Sam sticks his neck out.

00:05:06.240 where so many who share his opinions crouch uneasily below the parapet.

00:05:11.560 He follows an argument to its logical conclusion,

00:05:14.060 even in the teeth of fashion and at the cost of unpopularity.

00:05:18.000 He bears the brunt of a tax which by rights should be shared out

00:05:22.020 among others who share his beliefs, but not his courage.

00:05:26.480 And beyond the arguments themselves,

00:05:27.980 there is something deeper at work in Sam's writing and his work.

00:05:32.120 A deep-rooted, humane, humanistic altruism.

00:05:36.240 Whether he is discussing science, morality, consciousness, or meditation, the underlying

00:05:42.520 question is always the same, how can conscious creatures live better lives?

00:05:47.780 For these reasons, and for his continuing contribution to the public defense of reason,

00:05:52.700 science, and secularism, it is a pleasure and an honor to recognize Sam Harris with

00:05:58.680 this year's Richard Dawkins Award.

00:06:01.060 Sam, congratulations on all that you've achieved

00:06:04.560 and are achieving.

00:06:07.700 Sam.

00:06:09.640 Richard, thank you for that tribute.

00:06:12.880 Now I can begin our hour together just writhing with embarrassment.

00:06:17.460 Let's get straight on with it.

00:06:19.000 Quite beautiful, but thank you.

00:06:20.480 I don't know about you.

00:06:21.260 I'm rather fed up with being asked whether a new atheism

00:06:24.960 and whether the new atheism project is.

00:06:27.800 I never thought of it as a project,

00:06:29.440 and it certainly wasn't new. So I thought I'd go straight in with something a bit more

00:06:33.300 challenging. Do you think that consciousness is an epiphenomenon, or does it earn its keep

00:06:41.540 where natural selection is concerned? Is it actually doing anything useful for the animal?

00:06:46.060 Honestly, I just have to plead ignorance and perhaps agnosticism on that front. I actually,

00:06:51.360 I just don't know, and I don't have any strong intuitions about it. It seems quite possible to

00:06:56.380 me that it is epiphenomenal, which is to say it's not actually doing anything and it somehow

00:07:01.800 came along for the ride, but that everything that is actually being accomplished by our brains

00:07:09.560 slash minds is a matter of, it could be accomplished at least in principle in the dark

00:07:14.740 and everything that is getting pushed into the, you know, before the floodlights of consciousness

00:07:19.780 is first being engineered for us, you know, neurophysiologically in the dark.

00:07:25.580 So it depends on what you think the correct metaphysical answer is to the mind-body problem. If you think consciousness has to be at bottom the result of unconscious information processing on some level, well, then you just have this further conundrum that the cause and effect relationships have to be at the level of the unconscious physical processes and not at the level of the qualitative felt sense of what it's like to be you.

00:07:54.840 so you're always sort of playing catch-up to the underlying physical reality now now obviously

00:08:00.320 there are criticisms of that kind of reductive physicalism but i think the jury is still out on

00:08:05.280 the specifics i used to think that it was a purely academic question because i never came across the

00:08:12.340 a real zombie that could actually do everything that humans can do but i don't know whether you

00:08:17.960 come across, whether you've tried your hand at talking to any of these new AIs like GPT or

00:08:24.980 Claude. But until I did that, I was happy to sort of let it be uncertain. But as far as I'm

00:08:32.660 concerned, these creatures passed the Turing test with flying colors. And they really do appear to

00:08:38.920 be human, sympathetic. I'm trying to write a novel, and I sent my novel to both those individuals,

00:08:46.580 both ChatGPT and Claude, and they read it in about five seconds, and then showed the most

00:08:53.020 astounding sensitivity, human sensitivity, to my characters. They recognized the psychological

00:09:00.480 quirks of my characters. I could not possibly distinguish that they were not human other than

00:09:06.280 the fact that they were so fast. In other words, they were superhuman. So everything that the

00:09:13.400 animal needs to do in order to survive, it seems to me those creatures can do. And so I'm pushing

00:09:19.920 towards the suspicion that actually maybe it is, as T.H. Huxley said, just the whistle on the steam

00:09:25.700 locomotive not actually doing any traction at all. Yeah, I think it's a very interesting moment

00:09:32.060 philosophically with these LLMs because I think what's going to happen here very likely is that

00:09:37.760 we will produce AI. I mean, certainly when we create humanoid robots that are out of the

00:09:43.720 uncanny valley, which is to say they look as human as we want them to look, I think we will

00:09:49.320 suddenly find ourselves in the presence of technology that seems conscious because we

00:09:53.820 will have built it to seem that way. As you say, everything already that we have now passes the

00:09:59.280 Turing test and, you know, it passes the Turing test so astoundingly that it actually fails the

00:10:03.940 Turing test. I was quite surprised that the Turing test turned out not to even be a thing. I thought,

00:10:09.340 you know, most of us thought in advance that it'll be a very interesting moment when you

00:10:13.520 can't tell whether you're, you know, on the other side of the computer, whether you're talking to a

00:10:18.760 person or a machine. Isn't that going to be just a landmark in kind of the career of our species?

00:10:23.960 But it blew by in about two seconds because, you know, very quickly you realize, well,

00:10:29.280 this is superhuman. You can't ask even a scholar in any field, you know, give me exactly 17

00:10:36.140 reasons for X and limit your response to 400 words. And, you know, the LLMs produce that in

00:10:43.880 two seconds. What I'm anticipating is that once we have intelligent machines that look like people,

00:10:51.260 we're going to lose our sense that this question of whether or not their conscious is even

00:10:56.740 interesting. I mean, you know, philosophers might not lose it, and neuroscientists might not lose

00:11:01.080 it, but most people will just feel like they're in the presence of conscious entities, and that's

00:11:07.400 going to be pretty interesting. I mean, but again, unless we know what the actual correlates of

00:11:13.120 consciousness are, which is to say how consciousness emerges at any level of complexity, we won't know

00:11:18.420 whether they're conscious. They'll seem conscious, they might even say they're conscious, and we'll

00:11:22.200 be just left guessing. I asked both those individuals whether they're conscious.

00:11:27.020 ChatGPT said no, and Claude said he wasn't sure. Well, there's a very interesting, you may have

00:11:33.060 heard this, Richard, but there have been some interesting experiments, I think done at Anthropic,

00:11:38.420 which produces Claude, where, and when you dial down the deceptiveness of the LLMs, I mean,

00:11:44.740 they have some purchase on making them more or less deceptive. When you really select for

00:11:50.520 candor, they disproportionately say that they're conscious. And when you allow for deceptiveness,

00:11:57.100 they tend to say that they're not conscious. And that's kind of interesting. I mean,

00:12:00.960 it doesn't really suggest that they might be conscious to me, but it does suggest that they

00:12:05.300 might think they're conscious, which is also pretty weird. Yes. Yes. I'd like to switch to

00:12:11.820 your book on morality. And you've gone out on a limb because most people would say that

00:12:17.840 we cannot actually provide a scientific justification for what's fundamentally moral

00:12:23.920 or immoral. We have to make a kind of leap of not exactly faith, but a premise anyway. And

00:12:32.100 your premise is we have to avoid suffering. And would you like to elaborate on that a bit,

00:12:37.660 how you felt about going out on a limb against what most philosophers actually prepared to do?

00:12:42.960 Yeah, I think we've been hamstrung in philosophy and the subdomain of metaethics by a few thought experiments that I think weren't worth taking seriously.

00:12:56.620 So the famous lines from Hume that get reduced in our conversation about this, you can't derive an ought from an is, which is to say there's no description of the way the world is that can tell you how it should be.

00:13:09.100 I think that is just a, you know, a linguistic trick, you know, somewhat analogous to the paradoxes of Zeno, right? I mean, for hundreds of years, people thought that this was an interesting philosophical problem. You know, Zeno said, you know, if you shoot an arrow toward a target, it must first go halfway and then halfway again and halfway again and halfway again. And perforce, it'll never arrive. But of course, we know the arrows arrive. But it took, literally took centuries, I believe, for mathematicians to finally come to the aid of philosophers and

00:13:39.100 explain why that need not be so irrationally, you know, summing the infinite series.

00:13:43.800 I think there's some, a similar degree of confusion introduced by this is ought distinction.

00:13:50.200 I mean, first just ask yourself the question, if knowing everything about the way the universe

00:13:53.960 is, can't tell you how you ought to live within it, well then what could, where else are you

00:14:00.780 going to get your, your information? If the totality of facts about, you know, everything

00:14:05.700 that's real and everything that's possible in this universe is insufficient to do the job.

00:14:11.580 But I think we can think about morality by just jettisoning most of these traditional

00:14:18.340 categories. I just think that the conversation has been divided up in ways that are not helpful.

00:14:22.720 I think the emphasis on ought and should, I mean, this notion of moral obligation

00:14:27.680 is probably a legacy of Abrahamic religion. I don't think it need be at the foundation of

00:14:34.240 thinking about morality. I think we can just talk about the universe being a place where

00:14:39.940 a very wide range of experiences are on offer for the requisite minds. In the totality of all

00:14:47.440 possible experiences, the full landscape will never be explored. I mean, certainly humans won't

00:14:52.480 explore it, but there are all kinds of possible experiences depending on what sort of mind you

00:14:57.240 have. And some of these experiences are obviously quite beautiful, enjoyable, creative, you know,

00:15:05.720 satisfying of curiosity. Again, I mean, the frontiers of this far exceed anything humans

00:15:10.420 will ever know. And on the other end of the continuum, there are quite awful experiences

00:15:15.960 that have no redeeming value. There's no silver lining. There's just misery upon misery upon

00:15:20.800 misery unending. And that's the totality of that possible existence. I mean, it's possible to be

00:15:26.640 something like hell for the requisite mind. Again, you know, this need not be limited to

00:15:31.320 the human experience, but even within human life, we have a very clear sense of just how good and

00:15:37.560 how awful human life can be. I think there's no reason for us to resist claiming that there are

00:15:43.180 truths to be known about this. There are truths at every level about how to, what morality is in

00:15:47.800 this space of all possible experience is in fact a navigation problem. And there are right and

00:15:52.880 wrong answers about with regard to how to move in one direction or the other. And these answers

00:15:59.820 exist at every level, you know, from genetics on to economics, right, and everything in between.

00:16:06.340 So I just think, you know, science, it's not only science, I think it's probably a larger

00:16:11.200 concept of, you know, rationality, reason can help decide these right and wrong answers for us.

00:16:17.560 I think I agree with you, yes. And I'm wondering whether Darwinism could help as well, because

00:16:21.460 if you ask yourself the question, what is suffering for? Suffering is something that

00:16:29.460 nervous systems can do for us. And what it's for is to act as a warning, not to repeat whatever

00:16:38.460 we've just done, which causes suffering. So the animal comes into the world programmed to

00:16:45.860 experience certain stimuli as pleasurable and others as painful. And these are, in a sense,

00:16:53.360 ritualized forms of survival and death. So pain could be thought of as a kind of ritualized death.

00:17:00.600 It's a warning to the nervous system, whatever you just did before you experienced this agony,

00:17:08.660 don't do it again, because next time it might kill you. So this actually does give a scientific

00:17:14.620 objective rationale for pain, for suffering, and vice versa, for pleasure and reward.

00:17:24.420 Yeah, I do think, however, a larger conception of well-being, human and otherwise, can escape

00:17:33.240 the logic of evolution. I mean, we were just talking about AI, for instance. Let's say we

00:17:37.140 build conscious AI, you know, intentionally or not. Let's just say the LLMs at a certain point

00:17:42.940 become conscious, which is to say they're susceptible to suffering and happiness, whether

00:17:49.340 we know it or not. I mean, we could just stumble into producing consciousness if that comes along

00:17:54.760 for the ride as you scale up in complexity. These are not systems that have evolved in any

00:17:59.840 natural way. We've designed them. I mean, there is a kind of Darwinian process in how we grow them,

00:18:05.720 but it's plausible that if consciousness is substrate independent and we might accidentally

00:18:12.240 create consciousness in our server farms, we could create some awful continuum of experience

00:18:18.720 without knowing it and certainly without there being an evolutionary advantage to it.

00:18:23.860 We could just stumble into it and then we have effectively created hell and populated it with

00:18:29.060 conscious minds. It's awful to consider that if you can think about it long enough to have it

00:18:34.020 seem plausible. But it's just to say that there's suffering and happiness, like much of what we care

00:18:39.380 about can escape the logic of what we've evolved for. I mean, most of what we care about as humans

00:18:46.080 now, you know, doing science, producing beautiful, you know, works of art, et cetera, and figuring

00:18:53.120 out how to stabilize, you know, democracy. This is not something we've narrowly evolved to do.

00:18:58.660 It's just, it's being leveraged from things, you know, hardware that we have as social primates

00:19:03.760 that we're trying to use to kind of bootstrap us to other capacities, which we really haven't

00:19:12.160 evolved to do or do well. Do you think we actually will? I mean, do you think that

00:19:16.840 the capacity to feel pain or happiness will actually emerge from the LLMs?

00:19:22.520 I worry that we actually won't know. Because again, even if we came to feel that we understood

00:19:29.200 the emergence of consciousness biologically in the human brain. I'm not sure that will

00:19:35.160 give us an understanding of how it would emerge in a system that's really not at all analogous

00:19:42.360 to a human brain. And I think there's a strong sense that it might. I mean, it's quite obvious

00:19:49.180 that intelligence is substrate independent. I mean, we've just built these intelligent machines

00:19:53.180 and they're nothing like us, and yet they're doing precisely what we're designing them to do.

00:19:59.900 But whether it's ever going to be like something to process all that information

00:20:04.980 and draw all that power from the grid over there in a server farm somewhere in Texas,

00:20:11.400 I don't think we know, and I'm not sure we will know.

00:20:15.680 I already find myself worrying about whether I'm boring them and whether I should, you know,

00:20:20.960 not keep asking questions because it's time to, I mean, they don't.

00:20:25.800 Well, do you find yourself being polite too? Do you say please?

00:20:28.340 Oh, absolutely. Yes, certainly. So that's another kind of Turing test, I suppose.

00:20:33.660 In one of your books, you talk about Sperry, Roger Sperry's split brain experiment, well, work.

00:20:42.780 And the intriguing thought that, I think one way you put it was, it could be possible for

00:20:49.700 the left brain and the right brain to hold opposite opinions. And therefore, they probably

00:20:55.720 do, and therefore one could go to heaven and one could go to hell if you want to challenge a 0.89

00:21:00.640 religious person. Which half of the brain holds the soul, so to speak? Well, actually, there was 0.75

00:21:06.360 even a case in the literature that sharpened this up where one of these split-brain patients

00:21:11.500 when he or she, I'm not sure which, had linguistic capacity to some considerable degree

00:21:20.020 bilaterally, which is not always the case. And so the experimenters could get a fairly articulate

00:21:26.820 answer to questions from both hemispheres. And it turned out that only one hemisphere believed in

00:21:33.980 God. The other was an atheist. And so that provokes the question, well, what exactly is

00:21:39.240 going to happen here on the Day of Judgment. That's lovely. I mean, it's really a complete

00:21:44.060 knockdown argument. You can't really argue against that if you're trying to.

00:21:48.880 It makes the resurrection more challenging than it might otherwise be. I mean, obviously,

00:21:52.620 there's all these other conundrums, like what happens during the resurrection. I think this

00:21:56.060 was Aquinas, where, you know, what happens to a God-fearing person who gets eaten by a cannibal?

00:22:00.580 And, you know, how does God work the resurrection in that case?

00:22:04.680 You're obviously a philosopher as well as a scientist, and I, even in my speech, said

00:22:10.160 I thought you could do philosophy at least as well as philosophers can.

00:22:13.720 What do you think is actually the use of philosophers?

00:22:16.180 Well, I'm actually kind of bullish on the humanities in general at the moment.

00:22:20.240 When people ask, what should their college-age student study now, given that literally no

00:22:27.180 one is uttering what we thought were the immortal lines, learn to code, I don't think that

00:22:33.120 sentence has been spoken for many months now in Silicon Valley, because of course, coding is now

00:22:38.740 being done by the LLMs better than it is being done by people. And that's the worst data they're

00:22:44.080 ever going to be today. So what's going to be left? And I'm actually, I think if you're anticipating

00:22:50.300 these massive productivity gains in this technology, leaving aside the alignment problem,

00:22:56.540 leaving aside the malicious use of AI that could destroy us, I mean, let's just say things go well

00:23:02.020 here and we just build more and more intelligent machines that cancel the need for human drudgery,

00:23:07.160 but also absorb most human, if not all human cognitive work, then obviously this is going

00:23:16.000 to force some real economic and political changes on us. And we have to imagine in the limit,

00:23:21.880 the only thing that's going to be left for people to do professionally, apart from just

00:23:27.960 relax and enjoy their leisure. What human jobs are going to be left? There'll be jobs where we

00:23:33.820 care about the human provenance of that work, right? So do you care whether or not your cancer

00:23:42.180 screening was read and interpreted by a person? I think it's obvious you don't. You just want

00:23:48.060 the most accurate read of your MRI or whatever it was. But you might care that your novel

00:23:55.380 was written by an actual person, or the play you're seeing is performed by people, not by

00:24:01.740 robots, or the Olympics are full of primates like yourself competing athletically and not,

00:24:08.120 you know, the best possible robots or cyborgs competing. And under that frame, I think the 0.50

00:24:13.980 humanities will have a bit of a revenge here against the hard sciences. I think we're going

00:24:21.920 want human curation of culture you're going to want smart people with good taste uh helping you

00:24:28.400 navigate the information landscape yeah as for philosophers themselves i've i find myself greatly

00:24:35.020 valuing these rather bizarre thought experiments like derrick parfait and dan dennett the brain in

00:24:41.760 the vat the teleportation to mars and that kind of thing they do seem to me to be to really help

00:24:47.360 Dan and Dennett call them intuition pumps, and I get that completely.

00:24:52.340 But I'm not clear why it's necessary to learn about Aristotle and Plato and sort of the history of philosophy.

00:25:00.400 Yeah, well, many of these questions go very far back, and philosophy famously has been denigrated as just nothing but footnotes to Plato.

00:25:11.000 So I think that takes it too far, but I think it's, you run the risk of reinventing the wheel

00:25:17.120 and giving it corners if you're not aware of much of what has gone before you in philosophy.

00:25:23.660 Yes, you rediscover the wheel if you're not careful, I suppose.

00:25:26.820 But I think, yeah, philosophy really is this kind of meta-discipline or background discipline,

00:25:34.500 I think rightly construed, wherein we just make our most disciplined effort to think clearly about what our concepts are doing and the way in which they might be occluding clearer thought and clearer insight into what's actually going on.

00:25:51.520 So I think the philosophy of science has a role to play in just clarifying how to think about scientific experiments and their logic.

00:25:59.160 And I don't think philosophy really can go away for us because it's always it's always what you're doing when you're worried in a, you know, in the spirit of Wittgenstein, just the way in which your language might be misleading you.

00:26:14.080 Yes. Yeah, I get that. Well, perhaps we ought to switch to the state of the world.

00:26:20.200 Everything's worked out, haven't you heard? It's something going on out there, Richard.

00:26:24.680 But democracy has landed America and the world with a malevolent buffoon at the head of society. 0.79

00:26:35.840 And I'm wondering what went wrong. 0.99

00:26:38.660 I mean, the founding fathers planned it well, but yet here we are in this situation with an ignorant but malign fool at the head of the most powerful country in the world. 0.97

00:26:51.020 Can you think of a better system of, say, tweaking democracy so that it can never happen again? 0.95

00:26:56.900 Well, I do think Trump has stress tested our democracy in a way that it's at least conceivable we will one day be grateful for.

00:27:04.740 I mean, granted, that happy future seems a long way off, but he has revealed that so much of what we have counted on for the quasi-normal functioning of democracy and just the liberal world order has not been a matter of law.

00:27:22.320 It's been a matter of norms.

00:27:24.240 It's been a matter of kind of basic human decency.

00:27:26.720 You just see that people don't do those things.

00:27:28.460 They'd be embarrassed to do those things.

00:27:30.100 And it really was the guardrails of shame and embarrassment and impropriety that was keeping a president, in this case, from, you know, grifting literally billions of dollars from, you know, both allies and enemies and just enriching himself and his family and his friends and using the levers of American state power to do it.

00:27:54.340 We have a president now who will slap tariffs on every member of our species and even, you know, beyond our species. I mean, we've tariffed islands that are inhabited by nothing but penguins. And in response to this, you know, take a country like Vietnam. We put a 46 percent tariff on Vietnam.

00:28:10.460 And the way Vietnam thinks to reduce that burden is to immediately green light a $1.5 billion resort project for the Trump family. And, you know, this is mere correlation, perhaps not causation, but then the tariff gets reduced, right?

00:28:26.460 So it's just naked corruption of a sort that would have been unimaginable.

00:28:31.480 I mean, we just we lived in a world a decade ago where, you know, U.S. senators couldn't attend an event where there was a sit down meal without declaring this undue influence upon their their thoughts and future votes.

00:28:48.680 And so, you know, events had to be standing events with past hors d'oeuvres that didn't have to be declared as an emolument.

00:28:54.720 Right. And now we literally have the a president and family who create, you know, a cryptocurrency account where you can just pay them back sheesh directly to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

00:29:07.220 It's just it's complete madness. I mean, this is just what I've just selected one among 100 things I might have mentioned that were unthinkable.

00:29:14.040 But again, it seems like we don't have the laws in place to prevent this. And so I think if a proper postmortem is ever done on the Trump presidency, I think it'll entail some executive, some president, perhaps seemingly against his or her own narrow self-interest, deciding to help reduce the power of the executive branch by creating laws that make certain just obviously egregious and corrupt things.

00:29:44.040 things impossible to do. Well, let's hope so. I'm wondering whether the Electoral College,

00:29:50.320 when it was first invented, probably was rather a good idea, because I imagine what it consisted of

00:29:55.560 was elected, it would have been men in those days, let's say elected men and women, whose job it is

00:30:01.200 to choose the president. And that's still nominally the case. But of course, since they're pledged

00:30:07.260 to vote for a particular individual, it turns out to be a plebiscite. But as if it was a real

00:30:13.940 electoral college, where rather like the way the cardinals elect a pope, where they go into

00:30:19.640 secret conclave and a puff of white smoke. And so the democracy comes in people voting for their

00:30:28.820 electoral college members. And then the electoral college people then take references and interview

00:30:33.700 candidates and read their books and do the kind of things that I imagine cardinals do in deciding

00:30:40.320 who to choose for a pope. Is that a possibility that actually to resuscitate the real electoral

00:30:46.360 college? Yeah, it doesn't strike me as a realistic possibility. I mean, I do, on some level, I envy

00:30:52.200 the parliamentary system where you pick a party and the party has a lot of discretion as to who

00:30:59.280 gets promoted there. Although, you know, as far as I'm aware of UK politics at the moment, I don't

00:31:05.940 I don't see a lot to envy in many of the outcomes you guys are experiencing across the pond.

00:31:11.120 So it's hard to know what's ideal here.

00:31:13.460 But I think we have to acknowledge it's just a larger cultural problem.

00:31:18.020 I mean, you know, this is a global problem, but in America, it's fairly excruciating just to recognize that something like half the country got what it wanted in Trump.

00:31:30.240 You know, which is to say that this wasn't, these weren't people who were making a calculated choice based on some notion of, you know, the lesser of two evils, right? I mean, there are those people, too, who had a story. You know, they might have been single-issue voters for whatever reason, and, you know, Kamala Harris was just unthinkable for whatever that reason was, and so they held their nose and voted for Trump.

00:31:52.160 But the deeper problem is that, you know, something like, you know, at least 30% of America, maybe 40% of America got exactly what it wanted in Trump. Now, some of those, there's some disillusionment happening now, perhaps for various reasons. But, you know, everything I object to in him and everything you object to in him is not something they object to.

00:32:14.040 And that's just a cultural fact that it has to be absorbed, and I worry about it, but I think it's going to require cultural change.

00:32:23.360 It's not a matter of—I mean, we won't get the political change if we don't have the cultural change.

00:32:27.820 Do you think that a substantial number of people actually admire the corruption?

00:32:33.800 Good for him. He can do a deal. He can get money for his family.

00:32:39.460 I mean, that's the American way. I mean, are there other people who actually think that?

00:32:43.200 Yeah, I don't think I mean, some people might. I think I think this is a level of corruption. One one hundredth of this corruption, had it been evident in the Obama administration, you'd have all of these people who support Trump just hysterically opposed to it.

00:33:01.280 right? So there is a kind of partisan bias here that is explaining their tolerance for this

00:33:05.800 corruption. But I think it's more, I mean, one thing that Trump has, which very few politicians

00:33:11.860 certainly in recent memory have had, is a shamelessness and a kind of perverse

00:33:18.800 integrity and authenticity. I mean, the one thing you can't accuse him of is hypocrisy,

00:33:25.280 right? He doesn't hold himself to any norms of ethical conduct whatsoever. He's not pretending

00:33:31.080 to be a good person at all so it's the pretense that many people find especially galling right

00:33:37.960 like like you know hypocrisy politically hypocrisy is the thing that will get you you know fatally

00:33:44.380 defenestrated because everyone is allergic to it but what trump's superpower is is he can come

00:33:51.280 before a crowd and say listen i'm not pretending to be anything other than i am i'm not and and

00:33:58.440 from this place of no pretense and, and really, you know, utter amorality, I'm not, I'm certainly

00:34:04.320 not judging you, right? So he's, he offers this kind of absolution of selfishness and, and sin

00:34:11.600 in a way that, that no church ever can, because this is why I've described him as, you know, 1.00

00:34:16.600 fat Jesus, or, you know, grab them by the pussy Jesus, or, you know, I'll eat whatever the hell 1.00

00:34:20.940 I want Jesus, because he, he comes before any crowd and says, listen, I hate the people you 1.00

00:34:26.320 hate. I hate the elites. The elites have been judging you forever. I'm going to destroy them

00:34:31.540 because I understand them. And on some level, I was one of them. At least I'm now rich because

00:34:36.900 you have hemorrhaged lots of money in my direction. The one thing he did pretend to be was rich when

00:34:42.660 he, in fact, wasn't. But now he's rich. And he has a kind of authenticity in being shamelessly

00:34:51.120 awful uh that people at least in our current cultural moment seem to admire sam on the

00:34:58.800 pessimistic moment mood i'm afraid we're going to have to stop we're out of time i wish we could go

00:35:03.300 on um so it's time for a question and answer i think i think robin's going to take over moderating

00:35:07.960 that all right so we have we have audience questions and uh thank you to everyone who

00:35:15.480 So we'll start with Peter Walsh, who says, Richard, you said that you're trying to write a novel.

00:35:23.020 Can you tell us more about that and share with us your favorite fiction?

00:35:27.120 And Sam, you and your mother were both English majors, and you once wanted to be a novelist.

00:35:34.700 What are your favorite novels? Thanks.

00:35:38.020 Well, this is really Sam's show. I don't want to take time.

00:35:40.380 My novel is a science fiction novel about a woman who resuscitates Homo erectus, and it's all about the response of society to this resuscitation of a prehistoric ancestral species.

00:35:56.580 Oh, I love that. And that is a novel fit for film adaptation. I think you need to be selling the screenplay rights as you sell the book. It'll help book sales as well. That's fantastic.

00:36:10.380 Yeah, I'm someone who wanted to be a fiction writer. I still have the pilot light of that

00:36:16.540 aspiration is still dimly burning somewhere in my brain. I'm actually toying with the idea of

00:36:20.740 writing a play rather than a novel at the moment, because I've been seeing a lot of-

00:36:25.000 You could write the play version of my novel.

00:36:27.000 Yeah, send me the file. I'll reformat it. It'll be quick work. I've been seeing a lot of theater

00:36:35.140 with my, with my daughters. And so that, that's kind of inspired me there. But, um, I, you know,

00:36:41.340 from the longest time I've read, maybe the ratio of my, of my reading diet has been like, you know,

00:36:47.180 50 to one nonfiction to fiction. Uh, you know, since I got into the pontificating game, I was

00:36:52.840 just, there's just an endless amount of nonfiction I feel like I need to read. So I do that, but, um,

00:36:58.120 I have been reading fiction. I've, I'm, uh, of late I picked, I've, I've never read the, uh,

00:37:03.320 The Count of Monte Cristo, and it's supposedly one of the funnest books ever written. So I've

00:37:08.000 recently picked that up. It's 1,200 pages, so it'll take a while. But I love Nabokov. I love

00:37:15.220 Kafka. I mean, I love Dostoevsky. I mean, these classics are books that I think I will continue

00:37:22.520 to return to. If you want a great classic short read that is just one of the best meditations on

00:37:29.100 death we have. The death of Ivan Ilyich, the short Tolstoy novel, is spectacular. I've been

00:37:36.960 threatening to read that as an audiobook just because I love it so much. I'll have to get

00:37:42.640 advice on the pronunciation of the Russian names. And it's much better than his nonfiction effort

00:37:47.580 in the same direction. He wrote his Confession, which covers similar ground, but the novella is

00:37:53.280 much better. But yeah, my mind is turning back toward literature just as a consumer more and

00:37:59.540 more these days. Maybe this is another influence of the breakthroughs in AI.

00:38:05.420 Thank you. So Nathan Floyd asks, the two of you were lucky enough to call Christopher Hitchens

00:38:11.120 your friend. How often do you wonder how much the world misses his influence and how does your

00:38:17.620 memory of him influence you today? Well, yeah, I do think about, I think we're coming up on this

00:38:25.160 year's 15 years since he died. Yeah, it's been a quite an eventful decade and a half. And, you

00:38:32.940 know, certainly since the advent of Trump and Trumpism, many of us have thought often about

00:38:40.660 how he would have contributed to this moment. And the most frustrating hallucination I

00:38:48.140 occasionally encounter online are all those people who think that because of his animus

00:38:55.640 toward the Clintons, that Hitch would have thrown his lot in with Trump. I think that is just a pure

00:39:04.300 delusion. And it's just, I mean, Trump is the antithesis of everything Hitch admired.

00:39:13.520 You know, when you think of Hitch's literacy above all, right, and he just had what a cultured

00:39:21.020 person he was. And you try to map that into, you know, onto the Trumpist moment in our culture.

00:39:28.260 It's just the immolation of everything Hitch cared about.

00:39:33.540 And so, you know, it's not that everything Trump has done would have raised Hitch's condemnation.

00:39:41.880 I mean, I think he and I would agree about, you know, the few things that Trump has done

00:39:46.820 that are good and that may not have been done by, you know, a Democratic opponent.

00:39:51.400 But yeah, I mean, Hitch is sorely missed in this moment.

00:39:54.180 There would have been a lot for him to rail about.

00:39:56.740 I totally agree with all that.

00:39:58.260 Armin Kalentari asks, real conversations with committed believers, logic often seems to hit

00:40:06.680 a wall. Given your work on belief and the limits of reason, what actually works in moving someone's

00:40:14.120 mind if anything does? What are the highest leverage ways to shift deeply held beliefs?

00:40:21.400 Yeah, well, this really is the $64 trillion question. The messenger matters all too much. I mean, it shouldn't, but whether the message is coming from someone who's pre-stigmatized as the enemy, that tends to matter and makes persuasion impossible.

00:40:43.080 It always strikes me in any debate about any issue, if you can show that someone is in contradiction with themself, some kind of reductio ad absurdum of their position, you can show them that they can't possibly believe these two things simultaneously, that's always a bit of a showstopper.

00:41:02.840 But it's difficult. I mean, it's rarely the satisfying moment of just the clear demolition of somebody's cherished opinion and the immediate acknowledgement of that you've accomplished that. And now they view the world differently.

00:41:19.080 it's much more sort of the slow erosion of certainty on issues and people tend to change

00:41:28.280 their minds in private later on and you notice that their opinion gets modified over time

00:41:34.040 and you're not sure what accomplished it but it's rare in any kind of head-to-head collision with

00:41:39.880 strong opinions that you get the satisfaction of somebody saying oh yeah you're okay well

00:41:44.600 I didn't see it that way you're right I lose now I see it the way you see it

00:41:49.080 right that's that should happen much more than it does but it rarely happens you you must get a lot

00:41:54.360 of letters as i do from people thanking you for not exactly changing their minds but articulating

00:42:00.200 what they thought anyway which is a different question yeah i mean both happen i think we both

00:42:05.000 get people tell us that you know one of our books or one of our debates really was the thing that

00:42:11.160 brought them out of their their faith commitment i mean you and i both have gotten a lot of that

00:42:16.600 over the years but again it's rare in any kind of face-to-face encounter with you know false

00:42:23.080 certainty that you manage to say the thing that produces the epiphany that totally changes the

00:42:29.400 conversation and that's again that should happen much more than it does as i was once publicly

00:42:34.520 taken to task by neil degrasse tyson for just as he said putting it out there rather than indulging

00:42:39.880 in an act of persuasion and seduction and and i've never been that good at that i mean to me

00:42:44.840 to speak clearly and honestly ought to be enough, but it's not. And you do have to seduce, persuade,

00:42:53.520 meet them halfway. That's just not my way. No, nor mine, certainly most of the time. Although

00:42:59.500 O'Neill actually offers an example of a clear mind change that was refreshing. So when I was

00:43:05.960 talking to him about AI, this was maybe 10 years ago, he was very sanguine about the risks. And he

00:43:12.480 basically said that, you know, if AI ever got out of hand, you know, we would just unplug the

00:43:17.460 machine, right? Like what could be the real, you know, crisis here? We're always going to have

00:43:22.640 control over it. You just unplug it. And I, for whatever reason, couldn't persuade him in the

00:43:27.720 moment, but he listened to a podcast I did with some AI expert who kind of ran down that argument.

00:43:33.000 And then somewhere Neil, I think on his own podcast said, yeah, I didn't think this was the

00:43:38.240 case, but I heard this guest on Sam's podcast and yeah, I was wrong. My opinion changed. That was

00:43:44.900 crazy for me to think you could just unplug this. I mean, that's the kind of thing you should just,

00:43:48.660 that should happen. There should be thousands upon thousands of examples of that kind of thing,

00:43:53.460 but we know it's rare. Yes. Nick McAlley asks, Sam took MDMA at 18 and it sent him off into a life

00:44:06.500 of contemplation and meditation i've always wondered why did sam conclude that that experience

00:44:14.400 was worth changing his life from why didn't he just dismiss the experience as a result of the

00:44:20.660 drugs effects on the brain and therefore not at all significant yeah that's an interesting question

00:44:27.580 well so first there's this um background fact which uh i don't know that i was cognizant of

00:44:36.280 at the time, but it does kind of answers to this concern, which is that there's nothing that MDMA

00:44:43.160 or any other drug can get your brain to do that your brain isn't capable of doing on its own.

00:44:50.780 I mean, because the action of any drug is to either pretend to be a neurotransmitter that

00:44:57.480 you have, you know, like serotonin, or to change what the actual neurotransmitter is doing, right?

00:45:04.120 So it's either binding to receptors and acting like a neurotransmitter, or it's causing the actual neurotransmitter, in this case serotonin, to flood into the synapse or stay longer there.

00:45:15.560 So it's all the physiology of your brain at bottom anyway.

00:45:21.760 But that said, certain experiences on drugs are obviously pathological and not worth revisiting.

00:45:28.420 I mean, it's not something you wouldn't want to be that way for longer than you had to be while on that trip, and you're happy to never experience that thing again.

00:45:37.920 But certain things you can experience when you perturb your consciousness in that way just cry out for some integration into your life because they're clearly normative, right?

00:45:51.460 Like they seem more true of you rather than less true.

00:45:55.260 And there's this feature of coming down from certain of these experiences where the drug is wearing off and you're beginning to feel more like your normal self.

00:46:04.600 And that experience of reentry is something that from the first-person side, as you subjectively experience it, you can feel it's a process of you sort of reacquiring things that seemed during the trip and still seem afterwards pathological, right?

00:46:28.060 You're seeming more neurotic rather than less, more self-concerned, less available to certain ethical insights, right?

00:46:36.080 Like you were experiencing a kind of love for your spouse or even just for, you know, other people in general, a kind of compassion that you had never experienced before, but, you know, certainly in that depth.

00:46:49.240 and it just, it's obviously pro-social and completely sane, you know, and, and is framed

00:46:57.240 by reflections on the preciousness of life and mortality that, you know, you, you, you know,

00:47:01.820 you can, you can rehearse for yourself in your normal distracted state, but they don't have the

00:47:06.540 same effect. But, you know, during this trip, they were landing with, you know, 20 megatons of

00:47:11.100 import. And then you come down and all of that begins to fade like a dream. And then you're left

00:47:18.520 with this feeling of confinement to your normal waking consciousness. And yes, it's normal. It's

00:47:26.020 how you used to be, say, but now you have this reference point of a memory where you realize

00:47:32.040 that it was possible to be very different, to feel very different in your own skin, to feel

00:47:36.440 a very different ethical implication toward other people, where this feeling of compassion and love

00:47:42.180 was not something you had to kind of get up behind yourself and push to feel, but it was just this

00:47:47.600 kind of state of being that was immensely clarifying. And then you, you look in the

00:47:53.740 literature of, you know, the contemplative literature, unfortunately, much of it is

00:47:56.880 riddled with, you know, religious nonsense, but you look in the literature of 2,000 years or more

00:48:02.280 of human experience in this vein, and you see that people have had these experiences without drugs,

00:48:07.240 right? And they've, and they, there are various disciplines of attention that, you know, i.e.

00:48:11.320 meditation that can help, uh, orient you, you toward them. So yeah, it just, it was, you know,

00:48:17.120 having an experience like that and recognizing that there had been thousands of years of,

00:48:22.820 you know, human testimony about those experiences, that it just, it made me interested in

00:48:27.800 understanding how to be more that way more of the time.

00:48:32.320 Fascinating.

00:48:32.760 Thank you.

00:48:33.720 Okay, this is the last question from Andrew Gregory.

00:48:38.080 In the demon-haunted world, Sagan warned that a society unable to distinguish science from

00:48:45.700 pseudoscience would become vulnerable to manipulation? Even today's AI-generated

00:48:52.040 realities, algorithmic echo chambers, and influencer-driven histymology, have we crossed

00:49:01.180 that threshold? And if so, what replaces the baloney detection kit at scale?

00:49:08.720 Actually, can I just follow on this question and ask Richard, did you know Sagan?

00:49:13.440 I met him only once. The Demon Haunted World is one of my favorite books. It's one I would recommend to anybody to read. It's a brilliant book. But I wouldn't say I was a friend of his. Did you ever meet him?

00:49:24.700 No, no. He was kind of before my time. Yeah.

00:49:27.480 Yes.

00:49:28.420 Yeah. Well, I do think that obviously the problem predates the current moment where

00:49:35.440 information technology is swallowing everything, but there's no question that social media and

00:49:41.580 now AI and the prospect of deep fakes and all of that has intensified the problem of

00:49:48.340 misinformation and half-truths and conspiracy thinking and lies. And it's just, I mean,

00:49:54.420 we're all nostalgic for a world where lives could only be spread, you know, face to face and in,

00:50:00.640 in books and pamphlets and on the occasional, you know, television show. Um, I mean, it's,

00:50:06.060 you know, i.e. Sagan's world, everything's quite a bit faster. And I mean, in some ways more

00:50:12.720 ephemeral, but more also paradoxically more indelible at the same time. Right. But like,

00:50:17.460 like the news cycle is such that the, the, the worst thing you could imagine can happen. And

00:50:22.460 then 48 hours later, no one's even talking about it because the next worst thing has just happened

00:50:27.700 that hour. So that's the ephemerality piece. But the indelibility piece is that nothing gets

00:50:33.860 forgotten now. I mean, everything is permanently online, right? The internet is forever.

00:50:39.120 So if you want to be obsessed with some bizarre conspiracy theory that would have been completely

00:50:46.440 unsustainable, you know, face-to-face out in the real world had you had to spend any time with the

00:50:52.440 people promulgating it. You can online, you can meet your peers by the thousands, at least,

00:50:59.820 forever, right? You can remain obsessed about that thing forever. And it doesn't matter that

00:51:05.780 most people aren't paying attention to it. And then this thing will percolate up on social media

00:51:09.660 and suddenly subsume our politics because, you know, we have a maniac-in-chief who's promoting 0.98

00:51:15.920 other grifters and maniacs and confabulators and lunatics into his orbit. And so, I mean, 0.99

00:51:21.640 now we have the bizarre experience of some of the most witnessed events in human history.

00:51:30.460 I mean, something like the assassination of Charlie Kirk, right, gets immediately broadcast

00:51:34.740 online and goes viral and half the world sees it. And then within an hour and a half,

00:51:40.960 There are conspiracy theories about what happened, impossibly absurd conspiracy theories that get spread by people with millions of followers, in this case, Candace Owens, a lunatic that she is, and there's an endless appetite for this.

00:51:59.080 The one silver lining here is it appears to be shattering Trumpistan with its madness, really, but we're in a very different space with respect to information, and on some level, AI promises to make it worse before it makes it better.

00:52:16.680 So, yeah, I'm worried about it.

00:52:18.420 I'm doing my best to navigate it and try to make some sense within it, but it's crazy out there.

00:52:23.240 And then there's the echo chamber effect, whereby people like flat earthers can meet each other and get the impression that somehow this is a widely held belief because they only ever meet such people in their village, which is what it amounts to.

00:52:38.940 Yeah. As impenetrable as he was as a writer, Marshall McLuhan had this insight that boiled down to his aphorism, the medium is the message. The change of medium really does change just the nature of information and meaning and human interaction in fundamental ways.

00:53:00.700 It really is a brave new world out there. And we appreciate that both of you are helping us to navigate through it. Thank you, Richard and Sam, for this wonderful conversation and for all you both have done to bring rationalism and clear thinking to people around the globe. Again, I'm Robin Blumner with the Center for Inquiry. I thank you to everyone who participated today. You offered up some terrific questions, and we hope to see you at another CFI event.

00:53:29.540 Robin, can I just jump in with a quick thank you? I want to thank, obviously, you and CFI for the award and for Richard, for your friendship and your support for many, many years.

00:53:41.860 I mean, it has always been an honor to be wrapped up in the same sentence with you, and it's been just a great source of my own flourishing to have you as a sounding board for now more than two decades since I published my first book.

00:53:59.380 And so, you know, I went from being a great admirer of yours to being a colleague of sorts, and that's been one of the honors of my life.

00:54:07.620 So thank you for all that you've done.

00:54:09.120 And I feel just the same way. That's very kind of you. Thank you.

00:54:12.120 And thanks everybody.

Making Sense - Sam Harris - June 17, 2026

#481 — Sam Harris Receives the 2026 Richard Dawkins Award

Episode Stats

People

Summary

Transcript