Making Sense - Sam Harris - #482 — More From Sam： The Iran Deal, College in the AI Age, Mamdani's DSA, and More

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00:00:24.840 Welcome back to another episode of More from Sam.

00:00:27.800 Hello, Sam.

00:00:28.640 Hey, good to see you.

00:00:30.000 Good to see you as well. This time we're not taping live in front of subscribers. I'm traveling and

00:00:34.900 didn't want the stress of whether the internet would hold. So if you're hearing this, obviously

00:00:40.060 it did. Making Sense community now has over 26,000 people in it and it's humming along nicely.

00:00:45.560 I really enjoyed many of the exchanges with so many thoughtful people there. Everyone has been

00:00:50.060 behaving and I think it's because they too wanted to see this succeed and you've been getting some

00:00:54.020 good feedback and pushback in there. It's definitely not been an echo chamber.

00:00:59.760 No, no worries of that.

00:01:01.660 No, and you've been in there quite a bit yourself.

00:01:04.540 It's almost like an Easter egg where I'm reading a thread and then I see a comment from you.

00:01:08.900 We don't have a follow feature, and I think that works out better because we didn't want

00:01:12.960 to build this community to be dependent on you, and it certainly hasn't been.

00:01:16.700 So for today's episode, I'm going to try something a little different.

00:01:19.620 Rather than running down a bunch of topics related to the news cycle, I'm going to grab

00:01:23.320 a sampling from the posts in our community and get you to comment on them here.

00:01:29.080 We'll also get your reactions to the Iran deal, whatever's happening over there, and to whatever

00:01:34.060 current events are necessary. So for those of you who are looking for that, don't worry.

00:01:38.820 And just a quick note before we get going, if you want to join community or become a subscriber to

00:01:42.800 the podcast, you can find subscription options by going to samharris.org slash subscribe.

00:01:49.200 Okay, let's get started. One world government. Is global political unification inevitable?

00:01:54.620 and would it be good? Should nation states eventually operate the way U.S. states do

00:01:59.880 under a federal umbrella? Yeah, actually, this is not something I've thought about recently,

00:02:04.880 but now that you mention it, this is probably something I've changed my mind about. I think in

00:02:09.120 my first book, The End of Faith, I wrote somewhere, probably in an end note, that it was just obvious

00:02:14.860 that the end game for civilization is some version of one world government. What we want

00:02:20.420 in the end, if things work out, is for the prospect of war between China and the U.S.,

00:02:27.180 say, to be just as ridiculous and therefore unthinkable as the prospect of war is now

00:02:32.040 between Vermont and Massachusetts, right? It's like, it's just not going to happen. Nobody's 0.93

00:02:36.360 worried about it. And that's the case because they're unified under a single government that

00:02:43.600 has a monopoly on the use of force. So something like that for the entire world must be where

00:02:49.940 we're headed unless we're going to keep killing one another i don't think i believe that now or

00:02:56.180 if i if i do believe it i think that goal is far enough away and you're quixotic enough that

00:03:02.340 you really can't argue for it in the current environment the idea that you know in our case

00:03:08.440 the united states could ever be truly subordinate to the political whims of of uh europe or or you

00:03:15.920 say nothing of going further afield and greater cultural distance from us. Our own society is so

00:03:24.860 dysfunctional politically at this point that the idea of a global version of this just seems

00:03:30.300 genuinely unthinkable to me. You don't think some super AGI of some kind would be able to

00:03:36.880 solve that for us? Or you're saying maybe? Well, I could imagine the dystopian version of this,

00:03:43.540 One world totalitarianism, tech enabled, I could well imagine that being in our future. But in terms of a desirable future where we realize that we've converged so fully on our cultural priorities that we're just going to un-Brexit the whole world because it's just obviously good and we really trust our brothers and sisters over there in Belgium and Congo and everywhere else.

00:04:13.380 I mean, it's just, it's not going to happen in the lifetime of, of, uh, our children or their

00:04:18.560 children or any of their robots. I just don't, don't see it. Really? You just, you really think

00:04:23.420 there's just no version where AI comes up with like all the best answers and we've all just

00:04:27.380 gathered around and said, Oh my God, this is just, this is not comparable. You can't, if you're going

00:04:31.900 to put it all on AI, then successful, perfect super intelligence that then I really don't know

00:04:38.000 what the world looks like. I mean, then, and the whole thing perhaps becomes a self-driving car

00:04:42.220 and we forgot we ever wanted a steering wheel. But the dystopian versions of something like that

00:04:47.840 are, I think, so much more numerous and easier to think about that I just don't see us overcoming

00:04:55.220 our political fragmentation to a degree that makes even the aspiration for one world government

00:05:01.880 something that you can talk about with a straight face. Okay, next topic. Are you a hard materialist

00:05:07.040 or do you leave room for genuinely unexplained phenomena? How do you handle people you trust

00:05:11.700 who report experiences science can't account for.

00:05:14.960 Well, those aren't mutually exclusive.

00:05:16.200 You could be a hard materialist

00:05:17.360 and freely acknowledge that they're unexplained phenomena, right?

00:05:21.100 You just think that the explanation,

00:05:23.900 should we find it,

00:05:25.000 will resolve itself within the materialist frame, right?

00:05:29.680 So it's just not,

00:05:31.060 I don't think there's anyone who's denying

00:05:32.540 that they're unexplained phenomena.

00:05:34.980 I'm not a hard, I mean, I wouldn't consider,

00:05:36.780 I'm certainly open-minded with respect to some other ontology

00:05:40.580 other than materialism. It's more commonly called physicalism at this moment. To remind people,

00:05:47.380 if you're a physicalist, you think that we live in a physical universe and that everything,

00:05:51.960 including minds and their subjective experiences, are by some mechanism we don't currently

00:05:59.380 understand emergent properties of all of those physical forces and structures that really exist

00:06:05.060 out there in the world. I think it's totally plausible that physicalism, as currently thought

00:06:11.720 about, can't explain consciousness in particular, and that consciousness either is just something

00:06:17.860 we can't understand in terms of normal physical reductionism, or it requires some other discussion

00:06:25.320 about what is real. And maybe everything that we're considering physical has some mental

00:06:30.900 properties or some interior dimension on some level. But if it is just, in fact, the case that

00:06:37.420 there's really just a universe of, quote, physical, you know, and insentient fields and forces and

00:06:45.160 consciousness emerges out of some combination of, you know, blind, unconscious events,

00:06:52.840 you know, information processing or otherwise, that may in fact be true. That's not an explanation

00:06:57.920 that is ever going to be intelligible to anyone.

00:07:00.280 So I think the hard problem of consciousness

00:07:01.560 is very real intellectually.

00:07:03.500 And I don't know what the answer is to it.

00:07:05.300 So I don't know.

00:07:06.600 I can't say I'm a, quote, a hard materialist.

00:07:09.460 I simply don't know how consciousness emerges

00:07:12.800 out of the physics of things.

00:07:14.960 All right, I'm way out over my skis, so we're moving on.

00:07:17.400 Does philosophy deserve its prestige

00:07:19.060 or is it mostly sophisticated opinion-making?

00:07:22.120 Where's the line between genuine intellectual rigor

00:07:24.580 and pseudoscientific hand-waving

00:07:26.420 dressed up in academic jargon. I feel like that question has it backwards. I don't think

00:07:32.340 philosophy has much prestige in, neither in science nor in popular culture does, you know,

00:07:42.520 certainly a degree in philosophy give you much gravitas, right? That's not, I mean,

00:07:46.640 when on the list of, on the short list of useless degrees or degrees that are imagined to be useless

00:07:53.080 by entrepreneurs and academics and, you know, just toss one out there.

00:07:57.940 Philosophy is usually on the tip of everybody's tongue.

00:08:00.640 I mean, they just like, you're going to get a degree in gender studies or, you know, I

00:08:05.900 don't know, dance or philosophy.

00:08:08.480 Basket weaving.

00:08:09.360 Yeah. 0.98

00:08:09.740 So as to be unemployable.

00:08:11.200 I think it's actually one of the best degrees and selects for some of the best people in

00:08:17.740 a university campus.

00:08:19.500 And I think that's been true for a very long time.

00:08:21.500 But increasingly, I think it's one of the best degrees if you want to be a generalist

00:08:27.900 who can just think clearly and write clearly and speak clearly.

00:08:31.520 I just think it's good training for all of that.

00:08:34.500 Under the shadow of AI, I think it only becomes a better degree rather than worse.

00:08:39.080 I think it becomes more practical.

00:08:41.060 I mean, we've talked about this.

00:08:42.200 I just think we're going to want the human curation of digital products ultimately more

00:08:47.520 and more.

00:08:47.840 If anyone's going to be left standing, it's going to be the massage therapists and the people with good taste intellectually who can kind of point in the right direction toward the robots that make more sense rather than less sense.

00:09:00.300 I mean, I've always felt it was a good degree to get and prepared you for anything else that you might want to do pretty well, even if you're going to go into science.

00:09:09.700 Because when you go into science at the graduate level, you basically have to relearn everything anyway.

00:09:14.660 I mean, you take all the same basic courses to get started.

00:09:17.580 So, yeah, I don't think it has much gravitas. I think it should have more. It's true that it depends what philosophy you focused on. I think there are corners of philosophy that are just word salad or mostly word salad. And yeah, those are, I think, rightly denigrated. But yeah, I've averted my eyes from most of that stuff.

00:09:38.460 All right. Thanks for that. Why are we here? Can you live a genuinely examined life without

00:09:44.180 arriving at a satisfying answer to that question? Or is the asking itself the point? Or is neither

00:09:50.080 the point? I think it's the wrong question. I don't think you can extract much of value out of

00:09:56.200 that question. It's certainly not the question that science asks. I mean, it's much more of a

00:10:02.340 how question. How are we here? How did this happen? That's a scientific question. The why

00:10:08.200 question attributes a or seeks to attribute a reason behind all of this and perhaps an intention

00:10:14.120 it's a very theistic framing of the nature of the problem what about the what what is the meaning of

00:10:20.380 life well again that just sort of smuggles in the same question under what it's um there need not be

00:10:26.780 a meaning to life it's just why should there be you know without people you would never be tempted

00:10:34.500 to ask that question it's like you know just let's say people become extinct you know there's

00:10:39.820 just a world filled with with non-human animals you know look at look at that creation look at

00:10:47.440 the wolves and the owls and the cockroaches you would never be tempted to wonder well what is the

00:10:52.820 what's the meaning of this you know why did this happen it's interesting it's no less interesting

00:10:59.300 to consider how it happened and what's actually happening and but um purpose that's just it's a

00:11:05.760 very anthropomorphic lens to look at all of this through there's just the fact that the cosmos

00:11:12.720 exists and you are part of it right and the whoa like why ask why in the face of that mystery the

00:11:20.600 mystery isn't resolved let me just imagine the answer that if you could believe it if an answer

00:11:26.260 were given to you, would it really resolve that mystery? You know, if a voice boomed out of the

00:11:31.360 heaven saying, oh, why? Because I wanted to, or why? Because this is what I thought was beautiful.

00:11:36.180 Does that really answer anything? Certainly just, it just throws up more questions than you want to

00:11:39.980 ask that maniac in the sky, you know, what about smallpox? It can't possibly satisfy that it's not

00:11:46.000 going to scratch the itch that anyone thinks it's going to scratch. So what is the right question to

00:11:50.520 ask, or is there just no question to ask? Yeah, I think that, I think this questioning mode,

00:11:54.980 So the emotional question, you know, the feeling that there's a problem here emotionally that has to be solved, you know, on the other side of which your happiness and tranquility will be found, that's an illusion and that's the cramp introduced by the question itself, right?

00:12:09.960 I mean, that's a failure of your attention to actually contact the mode of feeling good enough in the present moment, right?

00:12:18.620 Like you're distracted enough, you don't recognize thoughts as thoughts, you don't recognize any space around thoughts.

00:12:24.980 you don't know how to meditate, you don't know what your mind is really, you know, you're just

00:12:28.580 being used by it in each moment, you know, you're effectively asleep and dreaming, and now you're

00:12:34.840 dreaming that you're sitting in a classroom wondering, you know, what's the point of it all?

00:12:38.560 It's not the place from which you're going to answer this question, and it's not the place

00:12:42.180 where you could receive an answer that would be satisfying. I mean, your problem is you just don't

00:12:46.660 feel as good as you might feel if you paid closer attention to what it's like to be you in each

00:12:52.700 moment, right? If you broke the spell of your identification with thought, it can actually

00:12:56.880 rest, right? And you glimpse that kind of experience, you know, when you, you know,

00:13:03.220 are really working out hard or, you know, thrown into the, in some, you know, collision with the

00:13:09.780 beauty of nature or you're having sex or you're, you know, appreciating art or something has moved

00:13:15.640 you out of yourself and, or you've taken the right drugs, right? Something has placed you in

00:13:20.940 a quote non-ordinary state of consciousness or a peak experience and then you just this you've

00:13:27.060 forgotten you've certainly forgotten this question you're not asking any questions you're just

00:13:30.420 you know if the mind is going to come online again at that moment it's going to you'll be

00:13:35.700 asking questions like well why can't i feel like this more of the time or how do i maintain this

00:13:40.000 experience or maybe you know is it possible to to move here where they i can have this beautiful

00:13:45.220 beautiful view of the ocean or like the thing you think you that has moved you into that

00:13:51.600 profound embrace of the present moment you think it's exogenous to yourself right again it's the

00:13:57.900 landscape or it's the relationship or it's the you know whatever it is that the fun you're having

00:14:02.280 in the company of friends it's you're going to attribute that as its cause and then you'll be

00:14:08.220 left thinking how can i get more of that and again that's a failure to understand the attentional

00:14:12.980 basis of these changes and experience. So how do you answer this question if your seven-year-old

00:14:18.900 nephew says, Uncle Sam, why are we here? What is the purpose of all of this?

00:14:25.680 Then I would say, I don't know, but the mystery isn't the problem. And the mystery can be the

00:14:33.020 source of a very fun exploration of the world, right? That's everything, whether you're going

00:14:38.780 to explore the mountains, or you're going to explore a jungle, or you're going to explore

00:14:42.760 science. Your curiosity is not something you're ever going to get rid of. Curiosity is not a

00:14:49.680 problem. All right. In a recent episode of Making Sense, Noah Smith says, fixing the debt means

00:14:54.900 cutting healthcare for the poor while the wealthy give up a vacation or two. Is that the, we're all

00:15:00.460 in this together, or is it obscene? And is this exact frustration what's actually driving the

00:15:07.720 populist wave. I guess I don't understand the connection there. We think the populist wave

00:15:12.960 might, you're asking whether wealth inequality is driving populism? Well, he's saying in the

00:15:16.920 recent episode, I believe the question is, is that when Noah was talking about saying, look,

00:15:21.520 we're all going to have to be in this together, the poor are going to have, not the poor, but the

00:15:25.360 middle class are going to have to handle this and the wealthy are going to have to give up a vacation

00:15:29.080 or two. And he's, I think he's, the question is, is that really what it means? We're all in this

00:15:34.220 together that the wealthy are going to have to give up a vacation or two and that's i forgot he

00:15:38.020 said that i mean i would quibble with the definitions of the cohorts here i mean the wealthy

00:15:42.280 when you're talking about the wealthy you're talking about well the people who are not going

00:15:45.640 to give up anything right no matter how much we tax them they're not going to have to give up a

00:15:50.920 vacation or two i would draw the line at wealth where you're not you're there's not a conceivable

00:15:57.120 change in your style of living that could matter i mean that most of your money is always just

00:16:03.360 going to be numbers on a spreadsheet. It's never going to be implicated in how you spend your

00:16:08.940 money, right? Those are the truly wealthy people in our society. The question I think is directly

00:16:14.040 toward those people. Why can't those people bear more of the burden? I think what Noah was saying

00:16:19.580 though, is that even if you manage to tax those people quite onerously, it's still not enough

00:16:26.580 money, right? Like the middle class is going to have to pay more in taxes too, right? And the

00:16:31.600 almost wealthy, the people who will feel it. We're not going to tax our way successfully out

00:16:39.320 of a $40 trillion hole. And I think he was saying, as many people have, that really it's going to

00:16:45.480 require growth and inflation to get us out as well. You can't redistribute your way out of it,

00:16:51.620 but there's going to have to be a fair amount of redistribution too.

00:16:56.660 A 26-year-old is about to start medical school and wondering if it's a mistake. In eight years,

00:17:01.440 will there still be a meaningful role for human physicians or is this the wrong career bet at the

00:17:07.080 worst possible moment? It seems as good a bet as any, really. I mean, if you're going to worry that

00:17:13.640 being a doctor is a dead end now, I think almost everything else is on that list at the same level

00:17:22.500 as it's just as likely that there will be no lawyers and there'll be no, you know, even,

00:17:28.320 you know, CEOs of companies, right? It's like, do you want to found a company? Well,

00:17:32.860 what's to say that two years from now, that company won't even be more successful if a

00:17:37.080 robot were running it, right? So it's not, I think, I don't think you can close the door on

00:17:41.700 most professions like that at this point. It's just that there's going to be some way of being

00:17:45.900 a doctor and using all the AI tools. And if there's not, there's going to be some role for

00:17:52.260 a person who almost became a doctor to use those, you know, use these tools better than

00:17:56.880 most other people. I mean, there has to be some human layer to this. Otherwise, we're going to

00:18:03.420 have to solve everybody's problem all at once by just spreading the trillions of dollars around

00:18:09.360 that the robots have produced for us. So it's, yeah, I mean, I can't say that you should be

00:18:15.020 pessimistic about whether being a doctor is even going to be a thing in a few short years,

00:18:19.560 because if that happens, basically everything is gone, I would say.

00:18:24.340 Well, but if the doctors are gone, that's probably, I mean, there's an upside to that

00:18:27.960 or a silver lining as well.

00:18:29.460 That would mean that.

00:18:30.320 Yeah.

00:18:30.720 Well, but again, then we have to confront this at every level of employment, right?

00:18:35.680 It's just, I mean, again, there'll be a few things that are probably more impervious than

00:18:40.080 being a doctor.

00:18:40.680 Again, things like being a massage therapist or, you know, something where you could just,

00:18:45.180 there's this categorical difference between whether there's a human doing it or a robot

00:18:48.920 doing it.

00:18:49.520 And it's, you could imagine a preference for humans.

00:18:52.340 But I mean, now that, I mean, maybe even that is not real, that preference.

00:18:57.100 I can just imagine where people would want the, uh, the analog version still, and they'd

00:19:00.880 want their doctor to show up with the black bag coming over like they used to many years

00:19:05.540 ago.

00:19:06.100 All right.

00:19:06.440 With AI reshaping every career path, this is a related question.

00:19:09.900 Is a six-figure degree still a reasonable bet?

00:19:13.200 Uh, I hope so.

00:19:14.420 I mean, just culturally, it seems like we want, we want our kids to still have that

00:19:19.760 experience.

00:19:20.560 There's something great about the college experience because it gives you four years to be a student and to just be interested in anything that you find interesting and to be surrounded by people doing the same thing.

00:19:35.640 It's not that there's no pressure, but it's a very specific type of pressure.

00:19:39.000 It's not the pressure to make your life work out in the world.

00:19:41.780 It's not the pressure to find a career immediately.

00:19:44.700 It's, it's a very, it's a very useful crucible and it's over far too fast for most kids,

00:19:51.480 I think.

00:19:51.840 And it's, um, I mean, just culturally, I think it's valuable.

00:19:54.500 I mean, there are other things that are valuable that, you know, I haven't experienced it like,

00:19:57.700 you know, being in the military, I'm sure is valuable and is, is, um, you know, imparts

00:20:03.220 its own lessons for people.

00:20:04.980 And I think probably having mandatory public service that we, we, you know, we've never

00:20:09.520 had in my lifetime, which you can certainly make the case that that would be a good thing

00:20:14.100 for our society, as a way of overcoming hyper-partisanship and building culture intelligently

00:20:21.300 and intentionally. But I think college is very useful for some people. You can certainly

00:20:29.800 make the case that we have a lot of miseducated people out there now starting to run our

00:20:35.740 institutions, right? I'm sure we'll get into the Zoran Mamdani of it all. But I mean, the people 1.00

00:20:41.920 who are finding the democratic socialists of America to be credible voices for the future

00:20:48.020 of democratic politics, I mean, all of that's frankly terrifying and it is, you know, perfectly

00:20:54.260 correlated with being a miseducated dummy coming out of a school like Columbia, right?

00:20:59.500 So it's like, it's possible for the whole college experience to sum to something that's

00:21:05.260 truly embarrassing intellectually and morally.

00:21:08.300 But in the general case, I just don't think that's the outcome and shouldn't be.

00:21:14.880 And we can certainly guard against it.

00:21:16.360 And I think it's, if not college, I do think we want a stage in life that's kind of, you

00:21:23.460 know, a monastic immersion in the good parts of culture for people.

00:21:28.960 I think that's good.

00:21:30.780 So I wasn't planning to bring up Mondani, but do you want to get into that now?

00:21:34.480 Members can hear the full conversation by subscribing at SamHarris.org.

00:21:39.280 Subscribers get a private RSS feed you can use with your favorite podcast player.

Making Sense - Sam Harris - June 25, 2026

#482 — More From Sam： The Iran Deal, College in the AI Age, Mamdani's DSA, and More

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