Making Sense - Sam Harris - #486 — Luck All the Way Down

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00:00:22.940 i am here with katherine page harden page thanks for joining me thank you for having me it's been

00:00:29.480 a while it's been six years i know which is like five minutes and in a lifetime yeah the last six

00:00:35.520 years crazy well so i went uh as you know i sent you an email yesterday not wanting to ambush you

00:00:41.280 with um my recent uh adventures in in um reviewing our previous podcast so we we spoke six years ago

00:00:49.180 basically a full two years after this major controversy that i had with um having had

00:00:55.920 Charles Murray on my podcast talking about race and IQ, that anodyne topic that provokes no

00:01:02.080 controversy at all. Yeah, easy, light. And to remind people, my interest there was not in the

00:01:09.100 topic, but in the fact that here's a guy who wrote a book on the topic and 25 years later, he's being

00:01:14.420 physically assaulted on a college campus for talking about a different book. And it just

00:01:19.380 seemed to typify where free speech and tolerance and moral panic was going at that moment. And

00:01:25.900 And so I wanted to do a postmortem there and did and put this in the in the no good deed goes unpunished category.

00:01:33.340 But, you know, for my troubles there, I got castigated as a racialist, pseudoscientist, you know, dupe of Charles Murray's in so many words.

00:01:42.740 And part of that criticism came from you and your colleagues, Eric Terkheimer and Richard Nisbet in the pages of Vox.

00:01:51.120 And Ezra Klein published that and then gave it lots of topspin with his own op eds.

00:01:55.380 We got into a big fight by email that spilled out into public. He came on my podcast and, you know, paragon of wokeness that he was at the time, he had counted the black and brown faces of the people I had interviewed in my catalog up until that point and found the ratio wanting and emblematic of my own racism, however, unacknowledged.

00:02:14.240 I don't know if you followed any of this, but he recommended that I read closely the work of Ibram X. Kendi at the time to perform an exorcism on my brain. Kendi, to my lights, who is a man who, if it wasn't obvious at the time, it is now as a kind of, you know, race hustler and academic imposter.

00:02:31.560 But this is all to say that it was a very fraught time. And you came on my podcast two years later to just, we kind of processed it. And I thought we had a really good conversation. I did then. I went back and listened to it yesterday. And it was, I think it's still a good conversation. I invite people to go listen to it.

00:02:50.800 It was a bit of a tightrope walk for me.

00:02:55.340 I felt in listening to it again that you were kind of gaslighting me to the degree that you seemed oblivious as to how I could have wound up on the hate watch page of the Southern Poverty Law Center for the kinds of things that had been said about me in the aftermath of that podcast with Charles Murray and any contribution you made to it.

00:03:13.540 and then I just happened to see in my email that Gideon Lewis Krause, who profiled you in The New

00:03:21.640 Yorker, I think a year after that, had reached out to me for comment, and I had, I think, quite

00:03:27.500 correctly declined to comment, but I just noticed in my exchange with him how pissed off I still was

00:03:33.220 over the whole thing, and I wasn't pissed off when you and I spoke. I managed to, you know,

00:03:39.720 repress that or transcend that or something. But I mean, just the kinds of questions he was

00:03:44.720 asking me by email, the way it was still unprocessed. The truth is, I'm still pissed

00:03:49.240 off about it. I'm still pissed off at Ezra Klein because I think what's happened is that the

00:03:53.200 Overton window has moved. He's moved with it. He hasn't acknowledged any of the ways he was a

00:03:58.320 woke enforcer and leftist knucklehead back in the day. And now he's acting like none of that ever

00:04:03.980 happened. And so I think there is a kind of a reckoning to be had here because I blame all of

00:04:09.560 this for many things, but, you know, chief among them that we have a, you know, a President Trump

00:04:15.380 now and a highly weaponized and energized right wing now that is a backlash to wokeness and the

00:04:23.100 kind of intolerance we were and, you know, moral panic, I think I was discovering there. But I

00:04:27.680 bring this all up with you and revisit it. And this is not what we're mostly going to talk about,

00:04:32.180 But because I've noticed that in the intervening years, you've written two books on behavioral genetics, and I experienced some amusement, if not schadenfreude, to see you incur some of the same wrath that was directed at me very much in the same terms.

00:04:49.900 I mean, you were attacked, you've been attacked as, you know, effectively as a eugenicist, as a, you know, a handmaiden to the alt-right. I think someone somewhere, I think I have this from Gideon's profile on you, someone called you Charles Murray in a skirt, which was just so on the nose that I couldn't help but smile and I'm smiling even now.

00:05:08.740 So I just wanted to ask you if you see any of that differently, given that you now have kind of lived on both sides of it to some degree.

00:05:18.180 I mean, again, it's been a long six years, but also a short one.

00:05:22.240 What's happened to you?

00:05:23.400 And then we'll go on to talk about your book and all kinds of other interesting things.

00:05:27.320 Yeah, when you emailed me, well, I figured we would talk about it a little just because we haven't had a conversation in six years.

00:05:34.220 And a lot has changed.

00:05:35.400 and i went back and i just reread everything i reread the piece that i wrote with eric and

00:05:42.740 dick nesbitt originally in vox and then i read some of the replies to it and i read our response

00:05:48.840 to it and i read azra's kind of separate piece that he wrote um a little bit after that and then

00:05:55.000 i actually started to listen to y'all's podcast and i thought i yeah i don't know if i don't know

00:06:00.160 I don't know if I can go that far down the rabbit hole. And, you know, if you would ask me in 2020,

00:06:07.360 you probably did ask me in 2020, I think that my understanding of that situation was that

00:06:13.120 I had a disagreement with Charles Murray on the scientific merits and that that was my primary

00:06:19.740 concern and that that had somehow, and I'll come back to that somehow in a second, been wrapped up

00:06:26.440 into, you know, a conflict or a disagreement that you were having with Ezra really about,

00:06:31.980 you know, media and tactics and power and responsibility and ethics. And I really thought

00:06:36.960 of those as more separate than you did and you experienced. And then when I went back and I

00:06:45.400 reread my, or our, I will say it was an our original Vox piece, I was like, oh, Sam is all

00:06:52.980 the way through this like my memory of it had been like this is us describing sort of scientific

00:06:58.720 objections to murray's comments and i really had gone into it intending to focus on that

00:07:04.700 and remembered it that way and was surprised unpleasantly surprised at just how much of the

00:07:11.500 piece was not just i think murray is wrong on the scientific points but i think sam is wrong

00:07:18.620 normatively wrong on platforming him having this conversation. And that was really, you know,

00:07:24.880 it was one of those things where I was like, how did my memory of this so different? Like,

00:07:29.200 you're not surprised to hear that, that you're in that piece. So, you know, why was it a surprise

00:07:33.240 to me to reread that? And I think that gets at one of the lessons I've learned in the last nine

00:07:40.200 years. We wrote that in 2017. And it was my first, it was the first thing I ever wrote,

00:07:46.460 like for the public. Like it was my first like non-academic piece. So hopefully I've learned a

00:07:52.220 few things in the last decade. And one of those lessons is that you have your intentions as an

00:07:57.860 author, but once the piece is out there, like those intentions don't really matter that much.

00:08:06.080 It's actually like what's in the text, like what did you actually say? And I think you can have a

00:08:11.940 hard time actually seeing a piece of writing clearly when you know yourself and you've been

00:08:17.120 so close to it. And also, it was just my first experience writing something at the pace that

00:08:21.440 you write it, like not for an academic journal article. So anyways, I would say that if I could

00:08:26.880 go back in time, I had no intention of wandering into a like Ezra Klein v. Sam Harris debate about

00:08:35.220 wokeness and media ethics in that period of time. And I would have limited myself much more to

00:08:43.000 what am I actually an expert in, which is not what are the ethics of being a large podcaster

00:08:49.040 in a time of both racial tension and declining norms around free speech, but like what is the

00:08:57.680 science around genetics and IQ? So that's the kind of first thing that I was thinking about.

00:09:03.740 And the second thing is just like how different the political landscape is. You know, in 2017, I don't think I was alone in thinking that maybe if people like Murray were, you know, not so influential in terms of their views on science, that that might kind of stem the tide of a certain set of beliefs.

00:09:25.780 And in retrospect, all of that seems just very quaint to me. Like, I think what we've seen in the last nine years since we first became acquainted with each other through, you know, this unfortunate conflict has shown that the maybe if we just like, you know, maybe if we could just are really, really policing who is talking to whom, that that's going to stem the rise of far right extremism.

00:09:55.780 I would just say like, you know, I'm not a political scientist. This is also not my area

00:10:00.380 of expertise, but like that hasn't really seemed to work so far. So I, you know, I feel like in

00:10:07.060 2020, I was a little bit like, my beef was not really with you. It was with Charles, not really

00:10:12.820 beef my disagreement. Like you are famous and successful. Like why does this matter to you so

00:10:18.480 much? I feel like I was a little bit not hearing you when you were describing why you were so angry.

00:10:24.520 And now looking back, I'm like, oh, no, I totally see why he was upset about this.

00:10:30.960 And then the last thing I'll say is, you know, now I've been on the receiving end of that, as you know, and how I've been on the receiving end of how scientific criticism, which is like you make this claim.

00:10:44.560 I don't think you have the evidence for it, can, as it echoes through popular culture,

00:10:50.880 really become a license for some people to just caricature your work in the most unflattering

00:10:58.940 ways. And now I've seen that happen, you know, as you know, for me too. And so it's just given me

00:11:05.280 a lot more empathy for how it can be very, just empathy for that situation, which I'm sure was

00:11:14.460 no fun for you and i didn't when we talked i don't think i ever said like i'm sorry that that

00:11:20.120 situation was something that was so uncomfortable for you and i will say it was never it was never

00:11:25.340 my intention um for whatever intentions matter which we can talk about for the scientific

00:11:31.400 criticism of murray to kind of mushroom out into this kind of impugning of your character and work

00:11:39.540 in its totality that was never my that was never my intention yeah yeah well so i i just invite

00:11:46.160 people to go back and listen to that first conversation because i think it was i thought

00:11:49.520 it was surprisingly good given given the constraints on it and it it walks through

00:11:53.760 some of the scientific differences which still in retrospect seem quite minor to me i mean i feel

00:12:00.180 like they were given they were magnified by the sense of the political importance yes of highlighting

00:12:07.460 them, right? So, and I think, and again, I don't know, I know that Turkheimer was your advisor or

00:12:14.040 mentor and may still be a mentor. And I don't know, I don't know either Eric or Dickness,

00:12:20.200 but personally, I get the sense from having read them that they are a little bit in the mold of

00:12:26.840 people like Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, who in, you know, paleontology in the

00:12:34.380 first case and behavioral genetics in the second seem to me, to my eye, again, there'll be differences

00:12:40.740 of opinion about this, but they seem to not just not clearly police the boundary between politics

00:12:46.800 and science, but consider it a kind of scientific virtue to ignore that boundary, right? I mean,

00:12:53.380 they were very, these guys were really pushing a progressive agenda in the way they were

00:13:01.400 advocating for certain scientific ideas and castigating others. I mean, this is probably

00:13:05.760 the ultimate case of this is Stephen Jay Gould's book, The Mismeasure of Man, which, you know,

00:13:11.840 again, this is not my area, but as far as I can tell, is not a credible document on the intelligence

00:13:19.280 literature. But there are just certain topics, you know, IQ and certainly racial differences in IQ

00:13:24.520 being one, that are so polarizing and for obvious reasons that, you know, unless you

00:13:31.560 are going to be really scrupulous in like standing behind some kind of Rawlsian veil

00:13:38.220 of ignorance to talk about these things, you are, you know, you're going to be tempted

00:13:42.960 to not play fair with your scientific opponents and detect bad motives everywhere when there's

00:13:50.700 when there are differences of scientific interpretation. And that's what happens.

00:13:54.260 And that's, frankly, what I see happening to you. I mean, I haven't noticed it so much with

00:13:58.320 respect to the book we're going to talk about, your newest one, Original Sin, but your last one,

00:14:02.240 The Genetic Lottery, I saw that piece in the New York Review of Books written by two, you know,

00:14:08.440 one guy was a biologist. I forgot the names of both these people. Sorry, but perhaps it's good

00:14:11.980 that I forgot their names. But both Stanford professors both, you know, have PhDs seemingly

00:14:16.880 adequate to equip them for the task of reading your book, understanding it, and criticizing it.

00:14:22.160 And yet, I could see in the moral charge of what they were writing there, the same kind of,

00:14:29.140 I mean, you know, again, the allegation is these are dangerous ideas. It's irresponsible to traffic

00:14:34.980 in these ideas. You're putting communities at risk by speculating in this area. And there's

00:14:41.900 an ugly history that all of this conversation about genes and determinism and heritability

00:14:46.820 and, you know, the mechanics of, you know, that produces human difference, all of this 0.90

00:14:51.380 is a top stuff that really should worry us, you know, in your case, eugenics being, you

00:14:57.080 know, perhaps the primary offender. 0.65

00:14:58.920 And so it's just, anyway, it's worth looking back at our original conversation to see how

00:15:04.320 we were coming at it then.

00:15:05.400 And I don't really have more to say about it, but I just want to thank you for coming

00:15:09.360 on the podcast and talking about this. And I just want to dive into your newest book, which I loved,

00:15:15.020 which is Original Sin on the Genetics of Vice, the Problem of Blame, and the Future of Forgiveness.

00:15:20.380 These are all topics that are super important. And also polarizing for obvious reasons,

00:15:25.980 because here you're talking about concepts that relate to not just human difference, but

00:15:31.580 the differences that really matter. I mean, we're talking about violence, we're talking about

00:15:35.720 impulse control, differential success in life, the people who wind up in prison or addicted and

00:15:42.120 homeless and the people who, you know, wind up running major institutions and having beautiful

00:15:49.020 lives. I guess, but before we jump into the book itself and those specific topics, maybe you can

00:15:56.840 explain why behavioral genetics as a field is still so controversial. I mean, the one thing I

00:16:04.060 read in that kind of weird New York Review of Books review of your last book was almost a

00:16:09.660 suspicion on the part of the authors that, you know, it was too much to say that we know the

00:16:14.940 genes are doing anything, you know, are likely to be doing anything. So just give me the big picture

00:16:20.560 view of the field before we get into your book. Yeah. I mean, so behavioral genetics is how do

00:16:26.300 the genes we inherit influence in combination with other factors, the way that we behave. And

00:16:33.120 And in some ways, behavioral genetics has so kind of infiltrated our way of talking and thinking about behavior.

00:16:43.140 And also, in some ways, we don't even need behavioral genetics to see that inheritance matters, that children resemble their parents in particular ways.

00:16:52.620 Like, I think most lay people have an understanding that children are born different from day one in ways that matter for their likelihood of turning out certain ways.

00:17:04.060 And there's this great study I like where they ask people to estimate, I talk about this in my first book, they ask people to estimate, you know, how much do you think genes make a difference for a variety of human characteristics?

00:17:14.480 And they compare the average rating to like the, you know, the meta-analytic estimate from twin studies.

00:17:20.400 And they find that, you know, people are generally not blank slaters. Like the average American says that genes make a difference for not just your height and your blood type, but also your personality and your performance in school and your likelihood of developing a severe mental illness and your depression.

00:17:38.020 and that the most accurate people are parents of more than one child.

00:17:43.620 And, you know, I think that's a finding that makes intuitive sense to parents

00:17:47.260 because you have children and you can see how they differ.

00:17:51.040 So on the one hand, it's not that controversial of a science

00:17:54.020 if you're looking at what is public opinion

00:17:56.380 because most people already can see and they can recognize

00:17:59.820 that people are different in ways that aren't easily explainable

00:18:03.660 by their environmental circumstances.

00:18:05.800 At the same time, it is perennially controversial, especially within the academy. And I think one of those reasons is the historical reasons that you've already gestured at. You know, there is a history of eugenics here in the United States that did justify, you know, forced sterilizations of people.

00:18:23.820 there we do have an ascendant far right that does appeal to kind of innate racialized biological

00:18:32.500 differences so of course a science that connects what you inherit to how you behave is going to be

00:18:38.640 controversial given that political background but I also think it's something even older and deeper

00:18:44.960 than that which is you know we experience ourselves as as you've written about in your

00:18:51.640 own writing as agents, as people who are deciding how to behave, who people who have control over

00:18:58.220 the people that we are becoming. And behavioral genetics is a science that's taking the sorts of

00:19:06.700 things that we consider our, you know, usually feel ourselves to be the subject of and making

00:19:12.160 that an object of scientific study and pointing out the ways that it is influenced, rarely

00:19:17.360 determined but influenced by, you know, versions of the molecules we happen to inherit. And so I

00:19:23.900 just think that tension between ourselves as we are obviously part of nature and we experience

00:19:30.380 ourselves as the subjects of our own lives is a tension that really lives right at, you know,

00:19:36.960 behavioral genetics exists right at that tension. And so I think even if there was no, you know,

00:19:41.840 we lived in kind of a more utopian place with no eugenic history in the U.S. and no, you know,

00:19:48.080 a very different political and racial climate. I still think it might be controversial because

00:19:52.380 it raises these questions about what, you know, who are we? Who are we as humans? What is this

00:19:57.200 dilemma of being human? Well, I think we'll talk about just how far out from under the shadow of

00:20:01.980 eugenics we can get because I want to talk about IVF and selecting embryos and, you know, whether 0.97

00:20:07.480 that and whether we can fully avoid the Gattaca fate that science might be urging upon us. But 0.99

00:20:14.100 before we get there, I think maybe we should clarify this concept of heritability and the

00:20:21.000 divide or lack of a divide between nature and nurture, because it seems to me there's some

00:20:26.360 confusion that creeps in there. This is a confusion that really does contaminate that other topic,

00:20:32.320 which again, we're not going to get into or into much, you know, intelligence differences.

00:20:36.580 Yeah, we do. Yeah. Not to say we won't touch various third rails here.

00:20:40.640 Members can hear the full conversation by subscribing at SamHarris.org.

00:20:44.840 Subscribers get a private RSS feed you can use with your favorite podcast player.

00:20:48.880 I think we have this increase in technology and the vision to look ahead.

00:20:53.700 But we also live in a in a country in which Alabama tried to ban IVFs.

00:20:58.080 And like Texas, you know, has essentially banned legal abortion instead of hashing that

00:21:04.360 out at the level of policy the way that other countries have, we have, you know, just the

00:21:10.440 emergence of really, again, different moral communities around reproduction right now.

Making Sense - Sam Harris - July 22, 2026

#486 — Luck All the Way Down

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