Making Sense - Sam Harris - October 30, 2026


#500 — The Playing Animal

#499 — The Birth of AGI

Episode Stats


Length

27 minutes

Words per minute

196.55

Word count

5,420

Sentence count

279

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 you're listening to making sense with sam harris this is the free version of the podcast so you'll
00:00:06.420 only hear the first part of today's conversation if you want the full episode and every episode
00:00:11.400 you can subscribe at sam harris.org there are no ads on this show it runs entirely on subscriber
00:00:18.020 support if you enjoy what we're doing here and find it valuable please consider subscribing today
00:00:22.980 well i love what you've done with the outfit today i love it's really yeah it's beautiful
00:00:29.420 Yeah, back at you.
00:00:30.840 Yeah, the Ricky Gervais School of Fashion.
00:00:32.980 Well, at least one of us dressed as a grown-up.
00:00:35.080 Yes, I'm dressed appropriately.
00:00:37.180 Obviously, this is my first time meeting you,
00:00:39.380 but I've listened to the show religiously.
00:00:42.060 I hope you don't find that offensive.
00:00:43.360 No, not at all.
00:00:44.400 But this is my first time hearing you at regular speed.
00:00:48.060 Right.
00:00:48.740 I've never heard your voice at regular speed.
00:00:52.060 Well, this is going to be a challenge for you.
00:00:53.400 Oh, this is going to be...
00:00:54.480 Try to stay awake.
00:00:55.200 This is going to be a long couple of hours.
00:00:58.020 You've got a beautiful voice.
00:00:59.280 longest two hours of your life. Yeah. Yeah. No, I'm told that I'm often on 2.0 or faster for some
00:01:06.340 people. I mean, I'm a genuine slow talker. But you seem to speak in like, I mean, a lot of people,
00:01:11.120 I can speak in full sentences. It's not word salad, but you speak in full paragraphs.
00:01:16.160 Well, I have more time. I'm a slow speaker. Obviously, yes.
00:01:18.880 I'm taking my time. Yeah. It's basically, you are the linguistic equivalent of Neo in the matrix.
00:01:26.220 just you've slowed down time so you can dodge the bullets because yeah but it's uh somehow less
00:01:31.720 impressive for all that yeah yeah i mean the truth is i i mean i feel like i'm just neurologically
00:01:38.020 impaired i i could not speak as fast as you do or i mean there are people like you know ben shapiro
00:01:43.800 who are just you know speaking twice literally twice as fast as i do but even if you gave me
00:01:48.380 my lines and i rehearse them i can't actually speak as fast as you could naturally speak
00:01:54.940 right so yeah i wish my mouth just will not apply it's like a circus la act that i can't perform
00:02:01.740 okay well i think if you're neurologically impaired we're all in trouble okay
00:02:05.320 where should we begin what should we talk about yeah well jimmy car let me just introduce you and
00:02:10.320 thank you for being here it's great to actually finally meet you in person oh well thank you very
00:02:15.260 much i'm a fan of um kind of both sides of your compensate like i want to talk to you about you
00:02:20.940 your stand-up and how you approach it. And you have this new book on jokes, which you wrote with
00:02:25.800 two co-authors, Amanda Baker and Abby Grant. And it's this great study of comedy that I think many
00:02:33.960 aspiring funny people wish they had 20 years ago. I mean, I think it's very useful for people
00:02:40.300 because you actually analyze the structure of what's funny in a way that's very digestible.
00:02:46.580 and you're basically doing post-mortems on many example jokes and it's a good read.
00:02:52.300 Well, hopefully it's more than just a dissection. The idea of the book is really to get more people
00:02:57.640 involved. The idea is to kind of throw the rope ladder down and help people up because
00:03:02.340 I think we've made a huge error in our culture. I'm talking like on a big scale. When we moved
00:03:08.360 from the villages to the cities, everyone used to be in a choir and everyone used to speak and
00:03:14.200 everyone used to dance. And then we moved to the cities and everyone specializes and we have
00:03:19.300 ballerinas and we have the opera and we have these specialists and we go and we watch them
00:03:23.840 and it's, we're in awe of how great they are. And we're not, the opposite of a spectator is not a
00:03:29.760 professional. It's a participant. I get asked a lot. Or an amateur, an amateur is somebody who
00:03:34.980 actually loves the thing. Yeah, you can't. And it's also that thing of like, I think it's Mark
00:03:40.320 Fisher's point of like, um, capitalist ontology, everything's about like, well, can I make money
00:03:45.420 doing this? People ask me, how do I get into comedy? And really when you dig deeper, the
00:03:49.620 question is how can I make money doing comedy? I don't know about that, but I know that you could
00:03:54.280 do it. I know that you could do five minutes in a club and you would enjoy it so much more in the
00:03:59.700 same way. It's very analogous to music comedy. Like if you can play the guitar, even just a
00:04:03.860 little bit, play a couple of chords, then the next time you go and see Oasis live, you are
00:04:07.920 so much more impressed by Noel's playing because you go, you can see how good this is.
00:04:12.780 And I think comedy should be taught. I think it should be taught in schools because-
00:04:17.260 Well, the point you make in the book is it's just so valuable in context that had nothing to do
00:04:22.320 with aspiring to be a standup. I mean, it's just like public speaking about anything.
00:04:27.240 But first of all, you're writing down and ordering your thoughts, right? So the stage no one thinks
00:04:31.260 about with comedy because we sort of make it look as if we're making it up as we go along,
00:04:34.800 sitting down writing down ordering your thoughts and then being able to communicate those to other
00:04:40.520 people and getting up and speaking in front of other people getting getting over that you know
00:04:45.260 it's that it's that um thoreau um most men uh live lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave
00:04:52.260 the song still in their hearts like most people never get to hear their own authentic voice and
00:04:59.260 I want that for more people. I think as our culture shifts and changes, I think as AI becomes
00:05:06.020 more important, I think the things that it cannot do become more important. So being more human,
00:05:13.360 connecting to other people. I thought my job for years was the proximate reason for my job.
00:05:17.000 The proximate reason for comedy is laughter, but the ultimate reason is connection,
00:05:21.660 connecting to other people and people coming out in large groups, more small groups, like 50 people
00:05:26.780 in a room and audiences can be kind of as small as 30 people. And they'll tell you with the
00:05:32.000 reliability with which they tell you what's funny and what isn't. And it's humbling. Like I write
00:05:37.200 the jokes, but I don't write the show. The jokes, you kind of write them and then you try them and
00:05:41.800 the audience go no or change it or write another one. I prefer to just start again, write another
00:05:47.200 one. And then they tell you kind of what the show is going to be. And it's, you know, it's
00:05:52.680 obviously my audience are fairly there. It's self-selecting. Yeah. They know what they're
00:05:56.600 coming for. Well, no one's offended at my show anymore because being offended at my show is
00:06:00.200 like being, you know, scared at a horror movie. Is that the case? Because like you, well, first
00:06:03.480 of all, you seem, you invite hecklers. I mean, that's part of your, your approach. I mean,
00:06:07.160 you do a lot of crowd work, but, um. Well, I think, I think there's a big difference between
00:06:11.180 someone, you know, shouting something abusive in the middle of a joke and audience members
00:06:17.020 joining in. I would sort of say that my audience interactions, it's much more like saying there's
00:06:22.460 a sing-along section in the chorus of the Bruce Springsteen song.
00:06:25.860 So they're not real hecklers. They're not trying to disrupt.
00:06:27.720 They're not disrupting at all. And even if they are, it's with a sense of service to the evening.
00:06:31.920 So they could win. That's absolutely fine if they win, as long as we all know that we're in service
00:06:37.300 of this larger thing. We're kind of connecting and we can have to be able to kind of take a joke
00:06:41.120 and thinking on your feet, being able to kind of perform that trick. Because I think, what does
00:06:48.200 comedy do for society? You know the Overton window in politics, the most left-wing, the most right-wing
00:06:53.700 thing you could say at a polite party, right? And that has shifted massively recently. But I think
00:06:59.040 there's a conversational Overton window. There's an idea of the magic of comedy maybe happens the
00:07:04.680 day afterwards with your partner, where you can talk about things a bit more freely. You're more
00:07:10.460 open to it. I think it's where- Yeah. I mean, the thing was said,
00:07:14.220 the thing's been said already by the comic and it's the fact that you all laughed proved that
00:07:20.680 it was within the boundary of this whether even if it's a new boundary like you've discovered the
00:07:25.460 you look at what Lenny Bruce did and then George Carlin and Richard Pryor they had people talking
00:07:30.300 about their lives and their personal lives in that way made us feel all a little bit more human
00:07:36.660 because we all went oh we oh yeah uh you know that that lovely line of uh not that I'm in any
00:07:42.000 way, suggesting I might be, but in the work of genius, we see our own neglected thoughts.
00:07:46.460 I think it's often the way of like, Seinfeld will do a bit and I'll go,
00:07:50.280 I've seen it a hundred times. How did I not see that? It's my job to see that. And I didn't see
00:07:54.220 that. And it's so pleasing to us. The ha-ha moment is so close to the ha-ha moment. I think
00:08:01.480 it's cardamom. I think it's system one to system two thinking. Your brain is designed to not think.
00:08:06.840 your brain is designed to avoid thinking and see patterns and so we go from system one thinking
00:08:12.420 you've read that yeah thinking fast and slowly yeah the idea of going it's two plus two equals
00:08:16.380 four driving the car yeah think about that it's easy right it's just it's not thinking but if i
00:08:20.920 ask you a complex math problem divide 13 by whatever it is you have to actually think and
00:08:27.100 really thinking is you're rewarded for it jokes are freud called them pleasure bribes to think
00:08:33.900 forbidden thoughts i love that idea that you're you're kind of pushing people's boundaries and
00:08:38.800 also you're sort of showing where the boundary is like you're crossing the line yeah well i want
00:08:43.280 to talk about the kind of the ethics of all this but um i mean you mentioned ai it seems that you
00:08:47.620 are as ai proof as anyone can be because again so much of the value you're offering is bringing
00:08:56.080 people together in the real world to laugh right like it's part of the collective experience is
00:09:02.020 I believe they say it's you laugh 30 times more when you are with other people than on your own
00:09:08.240 even at the funniest stuff you could imagine your favorite show but watching on your own yeah it's
00:09:12.480 why in the UK like Christmas television is a real thing in the UK it's not because the shows at
00:09:16.700 Christmas are any better I know I make a lot of them but it's because you watch them with family
00:09:21.460 you watch them together and that experience of like the other mistake we made we gathered around
00:09:26.220 the fire and we spoke and then we gathered around the wireless and we listened to the radio as a
00:09:30.820 family. And then we gathered around the TV and we watched whatever was on. Like when I was growing
00:09:34.740 up, we watched like everything. It's a way of socializing. It's a completely low stakes
00:09:42.320 and friction-free way. It's a thing you're reacting to. And then social media came along
00:09:48.900 and suddenly we're siloed. And it's a poison on our, we are social creatures. We have a dispersed
00:09:56.580 identity. And there's a sense in which people now feel sealed off. If you think about the ancient
00:10:04.360 cultures, people were much more porous in terms of their spirits and beliefs and you could be
00:10:11.120 possessed or whatever. And now people think of themselves as kind of hermetically sealed
00:10:14.680 and not with a dispersed identity. I think the AI thing, there's different visions of this,
00:10:21.440 aren't there? It feels like history really is repeating. It feels like this is the Manhattan
00:10:27.020 Project once again. I mean, there's kind of a rumor. I mean, they're pushing through at such
00:10:33.500 speed. Yeah. Yeah. Although the Manhattan Project, you can't really imagine that moving forward if
00:10:38.840 every time you asked one of the principals, you know, Leo Szilard or Edward Teller or Oppenheimer,
00:10:45.700 et cetera, what's the chance you're going to ignite the atmosphere and kill everyone? And
00:10:49.940 they were putting the probability at 10% or 20% or 30%, you can't imagine them moving forward,
00:10:55.480 right? But that's the situation we're in with AI. It's like you asked the principals who are
00:10:58.880 actually doing the work, no one, with the exception of someone like Jensen Huang, and he's not,
00:11:05.460 you know, he's not actually doing the work of, you know, building the models, he's just selling
00:11:08.600 the chips. None of them say the chance of catastrophic outcome is one in a million or
00:11:15.480 one in 10 million. That's just not a sentence any of them have spoken.
00:11:18.880 It's a very odd thing. I think it's the, for me, sort of my view on AI is quite sort of spiritual
00:11:24.800 in a way. I don't think we were made in God's image, but I think we so wanted there to be a
00:11:30.360 God, we created one in our image. So we, I'll describe something to you. It's all powerful,
00:11:36.020 all knowing, can perform miracles and lives in a cloud. Well, there you go. And it's the idea that
00:11:42.220 we go, we are worshiping these things. Like there's, there's a phone now asked for four
00:11:47.200 hours a day and we give it our offering and we get a like. And the like is, uh, it's the digital
00:11:55.260 amen. Uh, whose, whose line is that? It's, um, Byung Hun. I can never pronounce his name,
00:12:00.180 but he's a brilliant philosopher. Um, writes these brilliant short books, but the digital
00:12:04.220 amen is such a great, like it's, it becomes like a religion because people are giving it their
00:12:09.280 attention. And for me, AI is impressive, but you know that thing of the fourth humiliation?
00:12:16.340 No.
00:12:16.640 So there's been three humiliations of men.
00:12:19.900 So Copernicus and Darwin, Freud, and then AI. So we're not the center of the universe.
00:12:26.560 We're no different to the animals. We're not even in charge of our
00:12:30.140 minds. And now we're not the smartest thing in the room. It's another humiliation. Is the future
00:12:35.740 going to be star trek because of this or star wars although ironically this humiliation is
00:12:41.140 if the thesis in your book is correct and comedy is a craft that is teachable it should be teachable 0.79
00:12:48.820 to the the llms and we should at some point get superhuman funny but they won't know what's funny 0.88
00:12:56.020 because they won't know how to laugh it's the connection it's a it's a two-way piece of
00:13:00.180 communication. I think I'm with McGilchrist on the AI thing. I actually haven't heard what he said
00:13:07.520 about it. Well, I don't know if he said this, but I think it's implicit in the master in his
00:13:11.200 emissary. The idea that AI is left brain activity. It can do left brain complicated things incredibly
00:13:19.380 well, but it cannot do right brain gestalt tasks at all. Just give it time. I mean, you'd have to
00:13:26.720 some argument as to in principle why what the right brain is doing isn't substrate independent
00:13:34.320 well okay so i mean that's a heavy lift the complicated stuff is easy and the easy stuff
00:13:41.180 is hard right that's that's the broadly speaking well we get there is 4 000 years old yeah okay
00:13:47.220 and walking and folding your shirt can't be done by ai because that's 40 million years old right
00:13:52.100 so it won't get to that in a hurry now but will it get to that that's but will it get to that well
00:13:57.540 well sure it'll get to that we've been here before there's been the manhattan project we created
00:14:02.340 something that can destroy the world you know and we've lived with it for 80 years now yeah
00:14:09.780 and basically forgotten about it i mean most of us most of the time have have just forgotten that
00:14:13.900 well who wrote that incredible book about i think you had her on here the incredible book about no
00:14:17.940 Annie Jacobson?
00:14:19.240 Because you wrote the one about
00:14:20.120 a pandemic thing recently.
00:14:22.360 Yeah, yeah.
00:14:22.640 I want to have her on.
00:14:24.120 She's written two terrifying books.
00:14:25.700 I mean, really properly terrifying.
00:14:27.180 Yeah.
00:14:27.440 I've had other worried people
00:14:28.820 on to talk about nuclear weapons.
00:14:29.800 Maybe this should be
00:14:30.660 the Halloween episode. 0.97
00:14:31.760 You get her on to talk
00:14:32.600 about those two books
00:14:33.180 because never mind
00:14:34.300 Freddy Krueger.
00:14:35.360 Those are scary books.
00:14:36.400 Death by ice or death by fire.
00:14:38.140 Yeah.
00:14:38.580 But that thing of like going
00:14:40.000 the idea,
00:14:41.260 humanity has always been
00:14:42.520 on the brink of these things, right?
00:14:44.020 We push ourselves forward
00:14:45.840 and there's religious analogies.
00:14:47.940 in large language models
00:14:49.800 to Towers of Babel
00:14:51.580 and the idea that we're,
00:14:53.980 history is sort of cyclical.
00:14:56.660 We're going through something now.
00:14:58.500 It's undeniable.
00:14:59.220 The cycles might be four hours long
00:15:00.540 at this point.
00:15:01.140 I mean, it's like,
00:15:01.800 there's an acceleration
00:15:02.960 that is undeniable
00:15:04.660 in terms of cultural change
00:15:06.280 and technological change.
00:15:07.480 It does feel like that point
00:15:08.640 that someone made about
00:15:09.520 if Watergate happened today
00:15:11.240 or Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.
00:15:13.240 I mean, it might get 48 hours.
00:15:15.040 I don't think Monica Lewinsky 1.00
00:15:16.040 would last 48 hours 1.00
00:15:16.880 in a new cycle now.
00:15:17.940 there's other stuff going on. It's, it's just. The first time I noticed that it just truly
00:15:23.940 indelibly was when we had the largest mass shooting in American history in Vegas and it
00:15:30.260 left the news cycle in like 48 hours. I mean, I don't even, I don't even remember the shooter's
00:15:35.340 name, but this is a measure of just how. It's good. I do like that thing. I really do like
00:15:39.320 that New Zealand thing where they don't name the shooter. Yeah. I love that. I think that's,
00:15:43.040 that's very smart because I think a lot of the time. I don't know they named the shooter,
00:15:45.540 We never figured out his motive, and we moved on to whatever Trump said next, and it was gone.
00:15:52.440 It was just incredible.
00:15:53.320 Well, that thing with the, okay, is Trump contingent or convergent?
00:15:58.740 So I read a lot of that Neil Howell, the fourth turning book I really like, which is kind of a rehash of Vico, which is kind of the basis for Finnegan's Wake.
00:16:07.880 yeah well i'm a little allergic to these notions of history having a this hidden structure but i
00:16:14.040 mean it's a little bit like uh i i like the i like that i mean i just think it's helpful to
00:16:19.160 think about viable in some way well yeah it is on full survival but you go we've been through very
00:16:24.120 very tough times before okay and there's the end of history delusion we all think we're living in
00:16:30.020 the end of times and maybe this time is different somebody can but everyone else right yeah well
00:16:35.300 are they, or is this the beginning of infinity? Are we going to get through this precipice?
00:16:40.320 It's an inflection point, unlike an inflection point 500 years ago, where one person couldn't
00:16:47.040 destroy the lives of millions in the same way. It's like, we're living in a world now where
00:16:51.920 it's not only conceivable, but foreseeable that somebody with the wrong technology in the hands
00:16:58.000 of some malicious person can create a civilizational problem.
00:17:01.200 Are we not thinking about the things in... We're choosing what to think about, right?
00:17:04.540 So if you point our attention at broken arrows, right, there's missing nuclear warheads, of which I think America has six, and the former Soviet Union has, we don't know.
00:17:16.480 Well, they had some submarines went down, and presumably we know where they are, but the warheads weren't recovered.
00:17:22.520 Presumably, sure.
00:17:23.320 I'll just go and check with my people.
00:17:24.440 I mean, no one knows.
00:17:25.920 And we've chosen just not to worry about that thing.
00:17:28.980 We've chosen not to be concerned with that, and we're concerned with this now.
00:17:31.760 so we're focusing our attention and saying well this could be the problem but i think the thing
00:17:36.460 about black swan events is they're black swan events you know that telebook i love the idea
00:17:41.620 that it's going to be a surprise whatever happens next no one really saw covid coming no one saw
00:17:47.780 the pandemic coming people had said oh a pandemic can well we knew we knew a pandemic was guaranteed
00:17:53.420 to come i mean that's just that's just a you keep rolling the same die again and again you're going
00:17:58.260 to get every conceivable number and we know that you know this is having nothing to do with human
00:18:03.820 engineered pandemics which is an additional problem but the idea that we're doing naturally
00:18:08.600 yeah gain of function research oh yeah just i mean insanity looking for a gas leak with a lit
00:18:13.880 match it's just like the the madness that that would in anyone would think oh that's a good idea
00:18:19.440 but when they when they you know wiped out polio and they kept some that you go who's in charge of
00:18:24.820 this? What are you thinking? Well, keeping, like, again, they're kind of gradations to the stupidity
00:18:29.680 that you can see how virologists got there in their first steps. Like, I mean, just going into 0.99
00:18:35.560 caves, looking for bats that are carrying something that has pandemic properties, and you
00:18:41.380 think you're sort of getting ahead of the problem, right? Like, somebody analogized this to, you
00:18:46.360 know, putting wanted posters out for, you know, the most dangerous criminals, right? Like, we want
00:18:50.680 to figure out what the risks are so that we can understand them. But now that we can spin up
00:18:55.520 a vaccine, now we can, we can sequence a whole genome in less than 24 hours and spin up a vaccine
00:19:01.240 and a weekend. The headstart is, is, is nothing now. We don't need a headstart and we certainly
00:19:06.180 don't need to be grabbing these viruses, working with them, improving them and then spilling them
00:19:10.900 on our, it becomes a weapon. It becomes a, you know, so that thing of like, will AI be like a,
00:19:18.360 take away the drudgery? Will we look back and say, well, in the same way we look back at slavery and
00:19:24.880 go, my God, how do we let that happen? How do we let people toil? 200 years ago, everyone worked
00:19:29.560 on a farm, effectively. 98% of the population worked in agriculture. And we are the first
00:19:36.200 people that have had to ask ourselves some questions. So will I get married? Shall I have
00:19:42.200 kids? Do I believe in God? These are new questions for our culture. No wonder people are struggling
00:19:49.980 because we've privatized mental health problems. We've coded anxiety and depression as a personal
00:19:58.080 failing rather than a structural problem, a collective action problem with the way that
00:20:03.260 our society operates. It strikes me that that's a mistake. Actually, are we arranging our society
00:20:10.660 in a way that is conducive to people feeling good.
00:20:15.340 Well, I think we've done both sides of this
00:20:17.300 and neither have been the proper corrective.
00:20:21.420 So on the one hand, yes, we've privatized mental health,
00:20:28.300 but also we've de-stigmatized it significantly.
00:20:31.440 And even among young people,
00:20:32.920 you have these bizarre social contagions
00:20:35.040 where they're acquiring conditions
00:20:37.320 that they think are fun to have.
00:20:38.900 like we've pathologized perfectly normal human behavior so and there's a cult of victimhood
00:20:43.740 that gets yeah there's no such thing as worry anymore it's anxiety there's no such thing as
00:20:47.460 sadness it's depression right and everyone has adhd which is horrific because the people that
00:20:52.940 actually have it can't get the resource that they need because everyone is complaining of the same
00:20:58.140 thing yeah so it's like you or tourette at one moment on tiktok there were people complaining
00:21:02.200 of tourettes you know or i just naturally i naturally just swear a lot yeah that's right
00:21:07.120 yeah all right hold on jimmy it's kind of interesting i want to say if i i need to bend
00:21:11.960 this conversation back to your book in any way that matters because i want people to read it
00:21:16.360 why i will i want to talk about big picture issues and i want to get your look on what's
00:21:22.260 happening to culture you know i mean you travel so much i looked at your tour schedule it's amazing
00:21:27.460 i think we're 50 countries now you're a masochist or you're uh you're jesus i don't know how to
00:21:32.220 understand how you're spending your time but how many dates a year are you doing maybe
00:21:35.980 200 dates maybe 300 shows because i do two a day yeah right incredible which i want i don't know
00:21:42.720 about that but i i love it i think i'm the hardest working man in comedy which is like being the
00:21:47.120 best looking guy in the burns unit right it's like it's not really everyone else is doing nothing
00:21:51.840 yeah but it's the it's not like with my job it's not about repetition it's about iteration
00:21:57.180 so it's about trying different things every night like you try new jokes you try what percent would
00:22:03.180 you say you're folding in new material each night like at the end of the show i literally get out a
00:22:07.100 piece of paper and mark off new jokes at every show right and some of those are like things
00:22:13.180 you've tried a couple of times you're like you're going okay that's ready i can bank that for the
00:22:16.840 next show and some of them you're trying to reword or get right and see what the audience like but
00:22:21.060 it's it's really fun to do and then sometimes it's the audience bits something comes out of that
00:22:25.000 yeah so i mean you're doing your routine which presumably you have worked out to the word but
00:22:31.560 But then, then you're, again, as I said, you're inviting audience participation and you're doing
00:22:36.580 crowd work, which is a very different kind of high wire act.
00:22:40.280 It's become very different because it was for years, the heckling bit was just like
00:22:44.980 heckle put downs and your mama jokes. And it was, it was very fun to do, but now it's become
00:22:51.820 something slightly different. I, in the pandemic, I wrote a book, which was kind of an auto,
00:22:57.240 we sold it to the publisher as an autobiography and then we kind of under the wire we slipped in
00:23:02.260 kind of a self-help book and it's been very rewarding because it's kind of i've kind of
00:23:07.120 opened up a little bit more the last five years and started talking about authentically and i
00:23:12.340 think it's resonated with a certain cohort that you know want to talk and they'll kind of you know
00:23:19.360 they'll ask me they kind of trust me a little bit i think that thing about well so well so but that's
00:23:25.600 somewhat paradoxical because because you can be very mean too so like so where's the line here
00:23:31.480 because you're you're very compassionate and i'm thinking of your crowd work in particular so you
00:23:36.980 you're responding to something that you're getting from the audience and you can go very hard against
00:23:42.940 that person you mean making fun of the way they look and or you know making fun of the way their
00:23:46.780 wife looks or i mean every permutation of that and yet you're successful i mean it may be there
00:23:52.840 moments where this totally fails and you lose the audience but from everything i've seen
00:23:56.720 you're keeping the audience on side and there's this understanding that you're actually a good
00:24:03.360 guy and there's like you're not you're not actually trying to hurt anybody and yet there's
00:24:08.100 like so and so there's i'm just wondering how you bound this game so that everyone plays it
00:24:13.680 and enjoys it or i mean and what i think it's what is its failure mode where you say something
00:24:18.120 that you regret and someone is really offended or what happens? It's, um, it's friendship at scale
00:24:24.360 is my job, right? So you get that thing of going, actually, you can be really funny with someone
00:24:28.920 and a bit scathing and take the piss out of them, but that's kind of what friends do. And there's
00:24:35.760 an intimacy to that. And it's also, what are we doing here? Well, we're having, this is kind of
00:24:40.500 a weird, safe space. You're like a Loki, like a trickster god. And the idea that you're allowed
00:24:48.900 to say these unsayable things, and we're all in this room where we're allowed to laugh at these
00:24:53.440 things. So it's a filter. It's the inoculation. It's looking at the stake on the staff.
00:25:00.020 But in a different context, it would just be mean, right? It might be funny,
00:25:04.280 but a joke that is so fully at some person's expense, it can't be exported to every other
00:25:09.980 context, right? Like someone's coming there almost, it's almost like a religious ritual where
00:25:14.800 your audience is coming, you're the priest, and the audience is coming to have, like they're
00:25:21.540 granting their attention to you in a way that allows for a ritual of, which would otherwise
00:25:28.360 be a ritual of humiliation, but here it's, everyone is enjoying it. Yes. So I think that
00:25:34.700 thing about, if you take away anything that could be offensive to anyone, you are left with juggling
00:25:39.040 and someone would complain that the balls are the wrong color. So you go, okay, so you can't,
00:25:43.360 so you take that off the table to begin with. You just go, right. As long as I'm an equal
00:25:47.140 opportunities offender, as long as I'm hitting everyone fairly equally, it feels like you're
00:25:52.500 not loading onto, you don't have something that you're trying to push. Like it feels like they're
00:25:57.700 just jokes. It's a category error for you to say, hey, sometimes your jokes aren't kind enough.
00:26:04.280 No, no, no. I wasn't trying to be kind. I was trying to get massive laughs for a minute for
00:26:08.440 two hours. That's what I was trying to do. And it worked. And the idea of going, if it's not
00:26:14.460 kind enough, then you're at the wrong kind of show. And yet you can have moments within that
00:26:20.280 which are incredibly touching. But it gets sharpened up when you're, again, your routine
00:26:24.860 is what it is. And it can be very edgy, very, you know, quote, offensive. But when you're doing
00:26:31.640 crowd work and you're talking to one person in the audience, and so you have thousands of people's
00:26:36.280 attention on an ordinary civilian, right, that you're now talking to, and you're commenting on
00:26:41.780 the way he looks or the way she looks, right? Yeah. It's obvious to see how that could go wrong,
00:26:48.220 right? Like, I mean, like, it could just be, like, have you ever done crowd work where you feel like
00:26:52.280 you just objectively crossed the line and you just felt bad about how that all went or apologized
00:26:57.480 from the stage? Members can hear the full conversation by subscribing at samharris.org.
00:27:02.980 Subscribers get a private RSS feed
00:27:04.740 you can use with your favorite podcast player.
00:27:07.260 There are worse things than war.
00:27:08.900 And one of them is believing
00:27:10.220 there's nothing worth fighting for.
00:27:11.600 And I think we're on track to be in a war.
00:27:14.820 But are we pointing AI at the wrong thing?
00:27:16.980 Leaders are going to come in now
00:27:18.080 and they're going to, to quote Thomas Sowell,
00:27:20.100 there's no solutions, only trade-offs.
00:27:21.780 They're going to say the world isn't safe.
00:27:23.640 We're going to promise you safety.
00:27:25.280 And all it's going to cost you is your freedom.
00:27:32.540 Amen.