Is civilization a machine for engineering and safeguarding certain experiences, or is it something more like a psychological experiment and a ponzi scheme? What are we trying to do with our time on earth, and what are we actually trying to achieve with it? Is it a social experiment, or a social enterprise, a social project, a political project, or something else entirely? Or is there something more to it than that? In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, I try to answer these questions and explore what we can learn from them, and how they can be applied to our own lives and the world we find ourselves in. I hope you enjoy the first part of my conversation with Sam Harris on the first episode of The Making Sense Podcast. If you're interested in becoming a member of the MESING Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe to the MINDING SENSION Podcast, where you'll get access to all sorts of excellent, thought-provoking episodes exploring ideas and concepts from all corners of human consciousness and consciousness, as well as access to the latest trends in culture and thought-leading thought and ideas? To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to makingsense.org/sponsors! We don't run ads on the podcast, but you can become a supporter of the podcast by becoming a patron of the making sense podcast by clicking the link below. It's made possible entirely through the support of our patrons, and you get 10% off the purchase of a premium membership membership membership plan that includes a 20% discount when you become a patron! You'll get 20% off your first month-only discount, 5% discount, and 5% off ad-free membership, and a lifetime membership when you sign up for the podcast gets you get a discount of $50 or more, you get an ad-only membership, plus a discount on the entire course of $40 or $50, you can receive $5 or $10,000 gets you'll receive a maximum of 5 months of making sense of the show? You get a chance to receive a course, plus I'll get $5,000, plus 5 other perks like this offer, plus they'll get a lifetime of the whole-choice, and I'm getting a discount, plus $5 will get a VIP membership, I'll also get $10% of your choice, and all other perks, including VIP access, plus all kinds of perks like VIP access?
00:00:00.000welcome to the making sense podcast this is sam harris just a note to say that if you're hearing
00:00:12.500this you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part
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00:00:38.840i've been thinking more and more about what we're doing here about what i'm doing personally and
00:00:54.760about how that fits into the various trends we're seeing in our intellectual and ethical and
00:01:01.060political lives the circumstance we find ourselves in is increasingly strange don't you think it's half
00:01:11.780psychological experiment and half ponzi scheme what are we doing here i generally think about
00:01:21.140civilization as a machine for engineering and safeguarding certain experiences and it seems
00:01:28.660to me that it has barely started running in earnest i mean we've had a few thousand years of real
00:01:35.060culture and a few hundred years of anything like scientific rationality and then merely a few decades
00:01:42.580of leveraging all this with information technology maybe there's a hardware and software analogy here
00:01:50.120perhaps civilization is the hardware layer and culture is the software we have the things we actually
00:01:57.100build the roads and bridges and the hospitals the factories the internet and then we have the
00:02:05.160reasons why we built these things and the insights and ideas that make them possible and the stories we
00:02:12.920tell ourselves and our expectations of one another our hopes for the future the norms we adhere to and demand
00:02:21.960that others adhere to whether we can consciously specify those norms or not much of culture is implicit but we need
00:02:31.000to make it more and more explicit when things begin to break down when our efforts to cooperate with one
00:02:37.000another are failing and failing at great cost to everyone involved on one level it's a miracle that anything works at all and things
00:02:46.520really do work to an impressive degree most planes do not crash rather often you call the police and they come and
00:02:55.160either prevent or solve a crime and everyone's grateful and no one appears racist journalists often put their biases aside and get their facts
00:03:05.000straight tomorrow some drug company will develop a new medication and regulators will help to standardize
00:03:12.840its usage and it will actually improve people's quality of life without imposing
00:03:18.280unacceptable costs elsewhere it's against a background of success and successes that we
00:03:24.920increasingly take for granted that our failures are so noticeable but i know i'm not
00:03:31.400alone in feeling that we've had more than our fair share of failures of late and of course we can't get off
00:03:37.960the ride right there's no brake to pull we are condemned to create and proliferate culture memes upon memes
00:03:48.280upon memes we bend light and sound for the purposes of entertainment we create corporations and economic
00:03:57.400relationships that leverage mutual advantage and yet seem to presuppose endless growth
00:04:04.280and it's very hard to envision where all of this frantic activity is headed
00:04:08.760i mean clearly we have to navigate between a crisis of overpopulation where we suffer some kind of global
00:04:15.880collapse and famine and underpopulation where we have multitudes of senescent men and women wandering
00:04:23.880the streets in the streets in diapers with no one to care for them and we have to expect technology to
00:04:29.560save us or to ruin everything i mean are the robots coming to our rescue or are they coming to kill us
00:04:36.840it's hard to know from here in the meantime as we stagger around with our smartphones the need for
00:04:44.680meaning is becoming more and more pressing what should we be doing with our time on earth needless to say
00:04:54.280the ancient answers to this question aren't working in fact they're becoming increasingly dangerous
00:05:01.320one answer to the crisis of meaning is tribalism and tribalism has many forms from caring just a little
00:05:09.160too much about soccer or college basketball to the fully weaponized hysteria and cultishness that has
00:05:16.920subsumed our politics all tribalism now tends toward theocracy whether it's religious or not it develops a
00:05:25.480taste for the irrational rather often you have to profess to believe the unbelievable as a profession of
00:05:31.800in-group loyalty and then the ideologies proliferate and they erect taboos and blasphemy tests that are
00:05:39.880non-negotiable and then even otherwise smart and decent people increasingly adopt the ethics of the crowd
00:05:48.760and they scapegoat others and they find they rather like to watch a human sacrifice whether real or
00:05:54.760metaphorical of course we now see this dynamic in the form of identity politics everywhere there's not
00:06:01.160even a pretense of an argument that the world can be made better for everyone and the media
00:06:07.960and academia and other institutions have been captured by all this clamor and these new norms of
00:06:14.680intolerance in the name of tolerance are making honest conversation more and more difficult and even
00:06:20.920dangerous because if you say anything that calls this modern catechism into question if for instance you
00:06:26.920wonder whether systemic racism is really as bad as advertised by those who might be shrieking about
00:06:32.200it in portland in front of a vacant storefront or whether the cops are really killing disproportionate
00:06:38.760numbers of young black men at this moment in history or whether islam really is as peaceful
00:06:44.520and compatible with modernity as methodism is say or whether there's an element of social contagion
00:06:51.560behind the increase in transgenderism among teenagers specifically teenage girls or if the pervasive
00:06:58.840social inequality we see in our society has anything to do with certain cultural norms actually being
00:07:05.400better than others or more terrifying still whether there are genetic differences among individuals or
00:07:12.360even between groups that might be involved here well if you even entertain any of those ideas well then
00:07:20.760you're a nazi fit only to be destroyed and this increasing commitment to moralizing and
00:07:29.160politicizing everything is becoming authoritarian it is stifling dissent it is punishing thought crime and it has
00:07:39.800provoked an exodus of smart people from mainstream institutions and so we now have podcasts and
00:07:46.680sub-stack newsletters proliferating by the hour but as i've said several times of late this
00:07:53.560shattering of institutions is increasingly dysfunctional not everything in our society can be accomplished by
00:08:02.440outsiders and iconoclasts imagine if we no longer trusted mainstream sources of airplane parts and every
00:08:11.880pilot was left to their own initiative to find spare engine parts from non-traditional sources
00:08:18.760that would be madness you're going to get your spare plane parts on etsy but something analogous is happening
00:08:27.000in information space when people are deciding what to believe actually trying to figure out what is
00:08:34.760factually true about covid for instance or china or climate change people no longer trust the mainstream
00:08:43.080media or academia or the government to deliver anything like the unvarnished truth and this is largely due to
00:08:51.960how captured these institutions are by left-wing social justice hysteria and to make matters even more
00:08:58.680confusing there are nazis in our society and there are people who are nazi adjacent and some of these
00:09:05.960people have had an inordinate influence over right-wing politics undermining our basic commitment to
00:09:11.720democracy there are many people on the right who by tendency or design seem to want an authoritarianism
00:09:19.640of their own so we're being pushed and pulled by turns to some kind of precipice and the question is how
00:09:27.160can we step back reality doesn't care about the color of your skin or your biological sex or the
00:09:36.200gender with which you identify or the religion into which you were born or the cult toward which you were
00:09:42.680lured from some shopping mall and if we play our cards right the future won't care about those things
00:09:49.640either but the question is how do we get to that future with our world intact i mean when will we
00:09:57.480realize that we're all on the same team and that we've been celebrating one own goal after the next and how
00:10:04.920will we realize it what is the mechanism that will force us to converge on a common picture of reality and a
00:10:13.400common set of primary values anyway trying to figure this stuff out remains the purpose of this podcast
00:10:21.400and as always it's a privilege to have anyone listening at all and now for today's questions
00:10:30.120hi sam my name is cory i live in eau claire wisconsin my question for you is more of a vote than a question
00:10:37.560i'd really love to hear you discuss the eric topo podcast with brett weinstein on a future podcast
00:10:45.000i know that you have considered that and kind of rule it out at this point but love for you to
00:10:50.280reconsider my sense is that there is a lot more common ground to land on than disagreement and each
00:10:56.520of you i think could actually learn from the other about their own sense of reality surrounding the
00:11:03.400covet issues i think we're all a bit confused and we would all learn from the two of you learning
00:11:10.280from each other thank you hey cory thanks for the question yeah this is um this is a hard one for me
00:11:20.360actually you know i i get that it seems crazy not to just flip on the microphone and talk to the guy
00:11:29.480or talk to him and heather who's also been his partner in crime it's hard to put this in a way
00:11:36.600that doesn't sound like a personal attack but the reason why i don't want to do a podcast with brett
00:11:46.440and heather is the same as why i wouldn't do a podcast with a 9-11 truth conspiracy theorist or
00:11:53.800alex jones or alex jones or anyone in that world because there's a basic asymmetry which is very hard
00:12:03.560to overcome it's so much easier to make a mess than to clean it up it's so much easier to light
00:12:11.000several small fires than to put them out it's like a 10 to 1 advantage to put it that way it sounds like
00:12:18.600my concern is not losing a debate and that's absolutely not my concern if you're going to view
00:12:25.320this as a debate it's won almost immediately but i worry about what people take from the encounter
00:12:34.040and i just don't want to do additional harm to our public conversation about what is in fact an
00:12:41.480important public health concern and a growing political one first the asymmetry the reason
00:12:48.760why there's such an asymmetry here is that it is just impossible to debunk most things in real time
00:12:56.760and even if the point being made is in fact spurious it won't seem spurious to 99 of an audience
00:13:05.480right so the person on the conspiracy theory side of things can say well what about the 14 cdc officials
00:13:13.880who resigned last week and wouldn't give reasons when asked what do you make of that right now there's
00:13:21.880probably nothing to be made of that right i didn't even hear about it and the truth is i just made that
00:13:26.520up but when delivered in the context of a quote debate about these things with someone who whose whole
00:13:34.760angle is there's conspiracy everywhere it can seem like oh you didn't know about that well that's
00:13:41.560clearly a problem you should look into that what about the paper that just came out of micronesia
00:13:46.520that showed ivermectin was a hundred percent effective i didn't see that paper out of micronesia
00:13:53.720oh you didn't well okay you should really do your homework it's possible to just scatter a lot of
00:13:59.160dust in the eyes and ears of the audience and make it seem like there's so many anomalies out there
00:14:06.840there's so many things that need to be explained and if you're not going to explain those things
00:14:11.800if you're not going to connect this particular pattern of dots well then you're just not doing
00:14:17.960the work and and that need not necessarily be done in bad faith of course it can be right it's a tactic
00:14:25.560but that's not what i'm alleging brett and heather would do i'm just saying that's the way they think
00:14:32.200now it's such a scattershot approach to this there's so little quality control around the kind of
00:14:40.360information they're putting forward and it takes such an effort to chase it all down and debunk it and
00:14:47.240anything that shows up that's new in the conversation can't be tracked down in real time
00:14:53.880so i don't have much hope that a conversation would wind up producing a document that would be
00:14:59.000good for the world the truth is i'm not the best person to have the conversation either it would be
00:15:04.760good to have an immunologist or a virologist or someone who's much closer to this type of research
00:15:11.720who could really get into the weeds with them more and the truth is they're obviously the wrong people
00:15:18.360to be doing what they're doing and it shows but it's not obvious to their audience it apparently is
00:15:24.360not obvious to them so you know i would welcome an encounter between them and somebody who's truly
00:15:31.080professionally qualified to talk about all the details and perhaps that will happen i mean in fact i just
00:15:38.360reached out to joe rogan telling him what i thought of his latest podcast with brett and heather and
00:15:44.440recommended that he figure out how to unring that bell and maybe he will bring brett and heather on
00:15:51.080with someone like eric topel or someone even closer to the topic at hand and that could be useful
00:15:59.000but even then i think that in front of rogan's audience it's questionable whether that will
00:16:07.480actually work for the reasons already given it's just so easy to be misleading and again i'm not
00:16:14.520suggesting bad faith on their part i think they probably really believe everything they're saying but
00:16:21.960there is just an asymmetry here in how difficult it is to close every loophole to conspiracy and
00:16:30.040the influx of the incredible as they get opened in the conversation i'll give you one example of the
00:16:36.920kind of thing i found implausible in brett and heather's last appearance with joe rogan and it's the kind of
00:16:45.400thing that they too should find implausible that the moment these words escape their mouths and it's
00:16:52.600still mysterious to me why this isn't happening but for instance they were talking about the evolutionary
00:16:59.960logic of immune escape right so we get vaccines and the moment tens of millions of people start getting
00:17:10.520vaccinated that begins to select for variants that can evade the vaccine right so it's a it's a fool's
00:17:19.080errand to be thinking that you're going to get out of this pandemic by vaccinating everyone because
00:17:26.120you're just going to create more transmissible and possibly even more dangerous variants now there's a
00:17:32.440lot wrong with this from a public health point of view and from an evolutionary point of view right
00:17:38.280i mean from an evolutionary point of view it's just half the story right yes the immunity conferred
00:17:44.680through vaccination can select for variants that can defeat the vaccine but the immunity conferred by
00:17:53.880having caught covid and recovered also selects for variants that can escape that immunity
00:18:01.000right so vaccination is on all fours with natural immunity there think of how worried we need to be
00:18:06.920about a variant that can defeat natural immunity also that's an argument against all vaccination
00:18:14.680right because no vaccines to my knowledge are a hundred percent effective right regardless of exposure
00:18:23.400regardless of possible genetic changes in a virus right and i believe that the mrna vaccines for covid are
00:18:32.600among the most effective vaccines we have we're just in the middle of a pandemic which is an extreme
00:18:39.800circumstance i'm not quite sure how our measles vaccines would be performing if we were in the
00:18:45.080middle of a measles pandemic if everywhere you went you were confronted by somebody who had measles
00:18:51.080i don't know how often measles mutates but i think we'd probably find that there's some breakthrough
00:18:57.080infection so if you follow his argument you seem to land in a true anti-vax position right don't vaccinate
00:19:05.160against anything because you're selecting for dangerous variants and again ignoring the fact
00:19:09.880that natural immunity is also doing that and it's curious that brett and heather are not seeing that
00:19:15.320because again they run everything through the logic of evolution there's another glaring error here you
00:19:21.880know to suggest that our current problem with variants has anything to do with vaccination
00:19:27.640seems a little bonkers because the biggest problem the delta variant emerged in india and became
00:19:34.680prevalent there under conditions where exactly no one was vaccinated we know that the emergence of
00:19:41.240delta has nothing to do with our vaccination regime the whole thrust of their comments there
00:19:48.760is confused right and once again the subtext to everything they're saying no matter how reasonable and
00:19:58.440attentive to caveats they can seem and i will grant you they can seem incredibly reasonable they do not
00:20:05.320seem like alex jones and this is why what they're doing is so insidious but the basic message the basic
00:20:13.320implication of everything they say and the apparent reason behind everything they're saying is the belief
00:20:20.680that these covid vaccines are dangerous and you should be worried about them you should be profoundly hesitant
00:20:29.800to take them these are not normal vaccines and in fact the pushing of these vaccines on the public is
00:20:39.000colossally unethical that is what they are messaging right they've said as much explicitly on their own
00:20:45.320podcast i think brett called it the greatest crime of the century or something insane like that i should get the
00:20:53.880actual language all right hold on okay now i've taken a few minutes and found the transcript of brett's
00:21:02.280confabulation on this topic he's talking about the absolute scandal of the suppression of the
00:21:11.960life-saving knowledge of ivermectin and the pushing of the vaccines on his own podcast where
00:21:18.520he's talking to a dr corey the podcast itself is titled the crime of the century and they're going back
00:21:26.280and forth about how nefarious the machinations must be to have produced this policy dr corey says all
00:21:33.720the pipeline molecules the stuff that's coming that they want to bring to market are also there right
00:21:39.080and then brett says which have had a tremendous investment made in them the thing i think we're
00:21:44.120almost certain to get wrong is that as outsiders we have no idea what these conversations sound like
00:21:51.000on the inside there's a temptation to imagine that people are somehow sitting around comfortable with
00:21:55.480the fact that their behavior is going to cause hundreds of thousands possibly millions of deaths
00:22:01.000that it may stick humanity with a relationship with a pathogen that will not be able to shake
00:22:06.040because it will prevent us from taking the appropriate action until it's too late we imagine
00:22:10.040that people are saying these things out loud when i'm sure that there are some sociopaths in the system
00:22:14.920who are probably capable of having those discussions but there aren't enough sociopaths to account
00:22:19.560for this behavior there is some way that people who are doing a harm great enough i've
00:22:25.240called it the crime of the century and i realize the century is young but this is going to be hard
00:22:29.560to top it's going to be hard to top there is some way that people who are engaged in something worthy
00:22:35.320of a claim like the crime of the century are comfortable with what they're doing or worse are
00:22:40.600convinced it's the right thing that somehow the greater good is being served okay here you have it in
00:22:48.120fairly crystalline form the conspiratorial thinking the outrageous claims about
00:22:55.960death and destruction due to these vaccines and the suppression of ivermectin for purely mercenary
00:23:04.520reasons the problem of course is that there's no reason to think this is true right there is no reason
00:23:11.640to think that ivermectin is a surrogate for getting vaccinated and there's no reason to think that
00:23:20.040people should be terrified of getting these vaccines and that is the message that bread is spreading
00:23:25.720hour by hour by hour whereas the truth is we have a head-to-head comparison between three cohorts
00:23:34.200of people tens of millions hundreds of millions in some cases those who have been vaccinated those
00:23:42.520who have caught covet without being vaccinated those who have caught covet having been vaccinated
00:23:48.680and we know the outcomes we know them well enough to know that you're far better off being vaccinated
00:23:56.280and eventually catching covet as you will than catching it without having been vaccinated
00:24:01.800catching covet is not a strategy for becoming immune to covet it's just catching covet right and
00:24:10.440those who survive will have some natural immunity the jury is no longer out on that score now it may be
00:24:17.720true that in certain populations it is rational to worry that the potential side effects of vaccination
00:24:25.800vaccination are greater than the risk of covid for instance i believe there are some data about
00:24:33.160teenage boys having a higher risk of myocarditis than teenage girls certainly i think it's a tenfold
00:24:41.080difference and the risk may be high enough that it is in fact greater than their risk of becoming
00:24:45.960severely ill with covid the data i saw suggested it was kind of a coin toss there but slightly in favor of
00:24:53.560not getting vaccinated if those data hold up well then yes it may be rational to decide that 12 year
00:25:00.680old boys shouldn't be vaccinated but the general picture here is fairly well established we know
00:25:08.760catching covid is worse in almost every case that has thus far been tried than getting vaccinated for
00:25:16.680covid and from what i've seen recently the data in favor of ivermectin seems increasingly dubious so
00:25:25.400parsing all this should be left to the professionals right again i come back to my basic mystification
00:25:34.840around what brett and heather are doing why do this publicly if you're going to make the personal
00:25:40.680choice not to get vaccinated based on your scrutiny of the data great make that choice but why spend
00:25:49.160the better part of a year convincing people that they shouldn't get vaccinated you can say that's not
00:25:56.120what you're doing but that is in fact what you're doing and that's what seems so irresponsible the us is
00:26:02.520is now one of the least vaccinated countries in the developed world we got these life-saving vaccines
00:26:08.680before everyone and now we're the 37th most vaccinated country we're behind the uae and portugal and
00:26:21.400singapore and spain and denmark and uruguay and chile belgium ireland canada bahrain the uk
00:26:31.160mongolia we're behind mongolia norway italy france the netherlands germany we're behind mauritius and
00:26:41.480cyprus but we're also behind cambodia lithuania malaysia the czech republic greece it makes no sense
00:26:51.240right and it's because of misinformation and the way it's interacting with our hyper-partisan
00:26:57.480political landscape that's why we're here and there's no question that three hours of the brett
00:27:05.000and heather show on joe rogan is having an effect and that'll sound as censorious as it does i just
00:27:13.640think it's irresponsible and i'm not quite sure how to grab hold of this increasingly unbalanced object
00:27:22.280so as to set it right but perhaps rogan will do something to unring that bell okay next question
00:27:31.080hi sam my name is brian and i live in paris ontario my question's for you
00:27:37.960if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation you'll need to subscribe at sam
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