The goal of this series is to organize, compile, and juxtapose conversations hosted by Sam Harris into specific areas of interest. This is an ongoing effort to construct a coherent overview of Sam s perspectives and arguments, the various explorations and approaches to the topic, the relevant agreements and disagreements, and the pushbacks and evolving thoughts which his guests have advanced. Along the way, we ll point you to the full episodes with each featured guest, and at the conclusion, we'll offer some reading, listening, and watching suggestions which range from fun and light to dense and densely academic. We don t run ads on the podcast, and therefore, therefore, it s made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers, we re making possible entirely by the support from our subscribers.So if you enjoy what we re doing here, please consider becoming a supporter of what we're doing here. You'll hear plenty of crossover into other topics as these dives into the archives unfold, and your thinking about a particular topic may shift as you realize its contingent relationships with others. And you'll hear the natural overlap with theories of free will, political philosophy, the foundations of morality, and more. So, get ready to make sense of encounters with violence. This is a series of compilations that presents harrowing scenarios and situations. Some of this compilation will be difficult to hear, and much of it will be hard to hear. But thinkers like Sam often intentionally wander to the dark edges of possibility and behavior, not just out of a penchant for the macabre, or for the public shock value, but to hopefully make genuine and important discoveries that have many implications for all aspects of life. Let s make sense, right? I mean, you'll never really be in the dispatcher s room when an out-of-control trolley barrels towards various people tied to the tracks. Get ready to become a member of The Essential Sam Harris by becoming one! -- Sam Harris, . The Making Sense Podcast is made possible through the work of Sam Harris. -- This is making sense of violence, and so on and so that you can be a part of the Making Sense community and so you can learn how to be a better human being. and a better thinker or a better all-around human being in the making sense that s better at being a better friend of the world so you don t become one.
00:21:50.600That's Gavin DeBecker's area of interest.
00:21:54.040DeBecker is an expert in the prediction and management of violence.
00:21:57.400He's worked in security details for celebrities and investigated stalkers.
00:22:02.380He's developed threat assessment systems for governors and U.S. Supreme Court justices.
00:22:08.040And he's frequently been brought in as an expert witness in high-profile cases.
00:22:13.380He's also managed security for Sam's public events.
00:22:17.820Here, he and Sam will focus on fear and the mysterious concept of intuition.
00:22:23.140You'll hear DeBecker give a robust defense of this inner sense and the nearly subconscious form of intelligence it represents as it has been molded through countless trial runs of evolution.
00:22:35.100This is Gavin DeBecker from episode 90, Living with Violence.
00:22:40.760Let's talk about intuition because we have just said that people are fairly confused about violence and tend to be bad at dealing with some of the information that's out there about it.
00:22:57.460But this point you make again and again, you've made it here, and it's the very title of your book, The Gift of Fear.
00:23:04.520There's one thing that we are actually very good at.
00:23:08.280Evolution has made us experts at detecting danger and detecting shady people, feeling uncomfortable in the presence of people who are liable to do us harm.
00:23:19.540Talk about intuition here and what it means to trust it and why so many people are unaware of the validity of trusting it, the reasons given for not trusting it.
00:23:34.160Talk about the primacy of intuition for a moment.
00:23:36.720Well, here we get to, I think, the biggest gift we can give to listeners.
00:23:41.440And this goes for female listeners and male listeners.
00:23:44.140This goes for decisions you make in your work and decisions you make for your safety.
00:23:49.580Ultimately, the biggest decision we all make is who to include in our life and who to exclude from our life.
00:23:55.740That's choosing friends, spouse, neighbors, you know, co-workers, et cetera.
00:24:03.740And so my advice always is to make very slow and careful decisions about whom you include in your life and very fast decisions about whom you exclude.
00:24:16.680So if you have that nanny that you're uncomfortable about, she goes quickly.
00:24:24.520I mean, I've had people through my career say, you know, should we put in a nanny cam?
00:24:28.280Because we're worried that this nanny is doing something dangerous with our kids.
00:24:33.820And I say, no, you should get rid of the nanny because no kid is going to thank you in 20 years.
00:24:39.340Gee, mom, thank you for having that video of me being hit by a spoon on the head by that crazy nanny you guys hired.
00:24:45.720And so the concept of listening to intuition is what I want to focus on for a moment.
00:24:50.300Because America particularly, or Western societies, we look to government and we look to experts and technologies and corporations to solve our problem for us.
00:25:01.140And I am very glad to tell everybody here that the police are not going to protect you because they're not going to be there during the moment that you face an intruder or you face a violent situation.
00:25:12.440And government's not going to protect you.
00:25:15.360It tries to pretend it can, but it can't.
00:25:17.400And the only thing that's going to protect you is your own intuition, which is your own ability to recognize that something is up while it's right in front of you or while it's in your environment.
00:25:29.300And I think, as you said, Sam, it's super hard for people to accept the importance of it because intuition is usually looked on with some contempt.
00:25:38.860It's described as emotional or unreasonable or inexplicable.
00:25:42.200And husbands make fun of wives for feminine intuition and they don't take it seriously.
00:25:46.060But what I can tell you about intuition, I learned from the origins of the word itself.
00:25:53.240The root of the word, inter, means to guard and to protect.
00:25:57.760Super interesting that that's what it means.
00:25:59.760We think we're using intuition to make a thousand other decisions, but what it's built for, what it's in this system for, is to guard us and to protect us.
00:26:09.580And what it, you know, what it does is, and I'm really going to quote you for a second here, because you said a moment ago that evolution has really honed this.
00:26:27.420And the idea that we use the, you know, the expression gut feeling, well, the gut actually has more brain cells than a dog.
00:26:39.400So the gut is literally where a lot of that thought is going on.
00:26:43.220That's why, you know, you get that bad feeling in your stomach about this employee, this friend, this thing somebody said to you, this danger.
00:26:50.760Uh, and that's a very meaningful thing.
00:26:53.120Gut feeling is, is the perfect word for it.
00:27:05.340The, the idea is that this is a process.
00:27:08.100This, this process we ridicule intuition is a process more extraordinary and ultimately more logical.
00:27:15.240In the natural order of things, it's more logical than the most fantastic computer calculation.
00:27:21.480And it's our most complicated cognitive process.
00:27:25.020Uh, and, and it's also in some ways, it's the simplest, which I'll explain.
00:27:28.460But what it does intuition is it connects us to the natural world and to our nature so that when we are free from judgment and we've got only perception, we say that thing, you know, in, in recounting what happened to us, somehow I knew.
00:27:43.920So if people will do these two things, one is to pay attention to intuition.
00:27:51.400It's, in my opinion, it's always right in two important ways.
00:27:55.760One is it's always based on something.
00:27:58.380And two, it always has your best interest at heart.
00:28:08.960And, uh, millions of people have had this feeling.
00:28:11.200This plane's going to crash something, they get anxiety about it and I shouldn't get on this plane.
00:28:15.340So what I ask people to do is look introspectively for a moment at where that feeling's coming from.
00:28:22.120And if it is coming from a news story you saw, you know, two weeks ago on television of an ugly plane crash in Peru, that is not in your, based on your, your, uh, environment or your circumstance.
00:28:37.960It's based on your memory or your anxiety, and that's not actual fear.
00:28:43.660If, however, the feeling is based on seeing the pilot stumble out of the bar at the airport and, and, you know, make his way slowly down the jet walk, now you've got something that's in your environment.
00:28:55.840And the question to ask always, this is how you tell the difference between true fear, like I'm afraid of getting on this plane and unwarranted fear, worry, anxiety, et cetera.
00:29:08.700This is how true fear will always be based on something in your presence and will always be based on something you perceive it.
00:29:19.660The signal comes from your perception, from your senses, unwarranted fear will always be based upon memory.
00:29:28.720And, uh, and so it's something you remember, something you recall, something you're, you're worrying about or something you're thinking about, but something based on your actual environment is a gift.
00:29:39.960There's not an animal in nature that would say, oh, I don't want that gift.
00:29:43.760Don't tell me when I should be worried about my safety.
00:29:45.660It's, it's, it's so much trouble, you know, there's no antelope that suddenly is filled with fear and says to itself, it's probably nothing.
00:29:54.400But human beings every day are engaged in the constant prosecution of their own feelings.
00:30:01.120And, you know, the, the most vivid example I'm aware of is a woman alone in a building late at night.
00:30:08.020She's working late in the office and she goes to the elevator, the elevator door opens, and there's a guy inside who causes her fear.
00:30:28.700Because she says, I don't want to be the kind of person who makes a decision because of the guy's race or because his clothes look shabby.
00:30:35.120I don't want to be like that, or I don't want to offend him, or I don't want to make him angry.
00:30:38.460She talks herself out of what I call prosecutes her own jury's conclusion, and she talks herself out of it and gets into the elevator.
00:30:48.440And as I say, these are things that no animal in nature would ever even remotely contemplate, and human beings do it every day, participating in their own victimization.
00:30:57.080The elevator example brings up some other issues here that are hugely important, and this is the other side of the balance that causes people to not value intuition or to prosecute their feelings, as you say.
00:31:13.740And it's that these moments of negative intuition can be in contradiction to a variety of social norms that well-intentioned people want to adopt.
00:31:29.160So, if you're a white woman, and the elevator door is open, and the man on the elevator who makes you uncomfortable is black, well, you may just get on that elevator perversely to prove to yourself and to him that you're not racist, right?
00:32:23.860We've all been trained to ignore those facts, which, again, we can, in many cases, just instantly and intuitively surmise.
00:32:33.080So, what are good people to do with that?
00:32:37.360We're going to let that question from Sam hang in the air for a bit.
00:32:45.380Because you must be hearing how unafraid Sam is to take the logic of fear and poke at some strong societal taboos.
00:32:53.020Sam's line of questioning takes us directly toward one of the most precarious moral and political tightropes out there at the moment, the topic of profiling.
00:33:04.600We'll be taking a little time to walk that tightrope now, so let's see if we can keep our balance.
00:33:09.900Our sense of evolved, intelligent intuition sometimes mixes with other forms of embedded biases that are unhelpful or immoral.
00:33:23.180And that can create a jumbled emotional brew within us.
00:33:27.300The elements of this concoction are sometimes hard to distinguish and differentiate.
00:33:31.360That's why, when fear is felt, de Becker encourages a moment and method of introspection.
00:33:39.540It's invaluable to sharpen our internal tools so as to better heed the strange alarm bells that sound from our guttural, enteric nervous system.
00:33:50.360So, when we get a bad feeling about someone who's walking toward us on the same side of the street, what's really happening there?
00:33:58.240Well, in a generic sense, we are engaged in profiling.
00:34:06.020If we allow ourselves to drain the political ugliness from this term, we can simply define it as the process of gathering information about a potential threat in our environment, so as to inform our interaction with it.
00:34:19.960What kind of information can be gathered from seeing a figure on the same side of the street as us?
00:34:25.280Well, there's the likely sex of the person to start.
00:34:30.840There's the height and build of the person, which may be easier to track depending on the clothing they're wearing, which can itself reveal important information.
00:34:40.260Are the clothes appropriate for the weather?
00:34:44.360Does that signal that this person has a lot of money and likely isn't thinking about robbing someone?
00:34:51.960Or are the clothes extraordinarily trendy and expensive, which makes you suspect that they're more likely to target you and your very trendy shoes?
00:35:37.040And there's contextual data to incorporate.
00:35:39.500If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org.
00:35:45.840Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app.
00:35:58.020The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support.
00:36:02.100And you can subscribe now at samharris.org.