Making Sense - Sam Harris - The ＂After On＂ Interview

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Waking Up podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, in this podcast, I'm actually

00:00:26.440 releasing an interview that I did on someone else's podcast. That podcast is After On,

00:00:33.360 and the interviewer is Rob Reed. Rob founded the company which built Rhapsody, the music service

00:00:39.700 that created the unlimited on-demand streaming model that Spotify and Apple and others have

00:00:45.220 since adopted. Rob has also spent lots of time throughout the Middle East, including a year as

00:00:51.680 a Fulbright scholar in Cairo, and he's an investor, but he's mainly a novelist these days. And he

00:00:59.520 started his podcast originally as a limited run to promote his novel, also titled After On, but now

00:01:06.000 he's going to continue it indefinitely. And many people who heard this interview originally thought

00:01:10.800 it was unusually good, not that I'm unusually good in it, but that we covered a lot of ground. And we

00:01:17.720 certainly did. Rob and I talk about publishing and psychedelics and terrorism and meditation,

00:01:24.520 free speech, and many other things. And in fact, Chris Anderson, the curator of the TED conference,

00:01:32.140 heard it and got in touch with me and suggested that I release the interview on my own podcast.

00:01:37.040 And he felt this interview covered topics that I don't often touch, or at least don't touch in that

00:01:41.660 way. And I don't take strong recommendations from Chris lightly. The man surely knows how to put on a

00:01:49.160 show. So with Rob's permission, I am giving you a slightly edited version of the podcast he released.

00:01:57.260 I have to give you a little warning about the sound quality. We tried to clean it up on our end,

00:02:01.840 but there's a lot of popped peas. It's probably best listened to in your car or at your desk. But Rob is a

00:02:08.940 great interviewer. And he's since had many other interesting guests on his podcast. So if you like

00:02:14.760 the angle he took with me here, you might check him out at after-on.com. And you can find out much

00:02:22.060 more about his book there too. And now without further delay, I bring you the conversation I had

00:02:27.860 with Rob Reed.

00:02:33.440 So Sam, thank you so much for joining me here at Tom Merritt's lovely home studio.

00:02:37.580 Yeah, happy to do it.

00:02:38.860 You were a guest on the Art of Charm podcast about a year ago, and they asked you to describe what you

00:02:44.860 do in a single sentence. And you said, I think in public, which I thought was a very elegant way of

00:02:50.500 putting it. I was hoping you might elaborate on that. And in this case, feel free to use as many

00:02:54.660 sentences as you wish.

00:02:56.000 Yeah, well, I'm glad you brought that back to me because I would have totally forgotten that

00:02:59.020 description. It's a useful one. Increasingly, I'm someone who's attempting to have hard conversations

00:03:04.840 about what I consider some of the most important questions of our time. So the intersection of

00:03:10.900 philosophy, particularly moral philosophy and science and public policy and just things in

00:03:17.520 the news, topics like race and terrorism, the link between, you know, Islam and jihadism and

00:03:24.040 things that are in the news but that have, when you begin to push on these issues, they run very,

00:03:31.220 very deep into the core of human identity and how we want our politics to proceed and

00:03:36.800 the influence of technology on our lives. So there's just, you can almost, you pull one of

00:03:41.620 these threads, everything that people care about starts to move.

00:03:45.280 Yeah, there's a great deal of interconnection. And I'd say, and correct me if this is wrong,

00:03:49.180 but I'd say you started thinking in public and earnest, perhaps back in 2004, with the release

00:03:54.240 of your first book, The End of Faith, in which you argued stridently against all types of

00:03:59.300 organized religion. And in favor of atheism, it peaked at number four, was it on the New York

00:04:03.920 Times bestseller list or thereabouts?

00:04:05.820 You know, I don't even remember. It was on for, I think, 33 weeks, but I think four sounds about

00:04:10.600 right.

00:04:10.880 Yeah. So obviously you got out there in a big way with a book you've since written. Is it

00:04:15.740 four more bestsellers, New York Times bestsellers?

00:04:17.920 Yeah. Yeah. That designation means less and less, as it turns out. But I mean, there are bestsellers

00:04:24.720 and there are bestsellers.

00:04:25.760 There are.

00:04:26.280 They're the bestsellers that bounce off the list, which most of mine have been. And then

00:04:30.680 there are those that stay on forever. But yeah, I've had five that have hit the list. Yeah.

00:04:36.900 And what's intriguing to me is that quite recently you have developed a wildly successful podcast. And

00:04:42.880 I was hoping you could characterize the reach that the podcast has attained compared to that of

00:04:49.420 these very, very successful series of books that you did.

00:04:52.300 Yeah. The numbers are really surprising and don't argue for the health of books, frankly.

00:04:59.220 A very successful book in hardcover. Your book comes out in hardcover first, normally. Some

00:05:05.640 people go directly to paperback. But if you are an author who cares about the future of

00:05:11.540 your book and reaching lots of people, you publish your hardcover and you are generally

00:05:16.540 very happy to sell 100,000 books in hardcover over the course of that first year before it

00:05:22.680 goes to paperback.

00:05:23.760 Indeed, ecstatic. That would probably put you in the top percentile of all books published

00:05:28.320 by major publishers.

00:05:29.540 Oh, yeah. And that is very likely going to hit the bestseller list. Maybe if you're a diet

00:05:34.960 book, you need to sell more than that. But if you sold 10,000 in your first week, depending

00:05:39.760 on what else is happening, you almost certainly have a bestseller. And, you know, in the best

00:05:45.740 case, you could sell 200,000 books or 300,000 books in hardcover. And that's a newsworthy

00:05:52.640 achievement. And then there's the one 100th of 1% that sell millions of copies. So, you know,

00:06:00.020 with a book, I could reasonably expect to reach 100,000 people in a year and then maybe some

00:06:05.360 hundreds of thousands over the course of a decade, right? So all my books together now

00:06:11.140 have sold, I haven't looked at the numbers, but I'm pretty sure I haven't reached 2 million

00:06:17.180 people with those books, somewhere between a million and 2 million. But with my podcast,

00:06:24.540 I reach that many people in a day, right? And these are long form interviews and sometimes

00:06:30.780 it's standalone, sometimes just me just talking about what I think is important to talk about for

00:06:34.800 an hour or two. But often I'm speaking with a very smart guest and we can go very deep on any

00:06:42.740 topic we care about. And again, this is not like going on CNN and speaking for six minutes

00:06:48.160 in attempted soundbites and then you're gone. People are really listening in depth.

00:06:54.360 And so if we were to clone you in two right now, and one of the Sam Harris's that we ended up with

00:07:00.780 was to record a podcast. And the other Sam Harris was to write your entire literary output.

00:07:08.720 Who would require more time?

00:07:10.940 Yeah, well, that's the other thing. Forget about the time it takes to write a book, right? Which in

00:07:15.480 some cases is years, in some cases is months, depending on how long the book is and how

00:07:21.140 research driven it is. But it's a lot of time. It's a big commitment to write a book.

00:07:25.680 Once it's written, you hand it into your publisher and it takes 11 months for them to publish it.

00:07:31.260 So there's that weight, you know, and then...

00:07:33.840 There's a lack of immediacy.

00:07:34.900 Yeah, yeah. And it's, you know, that increasingly, that makes less and less sense.

00:07:41.100 Both the time it takes to do it and the time it takes to publish it don't compare favorably

00:07:46.620 with podcasting. You know, in defense of writing, there are certain things that are still best done

00:07:52.760 in written form. Nothing I said has really any application to what you're doing. I mean,

00:07:58.640 you're writing novels. Reading a novel is an experience that people still want to have.

00:08:03.100 Yes.

00:08:03.520 But what I'm doing in nonfiction that's primarily argument-driven, right? There are other formats

00:08:10.800 in which to get the argument out. And I still plan to write books because I still love to read books.

00:08:17.660 And taking the time to really say something as well as you can affects everything else you do. It

00:08:25.140 affects the stuff you can say extemporaneously in a conversation like this as well. So I still value

00:08:29.880 the process of writing and taking the time to think, you know, that carefully about things.

00:08:35.720 The thing that is striking, though, is the extraordinary efficiency that the podcast has become as a way for

00:08:41.720 you and many others to disseminate ideas in terms of the hours that you put into the creation of it,

00:08:47.160 which are non-trivial. I'm learning that as a very new podcaster myself. It ain't easy

00:08:51.980 to research and put one of these things together. But compared to a book, it's just, there's just

00:08:58.000 incredible leverage there. Now, another thing, speaking of large audiences, I believe I read somewhere

00:09:03.060 that you were featured in the most heavily watched Bill Maher video clip of all time. Do you know

00:09:10.020 if that statistic is accurate? I suspect it still is accurate. It was at the time. It was the most

00:09:15.380 viral thing that ever got exported from the show. And you were discussing Islamophobia with the then

00:09:20.720 future Batman. Yeah. And why do you suppose that clip became so widespread? I mean, Bill Maher is no

00:09:29.020 stranger to controversy. The exchange between you and Ben Affleck and between Maher and Ben Affleck did

00:09:35.540 become quite heated. But in any given month, there are many interactions on cable news and on Sunday

00:09:41.860 talk shows that are at least as lively. What do you think it was about that that made it go

00:09:47.020 so widespread? And also, if you'd characterized it, if you care to just characterize it briefly for

00:09:51.920 those who haven't seen it. It was a combination of things. It was the topic. It was the fact that it

00:09:56.500 was a star of Ben Affleck's caliber going kind of nuts and going nuts in a way that was very polarized

00:10:03.800 into the audience. So what happened briefly is I was actually on not to talk about Islam or jihadism

00:10:08.940 or terrorism or anything related to this topic. I was on to talk about my book on meditation,

00:10:15.280 Waking Up, you know, where I was trying to put our spiritual concerns, our contemplative concerns,

00:10:21.060 on a rational footing. And it just so happened that, I mean, this is a hobby horse that Bill and I have

00:10:27.680 written for a number of years talking about the unique need for reform in Islam. You know,

00:10:34.780 I have an argument against all faith-based religion, but part of my argument is to acknowledge that

00:10:39.420 religions are not the same. They teach different things. They emphasize different points. And to its

00:10:44.940 discredit and to the reliable immiseration of millions of people, Islam emphasizes intolerance

00:10:53.100 to free speech and intolerance to political equality between the sexes and rather direct connection

00:10:59.940 between suicidal violence and martyrdom. And hence all the problems we see throughout the Muslim world

00:11:07.680 at the moment and our collision with it. So in any case, that topic came up of Islam and jihadism

00:11:14.260 in the middle of this interview. And Ben Affleck jumped in. I mean, clearly he had been prepared by

00:11:20.420 somebody to hate me because his intrusions into my interview with Bill were otherwise inexplicable

00:11:27.200 because he was sort of at my throat even before the topic of Islam came up. I was still talking

00:11:31.940 about meditation and he said something snide, again, in a mid-show interview that is normally

00:11:38.200 protected from the intrusions of the rest of the panel. So it was weird. And then the thing just lit up

00:11:44.160 with him seemingly completely misunderstanding what Bill and I were saying, but doing it in an

00:11:50.480 increasingly adamant and ultimately quite heated way. So he was unhinged and not making any sense

00:11:57.880 from my point of view. And he was calling us racists and bigots.

00:12:01.940 And in some ways proving the very points that you were making.

00:12:04.820 Oh yeah, in every way. My point was, listen, people get emotionally hijacked on this issue.

00:12:10.440 They don't actually follow the logic of what is being said. I'm criticizing ideas, not people.

00:12:17.920 Islam is a religion subscribed to one or another degree by people who call themselves Muslims. But

00:12:24.300 we have to speak specifically about the consequences of specific beliefs. It becomes incredibly relevant

00:12:30.640 to know what percentage of people think dying in defense of the faith is the best thing that could

00:12:36.480 possibly happen to you or that apostates should be killed. So we're talking about the consequences

00:12:40.100 of ideas. And there are many, many millions of Muslims who would repudiate both of those ideas.

00:12:45.900 So obviously I'm not talking about them when I'm talking about the problem of jihadism or

00:12:49.440 a belief in martyrdom or apostasy. And so he proved himself totally incapable of following the plot just

00:12:56.280 as I was talking about that very problem and went berserk. And the most depressing thing about that

00:13:02.120 encounter was to see how many people on the left, and in particular apologists for Islam and so-called

00:13:09.080 moderate Muslims who viewed his performance as just the height of ethical wisdom, right? Like he had

00:13:16.380 unmasked Mai and Bill's racism as though being Muslim was to be a member of a race. I mean, that non-sequitur

00:13:23.960 was the first thing people should have noticed. But he was celebrated as just this white knight who came

00:13:29.700 to the defense of beleaguered brown people everywhere, right?

00:13:33.040 Really? I missed that part of the...

00:13:35.040 To a degree that is just... I mean, if you've looked on social media in the immediate aftermath of that,

00:13:40.460 it was just a tsunami of moral and political confusion, really. It was like a nuclear bomb

00:13:47.940 of identity politics.

00:13:49.040 Well, what's interesting to me is I looked at that in preparation for today's talk, and it would seem

00:13:54.740 the tide has changed. I looked at the YouTube clip, and I know that you've said in other places that

00:13:58.840 YouTube seems to be a particularly bad cesspool for really vitriolic commentary at times.

00:14:04.920 And I figured I'd scan it quickly to get a sense of like, what's the percentage breakdown?

00:14:10.220 And I looked at almost 100 comments, I believe, and I did not find a single one that was pro Ben

00:14:17.900 Affleck. I mean, people were making the points that you just made, that he was essentially making

00:14:21.700 your points for you, in that when you start talking about ideas, people presume that you're trying

00:14:27.640 to paint with a broad brush, people, which you were not trying to do. So it might have changed

00:14:32.780 since then. But in the immediate aftermath, there was a very pro Ben kind of reaction to what it

00:14:38.760 sounds like.

00:14:39.200 Yeah. And it continues in a way that is quite shameful. So for instance, the comic Hassan Minaj,

00:14:47.620 who just did the White House Correspondents Dinner, so he's now the one that Trump didn't attend,

00:14:52.980 but his stature has risen among comics of late. And he just released a Netflix special where he talks

00:15:01.580 about this issue, just praising Ben Affleck to the skies and saying quite libelously that Bill,

00:15:11.120 in that exchange, advocated for, quote, rounding up Muslims and containing them, as though in concentration

00:15:17.160 camps, or at the very least internment camps. How this got past Netflix fact-checkers...

00:15:23.260 He stated that as a fact.

00:15:24.540 As a fact.

00:15:24.760 Not as a punchline, not as a joke.

00:15:25.760 No, no.

00:15:26.260 He stated that as a fact.

00:15:27.360 Bill Maher said on camera, a YouTube clip viewed by millions of people, round them up.

00:15:32.880 This is his position, that he wants Muslims rounded up and contained, right? And happily,

00:15:38.940 he didn't mention me by name. He was talking about Bill and Ben in that episode. But it's just

00:15:43.620 pure delusion and slander. It's a massive applause line in his world. So this is a kind of form of

00:15:51.640 asymmetric warfare. Whenever I inadvertently misrepresent the views of my opponents, I mean,

00:15:58.880 no matter how malicious the opponent, right? If I say something that gets their view wrong,

00:16:04.620 and it gets pointed out to me, I publicly apologize for it. I am absolutely scrupulous to represent

00:16:12.340 their views faithfully.

00:16:14.360 As they represent them themselves.

00:16:15.740 Yes, yes. Because some of this gets fairly bloody. But when I'm pushing back against my

00:16:22.260 critics, and again, no matter how malicious, I am always holding myself to the standard of

00:16:28.040 articulating their position in a way that they couldn't find fault with. And then I can then go

00:16:34.240 on and demonstrate what's wrong with their view. Anyone who criticizes Islam as a doctrine, or really

00:16:41.960 anyone who touches any of these third rails that have become so fraught among liberals and progressives,

00:16:48.420 so to talk about race, to talk about gender, to talk about really any of these variables around which

00:16:54.400 identity politics have been built, reliably produces people who think that defaming you at any cost

00:17:01.920 is fair game. So they will attribute to you views that not only do you not hold, they are the

00:17:06.600 opposite of the views you hold. They will make any attempt to make that stick.

00:17:10.980 Do you think in their minds it's an ends justifies the means thing, where they are so committed to

00:17:16.480 their position, and they are so utterly certain that their position is objectively right, that they're

00:17:22.840 saying, okay, I know he didn't say round them up, but I'm going to say that he said round them up,

00:17:28.500 because that will eliminate his credibility, and the elimination of his credibility, even

00:17:33.800 by a dishonest mechanism, serves such a higher good. Do you think that's the calculus?

00:17:40.220 Obviously, there's a range of cases here. And so the most charitable case is that there's some number

00:17:45.400 of people who are just intellectually lazy, and are just guilty of confirmation bias, they're misled,

00:17:53.360 they hear a snippet of something which strikes them a certain way, and then they just run with it,

00:17:57.740 right? And they feel no intellectual or moral obligation to get their facts straight.

00:18:03.040 Yeah.

00:18:03.160 Anyone can fall prey to that. I mean, if, you know, I've been so critical of Donald Trump,

00:18:07.340 if you show me a tweet that looks insane from him, I'm not going to spend any time trying to figure

00:18:12.440 out if it's really a tweet from him, because all of his tweets have been insane. So either the chances

00:18:16.640 this one's real is very high. If revealed that it was fake, well, then I'll walk back my forwarding of

00:18:22.920 it or whatever. But everyone only has so much time in the day, and so it's easy to see how people get

00:18:27.700 lured into just being lazy, right? But then there are the people who consciously manufacture

00:18:34.480 falsehoods. You know, I think there are actually real just psychopaths in any movement, right? And

00:18:39.460 there are people who just have no moral qualms in spreading lies, no matter how defamatory, no matter

00:18:44.880 how likely they are to increase the security concerns of the people involved. Spreading the lie

00:18:51.240 that someone is a racist or that they favor genocide against Muslims, say, which are, these are both

00:18:57.780 lies that are just endlessly spread about me and Bill and even former Muslims or Muslim reformers with

00:19:05.700 whom I support. I mean, someone like Ayaan Hirsi Ali or Majid Nawaz, I mean, people who are,

00:19:09.600 have excruciating security concerns. Endless lies are told about them, and these lies have the effect

00:19:16.940 of raising their security concerns. It could jeopardize their lives. Yeah, yeah. This is well

00:19:20.800 understood by the people who are telling these lies. For instance, this is just, you happen to catch me

00:19:25.460 in a 24-hour period where this has happened to me in a fairly spectacular way. Really?

00:19:30.680 So yeah, I had Majid Nawaz, who's this brilliant and truly ethical Muslim reformer on my podcast.

00:19:39.820 And a reformed Muslim as well. He had been imprisoned for a period of time for radical

00:19:44.460 activities. Yeah, yeah. So he's a former Islamist, which is distinct from a jihadist. He was not a

00:19:49.320 terrorist, but he was trying to, you know, he was part of an organization that was trying to

00:19:53.240 spread the idea of a global caliphate, and they were trying to engineer coups in places like Pakistan

00:19:58.220 and Egypt. So he was doing fairly nefarious things. He was recruiting for this organization,

00:20:03.580 and then spent four years in an Egyptian prison, and got essentially deprogrammed in proximity to

00:20:10.160 jihadists and fellow Islamists, just understanding of the kind of world they wanted to build more

00:20:16.440 deeply. And then he was also taken as a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International. And that,

00:20:22.560 it was the juxtaposition of that kind of ethical overture from the enemy.

00:20:27.260 Because he at that time would have considered Amnesty to be the enemy.

00:20:30.660 Oh, yeah.

00:20:30.900 This is a Western liberal progressive organization. Now, all of a sudden, they're coming in

00:20:35.100 and defending me, even though they know I loathe everything they stand for, because that is

00:20:40.160 what they do, that is consistent with their values. So that got through to him.

00:20:44.120 And who in the, what organization in the Muslim world or the Islamist world does that, right?

00:20:49.420 It broke the spell. And so he came out of prison, and very soon thereafter,

00:20:54.600 disavowed his Islamist roots.

00:20:57.740 But did not disavow Islam, right? He's still a practicing Muslim.

00:21:00.940 He's at pains to say that he's not devout. He's not holding himself up as an example of

00:21:05.740 religiosity. But he's identified as a Muslim. He's not an ex-Muslim. He's not claiming to be an

00:21:12.900 atheist. And he started this counter-extremist think tank, the Quilliam Foundation in the UK,

00:21:18.180 that has attracted theologians and other former Islamists and has a very active program of deep

00:21:26.180 programming extremists, both jihadist and otherwise. And this is just the most courageous

00:21:33.160 and necessary work. I mean, of all the things that human beings should be doing, especially people

00:21:39.300 in the Muslim community. This is just, it has to be at the top of everyone's list. And yet he is

00:21:45.640 demonized as an Uncle Tom and a native informant by so-called moderate Muslims, right? And so he and

00:21:53.240 I wrote a book together, which was initially a kind of debate. I mean, we're on, you know, I was the

00:21:58.960 atheist criticizing Islam and talking about the link between the doctrine and terrorism. And he was

00:22:05.400 arguing for a program of reform. And it was a very fruitful collaboration and a very useful

00:22:12.260 introduction to the issue for those who have read the book. And there's a documentary coming out,

00:22:17.940 you know, based on the book. And we did a speaking tour in Australia together. I'm totally supportive

00:22:23.320 of him. I mean, he's a real friend now. And so he was on my podcast in January, and we're having a

00:22:30.180 conversation about all these issues. And there's a part of the conversation where I'm essentially

00:22:34.800 playing devil's advocate with him. And so he had been talking about reform. And at this point,

00:22:42.020 we're speaking specifically about the migrant crisis in Europe, born of the civil war in Syria,

00:22:49.060 and just what to do about the millions of people who are pouring across the borders into Europe

00:22:54.580 at that point, and just the ethical challenges of that. And I'm on record, both in that podcast and

00:23:02.540 elsewhere, saying that I think we have a moral obligation to let in all the Syrians we can

00:23:08.320 properly vet. I talk about these people as the most unlucky people on earth. I am, you know,

00:23:13.620 I was against Trump's travel ban, right? And I have criticized that on television and on my podcast

00:23:19.460 and in print.

00:23:20.560 Yeah, you've been quite unequivocal about that.

00:23:22.280 Yeah. And again, within this specific podcast made these points. I talk about secular and liberal

00:23:29.140 Muslims being the most important people on earth and the people who I would move to the front of

00:23:33.980 the line to get U.S. citizenship if they wanted it, if I had any influence there. So my views on this

00:23:40.340 matter are very clear. So there's a part in the conversation where I'm playing devil's advocate,

00:23:44.820 and there had just been a terrorist attack in Germany in the Christmas market where a jihadist in a van

00:23:51.040 plowed into dozens of people and I think killed 12 and injured 50. And at one point I said to Maja,

00:23:56.600 okay, so you've said many hopeful things thus far. I want to push back a little bit. I can well

00:24:02.120 imagine that there are millions of people in Europe at this moment, in the aftermath of this Christmas

00:24:06.300 market attack, who are thinking, why the fuck do we need more Muslims in our society? Surely we have

00:24:14.340 enough. Why not just not let anyone else in, right? So someone who apparently has been doing this to

00:24:20.940 all my podcasts, I only just noticed this time, someone in the Muslim community took a snippet of

00:24:27.460 the audio, starting with, why the fuck do we need more Muslims in our society, right? And then there's

00:24:33.440 just Maja's contribution here is just, he's just kind of nodding along saying, yes, doing nothing to

00:24:38.280 push back. I mean, just seeming to acquiesce to my position here. And he tweets this out, this minute

00:24:44.700 of audio witness, you know, Sam Harris's genocidal attitude toward Muslims and, you know, Majid's

00:24:51.000 support. And then all the usual suspects, Reza Aslan and Max Blumenthal, you know, the odious son

00:24:57.840 of Sidney Blumenthal, who has never resisted an opportunity to lie about people like me and Ayaan

00:25:04.580 Hursi Ali and Majid. All of them, just full court press, push this out. I mean, now we're talking about

00:25:09.560 people who have platforms of hundreds of thousands, you know, and then that percolates down to all the

00:25:14.720 people who have tens of thousands of people on Twitter. So millions of people receive this.

00:25:19.480 And this is just yesterday or...

00:25:20.980 Yeah, yeah, this is now 48 hours ago. And I'm seeing people from, I'm seeing a writer from the

00:25:26.860 nation also push it out. And also like nearly docks me where she says, well, next time I see him at

00:25:32.740 my favorite coffee house, and she names the coffee house that I'm at rather frequently, I'll tell him

00:25:38.480 what I think of him, right? So it's the most irresponsible use of social media. And in the

00:25:45.280 case of people like Reza Aslan, he absolutely knows what my position is, and he knows he's

00:25:50.660 lying about it.

00:25:51.620 And there is clearly a world of difference between what you had characterized as the most charitable

00:25:56.060 case, which is this is just somebody who's incredibly lazy and doesn't research. This person

00:25:59.580 very plainly, surgically removed something out of context, very, very surgically, not an oopsie

00:26:06.640 blunder kind of thing. Put it out there. And those who picked it up, presumably knowing a thing or two

00:26:12.300 about both you and also the source, just spread it wantonly without any notion of checking to see

00:26:18.280 if it was taken out of context.

00:26:19.740 And the other thing that's crucial here is that even if you wanted to extend the most charitable

00:26:24.560 interpretation to them, that is a genuine mistake.

00:26:27.860 The secondary forwarders, in a sense.

00:26:29.680 Within 15 minutes, the hoax is revealed, because I have, you know, nearly a million people following

00:26:36.660 me on Twitter. And I pushed back against it, you know, multiple times. And I sent a link to the

00:26:42.780 timestamp to the beginning of the actual part of the conversation that reveals just what is being

00:26:47.260 said. No apologies come from any of these.

00:26:49.780 No retraction.

00:26:50.400 No retraction. You know, they don't delete it.

00:26:52.560 Which you wouldn't expect from the person who did it, because they did it quite wittingly.

00:26:56.280 But the people who forwarded it to hundreds of thousands of people, having been made aware,

00:27:00.600 would have a moral responsibility to walk that back. Because it does put you, it heightens the

00:27:05.700 physical threat that you live under. We are probably either a double-digit number of months

00:27:12.120 from software, which we've seen the first prototypes already, that would allow somebody to basically

00:27:18.300 sample your voice, which there are many, many examples, and basically do a marionette thing

00:27:23.100 where they have you say whatever they want. But these tools are going to be out there,

00:27:27.720 and they're going to be misusable by anybody.

00:27:29.940 Yeah.

00:27:30.260 And you could be made to say, I could be made to say, the president, anybody could be made

00:27:34.940 to say absolutely anything. And I wonder if that's going to kind of, in a perverse way,

00:27:41.480 help things, because audio quotes will, from that point forward, just simply not being taken

00:27:45.900 seriously.

00:27:46.600 Yeah. No, I'm really worried about that. But I do actually see the silver lining you

00:27:53.460 just pointed to. I think that it will be so subversive that people will realize that all

00:27:59.380 you can trust is the actual source.

00:28:01.520 Yeah. It'll be so misused so quickly.

00:28:04.160 I imagine something similar has happened with Photoshop now, where people just don't use photos

00:28:11.320 as forensic evidence in the same way. And they just, they're fairly skeptical about what they

00:28:16.600 see in an image when it counts. Just imagine if you saw, if someone forwarded to you a photo of

00:28:22.480 Trump in some insane circumstance, your first thought before forwarding it would be, wait a

00:28:30.980 minute, is this photoshopped? We'll have to be that circumspect about audio and even video. So now

00:28:36.000 they have the mouth-linking fakery. The completely fake audio, which again, sounds exactly like the

00:28:42.960 person's actual voice, can be made to seem like it's coming out of his or her mouth.

00:28:47.500 You add the visual cue, and look, it always, what happens in audio happens next in video.

00:28:51.540 Yeah.

00:28:52.060 Well, to sort of go a little bit bigger picture for a moment, I'm delighted to be talking to

00:28:55.520 you now because there's almost an uncanny overlap between the subjects you've dedicated your life to

00:29:01.260 understanding and those that are discussed in my novel after on. The main topic of the book is

00:29:05.720 super AI. You're very widely quoted on this subject. You gave a great TED talk about it almost exactly a

00:29:11.540 year ago. Another major theme in the book is consciousness. You spent an entire decade exploring

00:29:16.600 consciousness full time. I'm not sure if that's an overstatement, but it's an approximation.

00:29:21.200 A connected major topic is neuroscience. You are one, or you're a neuroscientist. And yet another

00:29:26.520 major theme is nihilistic terrorism. And of course, you're now one of the most outspoken people.

00:29:30.680 In the U.S. on this subject, I think the only lifelong focus of yours that's not a major

00:29:36.540 obsession of the book is jujitsu. So we will keep the jujitsu talk to an absolute minimum here.

00:29:41.740 But before we go back into all this, and particularly nihilistic terrorism, I'd like to consider

00:29:45.700 the life trajectory that made you expert in all these topics, starting at the first time

00:29:52.380 our lives overlapped without either of us realizing it. We were both undergraduates at Stanford at the

00:29:58.140 same time. I was a year ahead of you, young man. And I'd like to go back that far just briefly,

00:30:03.760 because you embarked on an unusually bold, and as it turned out, unusually long project for one of an

00:30:11.240 undergraduate age. And it's a project that I think has a great deal to do with who you are now.

00:30:17.000 So when you arrived at Stanford, you're on campus, you haven't yet made this bold decision to take an

00:30:22.680 enormous amount of time off. What was your thinking of religion at that point? Were you an atheist

00:30:28.280 already? If you were, was that a major part of your identity, a minor part?

00:30:33.140 Well, I was definitely an atheist, but I wouldn't have called myself one. The term atheist was not

00:30:40.220 really in my vocabulary. I was completely unaware of the history of atheism, organized atheism. I

00:30:47.680 wouldn't have known who Madeleine Murray O'Hare was. And I had never been given religion by my

00:30:54.340 parents, so I wasn't reacting against some dogmatism that had come from the family.

00:31:00.420 And you came, your parents were from very different religious traditions, correct?

00:31:04.160 Yeah, but both just...

00:31:05.640 Were not in practice.

00:31:06.380 Just unreligious, yeah. I mean, they were just, but again, they were not atheists. They wouldn't have

00:31:10.280 called themselves atheists.

00:31:11.600 But you had one of your parents' ways, Quaker, is that right?

00:31:14.300 Yeah, Quaker, and my mother's Jewish. And so this is also slightly an artifact of what

00:31:20.120 it is to be surrounded by cultural Jews who are not religious. I mean, so Judaism is almost

00:31:25.240 unique in that you can have people for whom their religion is still a seemingly significant

00:31:31.180 part of their lives. They care that they're Jewish, but there is zero otherworldly or supernatural

00:31:38.220 content to their thinking about what it is, what it means to be a Jew.

00:31:41.560 I believe it probably is unique. I mean, maybe the Parsis have something similar.

00:31:45.600 Yeah, and this Jewish experience of secularism is fairly misleading to most Jews, I find,

00:31:52.700 because they kind of assume that everyone else has lost their religion to the same degree.

00:31:58.220 You know, so I've debated conservative rabbis who, when push came to shove, revealed they believed

00:32:05.080 almost nothing that could be classified as religious. Their notion of God was so elastic as to commit

00:32:14.140 them to almost nothing. You know, nothing specific about what happens after death, nothing that can

00:32:19.300 necessarily be prayed to or that can care about human events. I'm not talking about reformed Jews,

00:32:23.800 I'm talking about conservatives. You know, the ultra-Orthodox believe a fair number of imponderable

00:32:28.500 things. But short of that, Judaism has really been denuded of its otherworldliness. I grew up in

00:32:35.580 that kind of context where even religious people—again, my family wasn't—but even people who went to

00:32:41.520 synagogue didn't believe anything. So I was fairly sheltered from the culture wars in that respect,

00:32:47.820 and was just unaware of the kind of work that religious ideas were doing in the world or in the

00:32:58.500 phase. When I got to Stanford, I remember being in the Great Books Seminar, and the Bible was one of

00:33:03.940 the books that is considered great and that we had to read. And I remember getting into debates with

00:33:10.620 people who had clearly come from a Midwestern Christian background, say, or more of a Bible-built

00:33:17.340 experience, and just, I mean, having absolutely no patience for their belief that this book was

00:33:27.620 fundamentally different from the Iliad and the Odyssey or anything else we were reading in this

00:33:32.480 seminar. And the professor's way of holding that text in particular compared to the other books—I

00:33:39.420 don't know if she was religious, but she seemed to be carving out a kind of different place on the

00:33:43.660 bookshelf for this text to occupy. And from my point of view, the stuff we were reading wasn't even

00:33:50.300 great. I would admit that there are great parts of the Bible, but, I mean, we were reading Leviticus

00:33:56.400 and Deuteronomy, and just, I mean, these are the most deranged recipes for theocracy that have ever

00:34:03.220 been written. I mean, certainly sections of them are worse than anything that's in the Quran or any

00:34:07.800 other terrible book. I was just astonished that we were wasting time reading this stuff. The only argument

00:34:15.360 for reading it, in my view then, and it's really my view now, is to understand how influential the

00:34:22.580 book has been elsewhere. I mean, you want to be able to understand the allusions in Shakespeare,

00:34:27.220 you have to be conversant with the Bible. But the idea that this is somehow a great flowering of human

00:34:33.680 wisdom, you know, again, specifically books like Deuteronomy and Leviticus.

00:34:39.280 Those are books in which the grim punishments for people who step out of line, among other things,

00:34:45.000 are detailed in kind of gory detail. Yeah, and they're not allegories for anything. It's just,

00:34:51.200 these are the reasons why you need to kill not only your neighbors, but members of your own family

00:34:56.880 for thought crimes. Here's how you should be living. And it's just, you almost couldn't invent a worse

00:35:03.700 worldview. And the corollary to that is anyone, any neurologically intact person, in five minutes

00:35:12.360 can improve these books spiritually and ethically and politically and in every other way, scientifically,

00:35:20.000 economically. I mean, there's just nothing that this is the best for, even good for, apart from

00:35:27.180 creating conditions of, you know, Taliban level intolerance in a society. That is, if, you know,

00:35:33.200 people actually believe this stuff. And, you know, very few Jews now believe that you should be paying

00:35:38.560 any significant attention to Leviticus or Deuteronomy. And Christians have their own

00:35:43.080 reasons for ignoring it. But what we're witnessing in the Muslim world is that there are analogous

00:35:48.180 texts, the parts of the Quran being one, and the Hadith, and the biography of Muhammad being the rest

00:35:55.100 of the canon, which detail, you know, very similar levels of intolerance and a commitment to prosecuting

00:36:02.200 thought crime. And many, many millions of people take them very, very seriously.

00:36:07.340 And so you were in a state of outrage at the fact that these texts were being held up as great.

00:36:12.680 You were certainly not a believer in any manner. Atheism may not have been a word you would have

00:36:18.400 applied to yourself, but it was something that you, essentially, from what you're describing,

00:36:22.760 that's kind of what you were on the inside.

00:36:25.000 If you look at the DSM, 10-year journeys of spiritual discovery are generally not considered

00:36:31.980 to be symptoms of atheism. Yet, from that point of de facto atheism, you essentially did take off on,

00:36:39.640 is it fair to say, a 10-year journey of spiritual discovery and near full-time exploration of

00:36:46.000 consciousness?

00:36:46.960 Yeah. So what happened is I took MDMA for the first time, and I had taken other psychedelics

00:36:53.840 as a teenager. I mean, really just mushrooms a few times.

00:36:57.200 And I will add that Stanford in the late 80s was awash in MDMA long before it entered the club

00:37:03.960 scene in the UK.

00:37:05.240 Oh, that's interesting.

00:37:05.580 Yeah. It was all over campus.

00:37:07.580 I didn't know that, actually. I'd never encountered it.

00:37:09.620 Yeah, yeah. No, it was all over the place. And we called it X in the United States, and then the

00:37:15.120 Brits, who kind of discovered it a few years later, called it E. And it was something that was just so

00:37:20.740 part of just sort of the fabric that I mistakenly thought it was a very, very widespread drug,

00:37:26.120 and it didn't become widespread until much, much later. Now, I wasn't as bold as you. I actually

00:37:30.100 was fearful of this stuff, but it was everywhere. It was definitely everywhere in the 80s. Yeah.

00:37:35.940 Then you were in hipper circles than I was.

00:37:38.320 Well, you were hipper than I was because you actually tried it.

00:37:40.680 Yeah, no, I mean, maybe it was everywhere because I had taken it, and I was proselytizing.

00:37:43.260 It was like all Sam's on it.

00:37:44.420 Yeah. I was evangelizing pretty hard, at least to three captive friends when I got back to campus,

00:37:51.820 because it really did blow my mind. I mean, it just changed everything about what I thought was

00:37:57.700 possible.

00:37:58.380 So that was the pivoting incident. That was what caused you to—I didn't realize that. So that

00:38:02.640 was the thing that caused you to say, I'm out of here, at least for now.

00:38:06.520 It's connection to my dropping out was a little less direct than that. It took a little more time,

00:38:13.440 but it just took like a quarter, you know. But it was, you know, 10 weeks later, I was not

00:38:18.120 enrolling again. But I guess I took it during spring break or something. I wasn't at Stanford. I was

00:38:23.960 back home when I took it. This is something I write about in the beginning of my book, Waking Up.

00:38:29.200 Yeah.

00:38:29.500 It was the first experience I had where the implications of that change in my consciousness,

00:38:34.700 they were far more global, and they suggested something about the possibility of changing

00:38:39.760 one's consciousness in a more durable way. I wasn't left thinking, wow, ecstasy is amazing,

00:38:46.700 or, you know, that was a very interesting drug experience. It seemed to unmask something about

00:38:52.240 the nature of my own mind that was more true than what I was tending to experience. So the experience

00:38:58.960 of coming down from it was the experience of having my actual true self, in a way, occluded by neurotic

00:39:10.060 layers of my personality that were being rebuilt, that had been suppressed by the drug. So, I mean,

00:39:15.900 the experience was briefly of just feeling all self-concern drop away. So that I was, you know,

00:39:23.080 Sidney, I was talking to one of my best friends. He still is one of my closest friends. And he had never

00:39:28.360 taken it before either. So we both took this, and we, again, we took it, this is before anyone had

00:39:33.680 a rave or, yeah, so, and we took it very much in the spirit of trying to find out something

00:39:39.520 interesting about our minds. We weren't partying, this was, this was...

00:39:42.820 More of a Timothy Leary than a Ken Kesey type of experience.

00:39:46.160 Yeah. I mean, this was given to us as, this had been kind of an export from the psychotherapeutic

00:39:51.420 community. Like, this is a drug that shows you something about the nature of spirituality,

00:39:55.840 the nature of love, ultimately. So we were just curious about what was there to be discovered.

00:40:02.160 And I just remember talking to him, and there was nothing psychedelic about it at all. I mean,

00:40:08.180 there were just no visual distortions, no sense of coming onto a drug, just this increasing sense of

00:40:14.080 moral and emotional clarity, where I just have more and more free attention to just talk to my friend.

00:40:21.620 I'm getting less and less at every moment as I'm coming onto this, and it took a while for me to

00:40:27.240 recognize what had happened, but I'm becoming less and less encumbered by the concern about what he's

00:40:33.580 thinking about me. I mean, so, like, I'm looking into his eyes, and I'm no longer, like, and, you know,

00:40:39.080 there's changes in his facial expression in response to what I'm saying, and I'm no longer reading that

00:40:45.280 as a message about me. It's like, it's like, I'm no longer behind my face looking at him,

00:40:52.220 no longer tacking in the wind of somebody else's attention on me. There was just a sense of zero

00:40:59.000 self-concern. I mean, I just, my attention was not on myself at all. I was simply paying attention to my

00:41:04.640 best friend. And that pure granting of attention was love. What I was experiencing more and more as the

00:41:13.760 minutes ticked on was just a total commitment to his happiness, just his well-being, just wanting

00:41:21.960 everything that could, that could possibly happen for someone to happen to him, right? There was

00:41:26.900 nothing transactional about that. It was just a pure state of being. It was just like the state of being

00:41:32.340 fully attentive to another person as just the locus of a moral concern.

00:41:40.240 And this led you to decide that you wanted to significantly alter your curriculum, I guess. I

00:41:45.580 mean, you were at that point taking the, you were sophomore at this point. Yeah. So not a notoriously

00:41:51.320 delightful year for anybody, but you were taking a wad of things, preparing to declare your major if you

00:41:55.700 hadn't yet already. And so I assume that this made you realize that there was a different curriculum you

00:42:01.280 wanted to pursue in a sense. So ironically, it led me to realize that all of the otherwise incoherent

00:42:08.480 and offensive noises that religious people had been making for millennia actually, actually were

00:42:14.600 inspired, must have been inspired by experiences like this, right? So like, whatever you want to

00:42:21.560 think about Christianity and the Bible, Jesus was probably talking about this, right? Or something

00:42:26.820 like this. So the one thing that just bore in upon me like a freight train in that experience was

00:42:32.300 the recognition that millions of people had had experiences like this, and many not through drugs,

00:42:40.040 but through, you know, prayer and fasting and, you know, other contemplative exercises, yoga,

00:42:45.600 meditation. So there was a path. Your mind could be more and more like this than mine had tended to be.

00:42:53.100 And without chemicals.

00:42:54.700 Yes. Yeah. Because it's all just chemicals. I mean, the drug is, you know, drugs are mimicking

00:43:00.220 neurotransmitters or inspiring neurotransmitters to behave differently. I mean, you only have a few

00:43:05.920 levers to pull in there, but I didn't have a background in neuroscience at that point. And I

00:43:10.920 had been an English major. And so when I went back to school, there was nothing in school that I could

00:43:16.520 connect with that immediately seemed like this is the most rational use of your time, given what you just

00:43:21.880 experienced. And I also was writing, I was also planning to write fiction. I wanted to write...

00:43:26.840 I know you were working on a novel, weren't you?

00:43:28.460 Yeah. Yeah. So I had a kind of a dual agenda when I dropped out. I was going to write a novel and

00:43:34.320 study meditation. I started going on meditation retreats that were getting kind of longer and

00:43:39.780 longer. And then I was going to India and studying meditation with various teachers and going to

00:43:45.180 Nepal. And I mean, this is mostly in a Buddhist context.

00:43:48.080 And did you buy into the religiosity of Buddhism? Because often, I mean,

00:43:51.620 there's extraordinarily powerful spiritual practice that is embedded in Buddhism. But in

00:43:55.920 other contexts, you've said, you can access that and leave the religiosity behind if you wish.

00:44:01.160 You're coming in as a young person, as a novice of sorts into this community. Was it easy for you

00:44:07.500 to take sort of almost the neuroscientific wisdom that was being transferred and leave out

00:44:13.660 the religious wrapping that I imagine it often came in if you were going on retreat and going to

00:44:19.520 monasteries and things like that?

00:44:20.960 Yeah, not entirely. I mean, I was not, I never became a religious Buddhist or much less a religious

00:44:28.100 Hindu, though I was studying with teachers in both traditions. But I was not yet a scientist. I was not

00:44:36.600 yet really scientifically literate. I mean, my background, I'd been studying English at Stanford.

00:44:41.660 And hadn't taken many science courses at that point. And I became very interested in the

00:44:49.680 philosophy of mind and in the conversation that was happening between philosophers and scientists

00:44:55.060 about the nature of consciousness. So I was reading, I was getting some brain science in reading what

00:45:01.420 philosophers were saying. And I was reading some stuff at the margins of neuroscience. And then I was

00:45:07.040 also reading a fair amount of popular physics, because a lot of the popular physics was being

00:45:12.260 marketed as a way of cashing out a new age mysticism. People were hurling books at me on

00:45:20.520 quantum mechanics.

00:45:21.480 Quantum mechanics, yeah, yeah.

00:45:22.760 And the scientific and philosophical confusion there was not yet obvious to me. So at a certain

00:45:28.320 point, undoubtedly, when I'm up to my eyeballs in Krishnamurti and reading patently magical books

00:45:36.640 like Autobiography of a Yogi, you know, Paramahansa Yogananda. And then I'm also reading, you know,

00:45:41.660 Ken Wilber and people who are wrapping up Eastern wisdom with basically the spookiest exports from

00:45:49.880 physics. So if you had asked me what I thought the universe was like at that moment, I undoubtedly

00:45:56.440 some new age gobbledygook could have come out, you know, which is, I now view as quasi-religious.

00:46:05.120 There's a fair amount of confusion there. And I've debated people like Deepak Chopra, who still

00:46:10.060 promulgate that kind of confusion. I was always interested in just in the experiential

00:46:14.780 component of meditation and any of these paths of practice. But when you go far enough into the

00:46:22.080 experiential component and begin to confirm some of the very surprising things, some of the very

00:46:27.480 surprising claims about the nature of the mind that only seem to get made by people in the East,

00:46:35.260 for the most part, who are also making claims about the magic powers that come with attaining,

00:46:41.740 you know, very high states of meditation and the miraculous feats of various yogis and gurus.

00:46:48.520 Well, then you're surrounded by people who believe, for instance, that their favorite yoga teacher can read

00:46:55.100 their minds, right? And I was always somewhat skeptical of these stories. I mean, I don't think

00:47:02.480 I had the phrase confirmation bias in my head, but I could see that the disposition among these people

00:47:08.560 to believe, the desire to believe these stories to be true, yeah, was, I mean, there was very little

00:47:15.080 resistance in the system to just accepting everything uncritically. I think I was, you know,

00:47:20.600 I was on the skeptical end there, but I was not spending any time trying to debunk claims about

00:47:25.420 magic. I was simply just trying to get to the most qualified teachers and learn whatever they

00:47:32.140 had to teach. And it was roughly a 10-year period, correct? Yeah. Which you were going on to retreats,

00:47:38.300 coming back. How many of those 10 years were you in silent meditation? Was it, would it total to a

00:47:44.560 year or more? It totaled to about two years. If you strung them all together, the various silent

00:47:49.040 retreats. Yeah. I mean, I was, I was doing, I never did a silent retreat longer than three months,

00:47:54.520 but I did, I did a couple of three months, a couple of two months. Sounds like a doozy to me.

00:47:59.280 Yeah. I mean, it's long. It's, it's just an amazing experience. I mean, there's something,

00:48:03.560 you know, paradoxically, you can experience the same thing in a moment off retreat. It's not that

00:48:09.240 there's in principle the necessity of being in silence, but for most people, it's amazingly powerful

00:48:15.600 to go into silence. It's an experience unlike any you tend to have, even when you're spending much

00:48:21.460 of your day alone and out in the world, you know, for those who don't have an experience with

00:48:26.140 meditation, this is, I guess, some explanations in order, but whatever practice of meditation you're

00:48:31.440 doing, you're really in two conditions while doing it. You're either lost in thought, you're just

00:48:36.980 distracted by your, the kind of the automaticity of discursive thought, and you've just forgotten that

00:48:41.740 you were supposed to be meditating, or you're paying attention to the thing you're trying to

00:48:45.320 pay attention to, and that is your practice of meditation. And we spend so much time in our lives

00:48:51.020 lost in thought, having a conversation with ourselves that we're not aware of having. And so

00:48:55.800 much of this conversation is neurotic. So much of it is producing unhappiness. You're thinking about

00:49:01.300 the things you, you regret having done. You're thinking about the things that didn't go well moments

00:49:05.700 before, hours before, days, or even years before. You're thinking about what you want,

00:49:10.200 what you're anxious about, what you're hoping will happen, you know, a moment hence, or at some point

00:49:14.900 in the future. And you're spending almost no time truly connecting with the present moment in a way

00:49:22.620 that is deeply fulfilling. And so, and to take my experience on MDMA, you know, one of its features

00:49:28.000 was just full immersion in the present moment. There was just zero past and future going on. And part of

00:49:35.660 the ecstasy of that experience is attributable just to that. And this is an experience you really can

00:49:41.040 have in meditation. Focusing on anything to sufficient degree produces an ecstatic state

00:49:48.180 of mind. I mean, there's bliss to be found just in being concentrated. It's just being sufficiently

00:49:53.600 concentrated on the breath or a light or anything. It doesn't matter what it is. You can also be

00:49:58.980 additionally concentrated in specific states of mind, like loving kindness, which is very much the

00:50:04.940 emotion that one often experiences on ecstasy. That is a specific meditation practice within the

00:50:10.980 Buddhist tradition. And, you know, in other traditions, there's a devotion to the guru. And, you know,

00:50:15.780 in the Western tradition, there's, you know, the love of Jesus, right? So there's no question that you

00:50:20.340 can be one-pointedly fixated on the object of your devotion and get that emotion so intensely realized

00:50:28.900 in your mind that it obliterates everything else. Incredibly expansive experiences of await someone who

00:50:35.580 can get that concentrated. It need not even be in the positive emotion of love or devotion. It could

00:50:41.480 just be the breath. So I started, you know, I started training in various types of meditation for

00:50:48.060 periods up to three months or so. And so that was punctuating my, the decade of my 20s. And it took

00:50:54.140 me a while to realize that I had to go back to school. And did you come back to English at that

00:50:58.640 point? Because you were studying English at Stanford previously. I came back to philosophy because I had

00:51:03.740 been reading philosophy and essentially writing philosophy nonstop throughout this period for 10

00:51:08.500 years. So very much with the attitude of someone who's going to go to graduate school in philosophy,

00:51:14.180 I went back to finish my undergraduate in philosophy. With an idea that this is a segue

00:51:17.820 into graduate work, but then you ended up pivoting to neuroscience of all things, which is vastly much

00:51:23.460 more of a hard science. How did that pivot come about? I mean, it makes imminent sense looking at

00:51:29.720 who you are now and regarding it with the benefit of hindsight. How did that come about in the moment?

00:51:36.280 The fact that I had dropped out of Stanford was also just sheer good luck because Stanford, as you

00:51:42.500 probably know, is like the one school, certainly the one good school that has this policy where

00:51:47.960 you basically can never drop out. I mean, you just...

00:51:50.560 Well, they call it stopping out. They don't even call it dropping out. So you've stopped out.

00:51:54.080 And there's a presumption that at some point in your life, you may wish to come back. And if you do,

00:51:58.320 the door is essentially always open, right?

00:52:00.140 Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, Tiger Woods can go back to Stanford today. I don't know how long it's been.

00:52:04.100 It's been 20 years or something, but he can just walk back in and the registrar will just

00:52:08.760 have his name in the computer. Take his check for sure.

00:52:11.960 You know, I guess that's the way it should be. I'm sure there's a reason why Harvard and Princeton

00:52:17.280 and other good schools don't do it this way. They don't want you back unless you've been writing

00:52:21.460 them letters every year. And at a certain point, I think you have to reapply. You have to give some

00:52:25.760 accounting for what your years in the wilderness have done to you.

00:52:29.600 Well, I think you're probably an object lesson in that perhaps that's not such a great idea because

00:52:33.620 Stanford did get you back and it was to, you know, their benefit and yours. And I'd argue to the

00:52:37.660 worlds that you were able to slide back into that and make this pivot to neuroscience.

00:52:42.400 It's interesting to look back on that because in my 20s, I remember at one point, I think I was

00:52:45.440 probably 25 and had the first had the thought, you know, I should really go back to school to do

00:52:51.420 this right. But the psychological barrier to going, like, I felt so old at 25. I felt like I felt so

00:52:58.480 neurotic around, wait a minute, I can't go back and be a junior in college at 25. It's flabbergasting

00:53:05.320 for me to glimpse who I was at that moment because, you know, I went back at 30 or 31,

00:53:11.020 very close to 31. And that's a much more neurosis producing bit of arithmetic. And it was psychologically

00:53:18.080 hard to do because, I mean, you just picture it. I'm going back and I've, again, I've spent now a

00:53:22.760 decade reading and writing on my own. And I'm now having to take, do a full philosophy major,

00:53:29.920 taking all the courses. And I'm doing this as fast as I can because I want to get this done with.

00:53:33.900 Right. Because you started with English. So you're, you're in, you're in like sophomore

00:53:37.000 seminars. You're in like, you're in with freshmen.

00:53:39.180 Yeah. Yeah. I'm taking, I have to take, I'm not getting any breaks. I don't have credit for

00:53:42.860 what I've already read. So, and I'm taking a massive course load to do this quickly,

00:53:46.740 but I'm also getting my papers graded by, you know, 20 year old TAs. And it was just brutal.

00:53:53.200 It was just, you know, so.

00:53:54.880 Sam, I think you need to mature as a writer.

00:53:56.580 Yeah. Yeah. You know.

00:53:57.520 Maybe when you were a junior.

00:53:58.580 It was an extraordinary experience, but it was, you know, ultimately a good one because it was

00:54:03.900 just at a certain point, it was not about saving face. It was just, you just have to use this as a

00:54:10.000 crucible to get the tools, to be able to speak clearly, write clearly. And you just have to get

00:54:16.220 out of your own way. I mean, like I was spending all of my time focused on overcoming the, the

00:54:22.220 hallucinatory properties of the ego, right? It's like, I want to wake up from this hallucination

00:54:27.560 where it seems to matter what another person thinks about me and conditions how I feel about

00:54:33.440 myself in the next moment.

00:54:34.400 And you know, if 10 years of meditation aren't going to get you there, I guess it's just time

00:54:37.240 to go back to school and edit time, right?

00:54:39.000 Yeah, exactly. And what meditation gets you, at least at my level, is not a permanent inoculation

00:54:46.060 against all of these unpleasant states of mind, the half-life of psychological suffering

00:54:53.000 gets massively reduced.

00:54:54.680 Right. You regain balance rapidly.

00:54:56.420 Yes. It's sort of up to you how rapidly. At a certain point, you can just decide, all right,

00:55:00.480 I'm going to stop suffering over this thing. And absent an ability to really meditate, you're a

00:55:06.400 victim of whatever half-life it's going to be in your day. So if you're going to, if you get

00:55:10.640 suddenly angry now about something that happens, you know, you could be angry for an hour, you

00:55:16.580 could be angry for a day, you could be angry for a week. And over that period, you could

00:55:20.940 do all the life-deranging things that angry people do to screw up their relationships.

00:55:26.580 Because you've got plenty of time to do them.

00:55:28.100 Yeah, exactly.

00:55:28.460 If you're angry over a week or a month or whatever it is.

00:55:30.780 Yeah.

00:55:31.260 And the difference between being angry for 30 seconds and being angry for an hour, it's

00:55:38.020 impossible to exaggerate how important that is.

00:55:39.660 It's a massive quality of life impact. Yeah.

00:55:42.460 And so it is with embarrassment and everything else.

00:55:44.600 So you got through and then neuroscience beckons.

00:55:47.780 I was going to do a PhD in philosophy, but again, my interest was in the philosophy of

00:55:53.620 mind. And I thought I would do a PhD in philosophy, but it was just so obvious that the philosophers

00:55:59.900 were either having to become amateur neuroscientists to actually interact with what we were finding

00:56:06.700 out about the brain, or they were just having a conversation that was completely uncoupled

00:56:12.420 to what was known about the brain. And so I just decided I needed to know more about the

00:56:18.300 brain. But I went into neuroscience very much as a philosopher, I mean, with philosophical

00:56:23.960 interests. And I was, I never went in thinking, well, you know, maybe I'm, I'm going to work

00:56:27.540 on flies.

00:56:28.100 Did you have to take like pre-med courses or anything? Cause I mean, I think of neurosciences,

00:56:32.360 obviously it's, it's a deeply biological subject. You're going to need to understand, you know,

00:56:36.260 metabolic pathways, neurological pathways. Did you have to take like a whole pile of classes

00:56:41.000 having finally finished this philosophy degree to qualify?

00:56:43.900 As I was finishing my degree at Stanford and my interest in the brain was, was starting

00:56:50.180 to come online. I took a few courses that were proper neuroscience courses. And then when

00:56:57.420 I applied, I got provisionally accepted. They wanted me to take a genetics course at UCLA.

00:57:03.500 I had about nine months between when I finished at Stanford and started at UCLA. And I needed to

00:57:09.900 take a genetics course just to show them how I would function in a proper science class.

00:57:16.180 I've always been a bit of a, a drudge and a good student. So, I mean, there was, there was no problem

00:57:21.960 doing that. And happily, what happens when you go into, I don't know if this is true in every

00:57:25.620 neuroscience program, but at UCLA, whatever you've come from, you have to take everything all over

00:57:30.420 again. So I'm surrounded by people who did their undergraduate degrees in, in neuroscience or in

00:57:36.140 molecular biology, but we have to take all these fairly basic courses in, you know, molecular

00:57:43.280 neuroscience and cellular neuroscience and systems neuroscience. And you just have to take it all

00:57:48.200 again if you've done that as an undergraduate. So it's review for them and arguably a little bit

00:57:51.540 easier, maybe a lot easier, but you're all going through it. You're getting put to the same level.

00:57:56.000 That's good. Yeah. And on some level, all of that is a, just a vast memorization feat. You know,

00:58:03.960 I mean, certainly neuroanatomy is just this memorization exercise, unlike any other. And

00:58:10.080 you're just learning how to play a language game. You're just learning just the concepts and the parts

00:58:15.860 and how to talk about them and how, and how we currently understand them to be interrelated.

00:58:21.660 Looking back on it, it would be daunting for me to have to do it again now, but it was,

00:58:25.660 it was totally fine. And then I, and then you get into your research and then you get into the,

00:58:30.060 you know, having to use the methods and, and answer the kinds of questions you specifically want to

00:58:34.720 ask. And again, there, my interests were, you know, very high level and fairly philosophical. I mean,

00:58:43.060 I was, I was studying belief with functional magnetic resonance imaging, fMRI. So putting people in the

00:58:50.200 scanner and having them evaluate propositions from various, on various topics, propositions that were

00:58:57.600 either clearly true or clearly false or clearly undecidable. And so I was comparing belief and

00:59:02.480 disbelief and uncertainty and just looking at, at what, what it means neurophysiologically to be in a

00:59:09.860 state of accepting some propositional claim or rejecting it. So what brain regions were lighting up?

00:59:15.780 Yeah. And what, and what, just what the difference is. And I was, I was interested to know if it was

00:59:19.640 reasonable to speak about a kind of final common pathway or, or, or a content neutral property of

00:59:25.420 just belief. I mean, it's granting credence to a, a statement about the world. Is that a, a unified

00:59:32.560 thing in, in the brain and is rejecting something as false, a unified thing that is in some basic sense,

00:59:39.480 the same, whether you're talking about the virgin birth of Jesus or two plus two makes four,

00:59:45.280 we're recording a podcast right now, or you're a man, or you went to Stanford, or to evaluate any

00:59:51.380 of those claims as true or false, obviously invokes very different kinds of processing in the brain

00:59:56.500 because, you know, math is one thing and, you know, your, your autobiography is another. The truth

01:00:01.480 testing wouldn't be the same there, but the granting of assent and crucially for me becoming

01:00:08.720 emotionally and behaviorally susceptible to the implications, really the imperatives of accepting

01:00:16.240 something to be true or rejecting it as false. So if you have someone comes in and says, you know,

01:00:19.860 I hate to tell you, but your wife is cheating on you. You know, I just saw her, you know, you think

01:00:25.620 she's on a business trip, but I just saw her at a restaurant with this Lothario who I know, right?

01:00:32.360 Is that true or false? Everything depends on whether that is true or false. And your evaluation

01:00:37.500 of it, given the right evidence, it's instantaneous, right? It's like your world changes in a moment,

01:00:44.460 this propositional claim, which is just language, it's just noises coming out of someone's mouth,

01:00:49.020 or, you know, it's just an email, right? So you're just, you're just, it's just a bit of language

01:00:53.080 becomes your world the moment you grant it credence. And so that, that shift...

01:00:59.360 You almost made a belief detector, it sounds like.

01:01:01.700 We did, in fact, make a belief detector, which, you know, under the right conditions would also be

01:01:06.120 a lie detector. If you know whether someone is representing their beliefs accurately, you know

01:01:12.600 whether or not they're telling the truth. And, you know, that's an interesting topic, but the future

01:01:17.180 of mind-reading machines, I think, undoubtedly will be a future in which we will be increasingly

01:01:24.160 confident whether or not someone is telling the truth.

01:01:26.340 Yeah, because current lie detector technology is from the, what, the 1920s and is notoriously,

01:01:31.040 notoriously easy to trick.

01:01:33.240 Yeah, but it's not even a valid science, even if you were not tricking it, you know, it's just...

01:01:39.780 You could inadvertently trick it.

01:01:40.960 Yeah, it's just measuring physiological changes that are correlated with anxiety.

01:01:44.560 But, you know, if you're not an anxious liar, then you're...

01:01:47.940 You're going to pass with flying colors. And if you're an anxious truth-teller, as some people are.

01:01:51.820 Right.

01:01:52.080 So in the middle of all this research, 9-11 happens.

01:01:54.780 Right.

01:01:55.160 And that, was that a direct trigger to the book Into Faith?

01:01:59.000 Yeah.

01:01:59.300 It was.

01:02:00.000 Yeah, yeah. So within 24 hours, I was writing what became that book. I mean, I was writing initially a

01:02:06.420 book proposal, but I wrote essentially the first chapter of that book, you know, the very next day I

01:02:11.520 started writing it. So 9-11 came. I had finished my coursework. I was just starting my neuroimaging

01:02:18.280 work. I was already focused on belief, you know, and religious belief is a subset of that.

01:02:24.960 And I had just spent this previous decade plus focused on just questions of spiritual concern

01:02:33.160 and what is true in religion and why do we have these competing worldviews that are religious in

01:02:39.220 the first place? And what is it necessary to believe to have a meaningful life? And then people

01:02:45.500 start flying planes into our buildings, clearly expecting paradise. This is an act of worship,

01:02:51.840 you know, and we immediately start lying to ourselves about why they did it. And because I had read the

01:02:57.420 Quran, I was not, I hadn't focused on Islam to any great degree, but I was pretty sure I knew what

01:03:04.240 these guys were up to, right? Like the moment I heard about what Al-Qaeda was, just you have someone

01:03:10.460 like Osama bin Laden who could be doing anything he wants. He's got hundreds of millions of dollars.

01:03:14.680 He could be living in Paris and dating models, but no, he's decided to live in a cave and plot,

01:03:20.480 you know, the takeover of the world for the one true faith. I immediately recognized the spiritual

01:03:27.700 intensity of that enterprise. He was not faking his belief. He believed what he said he believed,

01:03:34.760 and it was only rational to take his stated beliefs at face value. I had been surrounded by people who

01:03:40.940 believed the Hindu version or the Buddhist version of karma and rebirth, right? And they believed it

01:03:47.080 absolutely to their toes. And I understood why they believed it. And many of them were having

01:03:51.960 intense experiences of the sort I was having in meditation or on psychedelics. And there's no doubt

01:03:58.440 in my mind that members of Al-Qaeda were having intensely meaningful experiences of both of solidarity,

01:04:04.580 you know, among their fellow jihadists, and just many of us have gotten into things that suddenly seem to

01:04:12.540 answer much of what we were lacking in our day-to-day experience.

01:04:17.700 You yourself did in college.

01:04:19.180 Yeah, but I mean, even seemingly more trivial things. So we all know that certain people,

01:04:23.440 you know, they become vegan or whatever, and all of a sudden it's all about getting their diet

01:04:26.900 straight, right? Or they get really into yoga. You know, and this happened to me with Brazilian

01:04:30.780 jiu-jitsu. I mean, I got into Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and all of a sudden, it's the only thing I can talk

01:04:34.780 about with people. Like, it's just, you know, I've become a cult recruiter for jiu-jitsu. I mean,

01:04:40.200 you go down the rabbit hole with these things, and suddenly you have immense energy for paying

01:04:47.540 attention. It just becomes effortless to pay attention to this thing. Now, just imagine

01:04:52.500 something that has all of these components. It has the, one, you actually believe the doctrine.

01:04:58.100 So you believe that this life is just a way station here. And the only thing that matters here

01:05:06.440 is getting your head straight about what's on the other side of death. You have to believe the right

01:05:12.700 things now. You have to get your life straight now so that when you die, you go to the right place,

01:05:18.860 right? There's no question that millions of people, billions of people, really, most people who have

01:05:24.700 ever lived believe something like that about the way the universe is structured. And Islam,

01:05:30.840 in particular, this especially doctrinaire version of it, gives a uniquely clear picture of just how

01:05:38.220 all of that is organized. I mean, it's just, it's a very self-consistent view of just what you need to

01:05:42.380 believe and how you need to live to get to the right place. Imagine having that kind of moral and

01:05:48.860 spiritual clarity in your life, which immediately translates into a recipe for how to live. I mean,

01:05:54.280 there's just zero ambiguity about how society should be structured, how men and women should relate.

01:05:58.660 But then there's this whole political layer, which is all of these historical grievances where the

01:06:05.620 West, the infidel West and the materialistic West, really the obscene West has, by some perversity of

01:06:13.520 history, acquired all this power and essentially trampled upon the only civilization that has ever

01:06:20.820 mattered to God, which is the Muslim one. In addition to everything else, you have essentially the yoga

01:06:27.180 component and the diet component and the personal life straightening component. You have this political

01:06:33.700 component where you have to right this great historical wrong and spread this one true faith

01:06:39.820 to the ends of the earth. I mean, this is a missionary religion. This is not Judaism. This is not Buddhism.

01:06:45.200 This is the way this works is you spread this thing, right? And there's nothing pacifist about this.

01:06:51.920 You, as a man, you get to harness all of your testosterone. You get to be essentially a spiritual

01:06:58.120 James Bond, right? You get to go to war for this thing. You get to kill the bad guys. You get to be

01:07:04.180 part of a gang.

01:07:05.440 But with social approbation within your circles as opposed to the negatives that would come with

01:07:10.820 being a gang member.

01:07:11.720 Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Like, this is a spiritual gang. It's also incredibly well-funded. I mean,

01:07:18.380 if you look at how the Saudis have funded the spread of the Wahhabi-style Islam, this is a gang

01:07:24.380 with petrodollars behind it.

01:07:26.320 And the rewards are simply beyond comprehension, literally, because the rewards are paradise.

01:07:33.380 I mean, it's like we see gangs motivated by, you know, money and access to women and all the

01:07:38.740 things that, you know, have powered, you know, lots of gangs and lots of songs. And that's

01:07:44.320 teeny compared to the upside that these folks would imagine that they're playing with.

01:07:49.960 Yeah.

01:07:50.280 And so you felt you knew a thing or three or 10 or 100 about belief.

01:07:54.680 Yeah.

01:07:55.320 This happens, you dive into it. And it's interesting just talking about belief, because I know

01:07:59.540 one of the complaints that you have about a lot of your critics is that they don't seem to think

01:08:05.360 the Islamists believe that which they actually say.

01:08:09.360 Yeah, it's amazingly durable, this piece of confusion. But the idea is that the jihadists,

01:08:16.080 you know, even those who blow themselves up, right, in what is just transparently

01:08:20.660 kind of the ultimate act of self-sacrifice, they don't believe what they say they believe.

01:08:26.280 They're not being motivated by religion. Religion is, at worst, being used as a pretext

01:08:30.780 for political goals and economic grievances and, you know, psychological instability, right?

01:08:38.520 Or it's being cited by Islamophobes as a way to sort of slander Islam by saying,

01:08:45.000 well, these people did it for religious reasons. No, that's an Islamic phobic thing to say. They

01:08:49.140 really did it for this other reason. What other reason is offered as an alternative to fervently

01:08:53.800 held belief?

01:08:54.540 Political grievances or they were so despairing over the state of the Palestinians, you know,

01:09:00.580 under the Israeli boot. Again, this can be more or less plausible if you're talking about a

01:09:05.920 Palestinian who's being mistreated in Gaza. It's completely implausible when you look at a third

01:09:12.400 generation British Muslim recruit to ISIS who had to drop out of, you know, the London School of

01:09:18.640 Economics in order to go to Syria, right? And there are endless numbers of cases of people who have

01:09:24.460 every other opportunity in life who become, quote, radicalized in this way. There's a deep skepticism

01:09:30.960 among people who simply don't know what it's like to believe in God, frankly. A real God, you know,

01:09:37.320 a God who can hear your prayers, a God who can hate homosexuals, a God who cares how you live,

01:09:42.240 not this elastic God of just good vibes in the universe. People have lost touch with me and many

01:09:47.920 academics, you know, virtually every anthropologist I've ever had to talk to about this stuff.

01:09:53.000 Many journalists, many so-called scholars of religion, just don't know what it's like to

01:09:58.360 believe in God and then doubt that anyone really does. They don't actually think that people believe

01:10:04.520 that they'll get virgins in paradise, right? They think this is just propaganda, propaganda that nobody

01:10:10.040 believes.

01:10:10.880 Almost like the Judaism that you described of your youth, where people would go to synagogue and

01:10:15.580 they'll go through these things, but not because they believed in something ephemeral, but because that

01:10:19.080 was sort of a cultural or a community activity, people are projecting that on to this world. And

01:10:25.260 you certainly are not saying this as some kind of a neocon. I mean, I imagine you probably first

01:10:30.260 voted in a presidential election in 1988. How many Republicans versus Democrats have you voted for?

01:10:36.620 I've never voted for a Republican.

01:10:37.940 Never voted for a Republican. And you actually think that this was a decisive issue or potentially

01:10:43.580 decisive issue in the election that we just had, correct?

01:10:46.400 Yeah.

01:10:47.060 Would you kind of go into that just briefly?

01:10:49.560 Well, yeah, because we had a president for eight years that just clearly lied about

01:10:55.880 this particular topic. I mean, he would not name the ideology that was delivering us this form of

01:11:04.600 terrorism. He would just talk about generic extremism or generic terrorism. And he was

01:11:10.700 quite hectoring and sanctimonious about the dangers of naming this ideology. So at the one point he

01:11:18.160 gave a speech just pushing back against his critics. You know, I was a huge Obama fan, actually. And

01:11:22.840 when I compare him to our current president, it feels like we have kind of fallen into some new part of

01:11:28.160 the multiverse that I never thought we would occupy. I mean, it's just unimaginable that we've taken this

01:11:32.180 turn, where you have a totally sane, intelligent, ethical, professional person running the country,

01:11:39.580 and then you have this unhinged con man running it next. But Obama really got this part wrong,

01:11:47.460 and disastrously so. And Clinton seemed to be echoing most of his delusion on this part. I mean,

01:11:53.540 at one point she talked about extremist jihadism, or radical jihadism.

01:11:59.920 As if there's moderate jihadism. Yeah, so there's moderate jihadism that doesn't pose a problem

01:12:03.160 for us. But so in the immediate aftermath of Orlando, the Orlando shooting that killed, I think,

01:12:08.340 49 people. 49. It was the biggest mass shooting in American history. Right, right. And no parallel.

01:12:15.200 And clearly an act of jihadism. I mean, just transparently so. Everything that Omar Mateen said

01:12:21.340 was just, he just connected all the dots. It could not be clearer. And Hillary Clinton spoke only about

01:12:27.880 the need for gun control, and the need to be on guard against racism in the aftermath of Orlando.

01:12:33.940 And that was just, I know at least one Muslim who voted for Trump, just because of how galling

01:12:41.120 she found that. To use Trump's language, it's all true, that political correctness and delusion,

01:12:46.560 I mean, it was just a refusal based on this fake concern about racism. I mean, Islam is not a race,

01:12:54.200 right? Not at all. You and I could convert to Islam right now, and we would be part of this

01:12:58.380 particular problem if we converted. When I lived in Cairo, I knew lots of Western, both American

01:13:03.580 and European converts, who were very sincere and devout Muslims, and they had not a drop of Arab

01:13:08.640 blood in them, etc. It is not a race, absolutely. And you can be more devout. You know, it's easier to

01:13:13.960 convert, because if you're actually going to convert on the basis of the ideas, the only way to convert is

01:13:19.460 to actually claim to believe these specific doctrines, right? And the doctrines get fairly

01:13:26.520 inimical to most things we care about in the 21st century very, very quickly. You can't convert to

01:13:32.480 the lived experience of just having been a nominal Muslim surrounded by Muslim culture, and analogous to

01:13:39.380 the Jewish experience that we just talked about. So I just had Fareed Zakaria on my podcast, and

01:13:43.800 he's a Muslim. He identifies as a Muslim. He's clearly not religious at all. I mean, most serious

01:13:50.640 Muslims would consider him an apostate. I mean, he's not a believer, right? But he has a Muslim

01:13:56.720 experience, analogous to the kind of Jewish experience, that matters to him, and he feels

01:14:01.820 solidarity with that community. You know, I can't convert to that, right? Because I don't have that

01:14:06.020 experience, but I could become a member of ISIS if I check the right boxes. Hillary was such an

01:14:11.260 obscurantist on this issue. And again, in the immediate aftermath of this horror, when you're

01:14:18.860 having attacks in Europe that are also enormous and seeming, you know, to presage more to come

01:14:26.680 in our own society, right? And this need not have been a winning issue for Trump, but it was among the

01:14:33.520 two or three things that... Yeah, in an election that tight, there are arguably probably dozens of

01:14:39.120 winning issues, because anything that swung a few tens of thousands of votes... Yeah, 75,000 votes.

01:14:44.280 Yeah, in the right or the wrong place. Now, you mentioned, you know, political correctness and

01:14:48.880 language. You have stated a few times that you view free speech as the master value. Would you care to

01:14:55.560 just say briefly why that is? Because I think it's an intriguing notion.

01:15:00.440 Because it's the only value that allows us to reliably correct our errors, both intellectually

01:15:07.540 and morally. It's the only mechanism we have as a species to keep aligning ourselves with reality as

01:15:17.540 we've come to understand it. So you're talking about the data of science, you're talking about

01:15:21.220 the data of human experience. Everything you can conceivably use to judge whether or not you're on the

01:15:29.040 right track or the wrong track. And again, this applies to everything. This applies to human health,

01:15:34.180 it applies to politics, it applies to economics, it applies to spiritual concerns, contemplative

01:15:38.660 concerns. It's the corrective mechanism. It's just, it's the only mechanism. And if certain ideas are

01:15:43.660 inutterable, you're not going to be able to correct. If there are certain things that you will not,

01:15:48.800 you refuse to talk about. This is what's so wrong with dogmatism. So dogmas are those beliefs or those

01:15:54.960 doctrines, which you will assert the truth of, and you'll, you'll, you demand people remain aligned to

01:16:00.640 without justification, right? It's like the time to justify them either never arrived or it's long

01:16:05.980 past. And these merely must be accepted going forward. So these are off the table. You know,

01:16:12.180 the Apostles' Creed, if you're a Catholic, that is off the table. It's instructive to know that the

01:16:16.260 word dogma is not a pejorative term in a religion like Catholicism, right? But it is everywhere else.

01:16:24.100 And there's a good reason for that, because it's even the most benign dogma can produce immense

01:16:30.740 human misery in surprising ways. And if you're not, if you can't keep correcting for it, you're just

01:16:37.560 laid bare to the misery. So I mean, my favorite example of this, because it is such a surprising

01:16:43.560 mismatch between the, the seeming propositional content of the dogma and its effects in the world,

01:16:48.740 but you have a dogma like kind of a twin dogma. It's the life starts at the moment of conception

01:16:54.260 and all human life is sacred. What could be wrong with that, right? So this seems to be the least

01:17:00.720 harmful thing you could believe about the human condition. How are you going to harm anyone believing

01:17:07.880 those things? All human life is sacred, and human life runs all the way down to a single cell.

01:17:15.680 What could go wrong? Well, what can go wrong is you suddenly get a technology like embryonic stem cell

01:17:20.820 research, where there's this immense promise, obviously unforeseen by the Bible, but also unforeseen

01:17:27.980 by every generation of humanity. Perhaps someone in the 1930s could have foreseen this was coming,

01:17:34.340 but not much before that, right? And you have this immense promise of alleviating scores of

01:17:43.200 conditions. Boundless suffering. Boundless suffering, full body burns and spinal cord injury and

01:17:48.860 Alzheimer's, just, just you name it, who knows how, how much promise this technology holds for medical

01:17:56.680 therapy. And then you have people, and again, these people are the most influential people in our

01:18:02.400 society, from presidents and senators on down, and religious academics, and bioethicists who aren't

01:18:08.860 religious but still treat these magical doctrines as somehow deserving of respect. But you have this

01:18:14.460 idea that every fertilized ovum contains a human soul. You've got now souls in petri dishes, just as

01:18:21.840 vulnerable as the baby Jesus, that cannot be sacrificed, no matter what the argument is on the other

01:18:27.840 side. You can have, you know, people with Parkinson's or little girls in wheelchairs,

01:18:33.560 doesn't matter. I'm just as concerned about the life in this petri dish. And, you know, we've sort of

01:18:39.100 moved on because there have been workarounds found biologically, but basically we dragged our feet for

01:18:44.960 a good 20 years there. And who knows what medical insights weren't had as a result of that.

01:18:52.620 And what do you feel about the value of anonymous speech? There are inarguable value to anonymous

01:18:58.240 speech in brutal dictatorships where dissidents and others can get into enormous trouble, get tortured

01:19:04.420 and killed if they say something that gets detected by somebody who's incredibly nefarious and has really

01:19:10.900 no ethical standing in the minds of most folks in this country. So I think there's certain things,

01:19:16.160 I'm not talking about those relatively inarguable things, but I know that you don't enable comments

01:19:20.860 on your webpages. I know that you have had concerns about the quality of speech in places like the

01:19:28.140 YouTube forums and so forth. Do you feel that there is a fundamental difference between the value of

01:19:33.200 anonymous speech and, for lack of a better word, owned speech? Or do you feel that anonymous speech is

01:19:39.740 every bit as much of the master value, in a sense, that you attribute to free speech writ large?

01:19:44.840 But I wouldn't prevent it in most cases. Certainly there's like the whistleblower's role for it.

01:19:52.940 I'm in favor of journalists protecting the anonymity of their sources if, you know, great harm would come

01:19:58.400 to the sources. Generally speaking, I think it is one of the variables that accounts for why so much of

01:20:05.920 what is said online is so toxic. I mean, people feel a license to be jerks that they wouldn't feel if they

01:20:14.120 had to own everything they said.

01:20:16.640 And then what about tools that enable tremendous anonymity to anybody? And I'm thinking particularly

01:20:22.640 of TOR. TOR, which is ironically a product of the United States Navy. It is something that I have no

01:20:28.100 doubt has masked the identity of lots of dissidents in ways that any reasonable person would applaud.

01:20:33.560 But at the same time, it preserves the anonymity and the secure communication, certainly between

01:20:38.400 terrorists. There's an enormous amount of child pornography there.

01:20:41.560 Again, it just cuts both ways. I think there is an argument to be made that something like that,

01:20:47.580 I mean, something like strong encryption is just inevitable. It's just a mathematical fact that

01:20:51.840 it's available and it will therefore always be available to anyone who's going to take the time

01:20:56.400 to acquire it. And this is something I kind of stumbled into on one of my podcasts or when the

01:21:02.000 first controversy around the FBI's unlocking of an iPhone came online. An iPhone, it was sort of

01:21:10.400 uncrackable by law enforcement. If you attempt the passcode too many times, it just goes into

01:21:16.280 permanent lockdown. Yeah, 10 times. Yeah, yeah.

01:21:18.280 And apparently no one can get in or almost no one can get in. And Apple was claiming not to have

01:21:23.920 devised its own ability to get in. And that struck me as a way of punting on Apple's part that was not

01:21:30.580 ethically justifiable.

01:21:32.420 They refused to help the FBI, in fact.

01:21:35.500 And their argument was that if they created a mechanism whereby they could answer a court order

01:21:41.720 and unlock an iPhone, that mechanism would be impossible to keep safe. Then everyone would

01:21:47.400 have a hackable iPhone. And I never really bought that. I felt like they could, if they had wanted to

01:21:52.860 keep it safe, they could probably keep it safe. And it seems to me that people do keep, I mean,

01:21:58.380 they keep other trade secrets safe, presumably. And...

01:22:02.380 Formula for Coca-Cola.

01:22:03.380 Yeah. You know, if those are the keys to the kingdom, then presumably they could keep it safe.

01:22:08.300 Obviously, the tech community took a very strong position against the government there.

01:22:12.960 But we don't have the analogous right in any other area of our lives. When you draw an analogy to,

01:22:20.640 for instance, I want to be able to build a room in my house where I can put things and even put

01:22:28.080 evidence of all my criminal behavior that no one on earth in principle can get access to, right?

01:22:34.380 So there's no court order, there's no government process, there's no evidence of my own culpability

01:22:40.160 that could be so clear that could get that room unlocked.

01:22:45.420 It's almost like your personal diplomatic pouch or having some kind of like privileged

01:22:50.020 communication with a lawyer. That is an unlockable box legally, but it's a physical box in this case.

01:22:55.280 Yeah. And so no one claims to feel that they have a right to that thing, right? It's not feasible.

01:23:00.860 We can't easily build it, right? Or we can't build it at all.

01:23:03.560 Or if we could, there would be unlikely to be a mass movement for everybody to get one of those things.

01:23:09.020 Yeah. And so if someone had managed to build such a thing, and we had reason to believe that evidence

01:23:14.860 of his, you know, vast criminality was in there.

01:23:18.220 There was a severed head in it or something like that.

01:23:20.040 Yeah, right. So there's a murder that is going unsolved every day because we can't open this

01:23:24.460 closet, right? His argument that that's his personal property that can't be opened, that wouldn't hold

01:23:31.280 water to really, for really any of the people who are quite exercised about the necessity of keeping

01:23:36.160 their iPhones private, right? And then you have the cases. So I spoke to, I didn't have him on the

01:23:41.120 podcast, but I spoke to Cyrus Vance, who's a, I think he probably still is the district attorney of

01:23:46.220 Manhattan.

01:23:46.820 Junior, not the former secretary of state.

01:23:48.880 Yeah, right.

01:23:49.280 Yeah.

01:23:49.700 And so we kind of ran through this with him for a couple hours. And he was telling me about, you know,

01:23:54.720 murders that are unsolved, where they know that the murder victim was texting with someone up to

01:24:02.020 the moment she was killed or that the, or that the video, the camera was on, right? Like, like,

01:24:07.160 like people who had taken pictures of their murderers.

01:24:10.300 With the intention of them being seen, presumably.

01:24:12.540 Right.

01:24:12.800 Yeah.

01:24:13.200 And Apple was declining to help unlock these iPhones, right? And they had, at that point,

01:24:17.980 some hundreds of phones.

01:24:19.640 Really?

01:24:20.220 Yeah.

01:24:20.840 And so...

01:24:20.980 And this is just one state.

01:24:22.900 Yeah.

01:24:23.400 A big state, but still.

01:24:24.460 And you can imagine, imagine being the parent of, your daughter gets murdered, and it is possible

01:24:31.420 to get the data.

01:24:33.540 Because she took the picture wanting her murderer to go to jail, and now all of a sudden it's a

01:24:38.660 violation of her privacy to see that picture.

01:24:41.560 Exactly.

01:24:42.400 The fact that we can't find some mechanism by which to right that wrong doesn't make sense to me. So I,

01:24:48.260 you know, I'm on both sides of this issue. I'm in favor of good people not having their

01:24:53.980 privacy needlessly invaded, obviously, and having secure communication. But at a certain point,

01:25:00.660 if you are behaving badly enough, I think we, the state has an interest in sorting out what

01:25:07.880 you've done, and why you did it, and who you collaborated with. And this controversy is going

01:25:13.040 to come back to us a hundredfold the moment we have reliable lie detection technology, right?

01:25:19.920 And I should also say that we have solved this problem in the opposite way, where people have

01:25:25.620 the opposite intuition with respect to DNA technology. So you do not have a right to keep

01:25:29.700 your DNA secret. You can't say, no, no, you can't take a swab of my saliva, because that's private

01:25:35.360 data, you know, that I don't want you to have access to. No.

01:25:37.720 And that would, in a certain level, be more logical for people to say, like, I'm sorry,

01:25:41.400 that is so intimate, you may not. It would be in some ways more defensible.

01:25:45.400 But it's not, and we've just steamrolled over that sanctity, because there's a forensic imperative

01:25:51.660 to do it.

01:25:52.240 There's an overwhelming benefit to social benefit and crime-finding benefit.

01:25:56.200 Yeah. But the argument, people are treating their iPhones essentially as a part of their

01:26:01.920 minds, that they don't want read, right?

01:26:04.020 Yeah.

01:26:04.980 Understandably, because there's so much information there. But when we can actually read minds,

01:26:08.960 right, that that's going to be, is, do you have a right to take the Fifth Amendment privilege

01:26:14.780 when we have lie detection technology that can sort out whether or not you're telling

01:26:19.980 the truth?

01:26:20.640 Yeah.

01:26:21.080 And I mean, there are philosophical problems with relying on lie detection technology. I mean,

01:26:25.400 there are people who, well, we know there are people who could be delusional, who could

01:26:29.200 be telling the truth and perhaps giving a false confession, right?

01:26:32.120 Well, one of your guests, Lawrence Wright, wrote a book about that very phenomenon.

01:26:34.840 Exactly. Yeah, that was fascinating. So, I mean, that's a wrinkle we need to sort out. It seems

01:26:41.220 to me that there are certain moments where any of the claims of personal liberty and privacy

01:26:48.620 just break down. I mean, you make the stakes high enough and you make a person's culpability

01:26:54.300 obvious enough that we should be getting into their phones and computers by any means possible.

01:27:00.540 And because of the San Bernardino connection, this actually touches on another interest

01:27:04.620 and another thing that interests me quite a bit is when you sit down to write a book

01:27:08.320 that's set in the very near future, certain depictions that you make of the near future

01:27:13.200 almost inevitably either come true or fail to come true during the period that you're

01:27:17.980 writing, particularly if you aspire for your book to be set roughly nine seconds into the

01:27:22.040 future, which is what I did with this one.

01:27:23.720 Right.

01:27:23.900 And one of the things in the world of After On is lone wolf terrorism and the self-organizing

01:27:30.900 lone wolf terrorism that is inspired by ideology as opposed to by a central group is a feature of

01:27:39.160 the world of After On. And to my absolute dismay, I take absolutely no pride in quote unquote

01:27:44.500 predicting this correctly. That has in fact started occurring to a significantly greater degree

01:27:50.960 in the couple of years since I started writing the book. Now, you made the point in your very

01:27:55.880 recent podcast with Graham Wood that in some ways ISIS-inspired attacks are more scary than ISIS-directed

01:28:02.360 ones. And he made the counterpoint that ISIS-directed ones tend to have much, much higher death

01:28:08.260 tolls. But the ISIS-inspired ones, is it just their ability to pop up anywhere and spread like a virus

01:28:14.680 that makes them more scary to you?

01:28:16.060 Yeah. Well, it's the demonstrated effectiveness and spreadability of the ideas that is the scariest

01:28:23.100 thing. I mean, there are two things to worry about in this world. You can worry about bad people and

01:28:28.020 you can worry about bad ideas. And bad ideas are much worse than bad people because they can

01:28:35.440 potentially inhabit the minds of good people and get even good people to do bad things. Right. So I'm

01:28:40.920 under no illusions, and many people are, that all the people who joined ISIS are bad people,

01:28:47.760 right? They're just people who believe these bad ideas. Many people imagine that ISIS is acting like

01:28:55.500 a bug light for psychopaths, right? And so that only people who would do bad things anyway, they would

01:29:00.360 have found some other reason to rape and kill and take sex slaves and cut people's heads off,

01:29:05.680 and they just happen to find this reason. No, that's absolutely not what's happening. And we know

01:29:11.580 that that's not what's happening. There are psychologically normal people who become as

01:29:16.660 convinced of the veracity of ISIS's worldview as I became convinced of the utility of meditation

01:29:23.280 practice, right? And then they do something very extreme. What I did was very extreme. I dropped out of

01:29:28.480 a great college, right? And kind of derailed my life in conventional terms and forsook every other

01:29:36.620 reasonable ambition but to understand the nature of consciousness more for this significant period of

01:29:43.560 time, right? You know, you change a few of the relevant beliefs. I could have been, you know,

01:29:48.200 John Walker Lind in Afghanistan with the Taliban, right? It's like, I recognize a person like that

01:29:53.760 as someone who's very familiar to me, you know? And John Walker Lind, he's in prison now. He still

01:29:58.840 believes all this stuff. And he's getting out soon. And the force multiplier element of it matters a

01:30:03.940 great deal to me because I actually think a raw material that a lot of these nihilistic organizations

01:30:10.620 use are folks who happen to be feeling suicidal today. Humanity produces them in abundance and has

01:30:17.060 across continents and societies and centuries, about a million people will kill themselves this year.

01:30:21.500 And by the way, it's very hard. I think probably impossible. If I were recruiting suicide bombers,

01:30:27.460 I would probably stay away from people who are happy and centered and empowered because talking

01:30:33.100 that person into killing themselves at all is an enormous lift compared to talking somebody who's

01:30:39.440 already coming to me out of their minds with, you know, addiction, with depression, with chemical

01:30:45.860 imbalances in their minds, whatever. So society produces this raw material in some abundance.

01:30:51.380 And some percentage of those people are inclined to take people with them. And some of those people

01:30:56.740 are secular. I mean, the guy who shot up the school at Newtown, he committed suicide. He was

01:31:01.700 relying on the police to kill him. He was committing suicide and taking as many people with him as

01:31:06.380 possible. Likewise, the guy who murdered the five cops in Dallas, that was, he didn't drop a bomb on

01:31:12.140 him. Likewise, the Columbine kids.

01:31:13.620 Wasn't there a Lufthansa pilot?

01:31:16.600 Yeah, Andreas Lubitz. And so that's the second force multiplier. And this gets me nervous. So when

01:31:22.220 somebody gets into that mental state, my feeling is that there are two force multipliers that stand

01:31:27.300 out. One is what is now animating them. And this gets to what you're talking about, the power of these

01:31:32.700 ideas. I mean, if you look at Mateen, the Orlando killer, he was a third rate loser who failed at

01:31:38.480 everything. He had been dumped by two wives before the age of 30. He could not hold down a job. I would

01:31:45.220 imagine that in many parallel universes, he's the kind of guy who might have killed himself or might

01:31:50.640 have killed an ex-wife or two ex-co-workers or something.

01:31:53.460 He probably also had some kind of gay shame thing happening.

01:31:57.140 Self-hating. Some self-hating thing going on. But there are many, many hundreds of people like that

01:32:03.340 who do themselves in. He got animated by an idea that inspired him to go out and literally commit

01:32:10.000 the biggest mass murder in the history of a country with a very high bar for biggest ever.

01:32:15.120 He killed 49 people. Now, the second force multiplier, as you just indicated, is going to be

01:32:20.220 weaponry. So this is a chilling fact. I wish I didn't know it, but I do. In the two and a half years

01:32:26.420 leading up to the Newtown attack, there was a series of very strange, unrelated school attacks

01:32:33.160 in China, mass murder attacks. And there were 10 of them.

01:32:37.200 And by chilling irony, the last one was literally just a few hours before the Newtown attack. Now,

01:32:43.740 those 10-ish attacks combined, all 10 of them put together, had roughly the same number of total

01:32:51.380 deaths as the lone Newtown attack, because they were being committed literally with knives and

01:32:57.260 hammers. Whereas the person who attacked in Newtown had the benefit of living in a society that sells

01:33:04.240 near cousins of machine guns to people who are on the no-fly list. Not that he was on the no-fly

01:33:09.740 list, but we permit that. So there's this huge force multiplier of weaponry. And then if you're

01:33:15.160 Andreas Lubitz and you have an airplane, okay, fine, you kill a couple hundred people more.

01:33:20.140 And with that chilling fact in mind, I'd like to just read a couple quotes to you from End of

01:33:26.180 Faith. Our technical advances in the art of war have finally rendered our religious differences,

01:33:30.780 and hence our religious beliefs, antithetical to our survival. We're fast approaching a time

01:33:35.560 when the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction will be a trivial undertaking,

01:33:40.240 while it—and these are from three different quotes—while it's never been difficult to meet your

01:33:44.140 maker in 50 years, it will simply be too easy to drag everyone else along to meet him with you.

01:33:49.480 So we have this force-multiplying spread of ideas, this proliferation of lone-wolf attacks.

01:33:55.200 We know what weaponry does. What weapons were you thinking about when you wrote that,

01:33:59.460 when you said in 50 years it will be simply too easy to drag everyone else? Were you thinking of

01:34:04.240 bioweapons, synthetic biology? Nuclear is harder to do.

01:34:09.320 Yeah, although it's not that hard, actually. I mean, it was hard to invent the technology.

01:34:14.460 The Manhattan Project was hard. It's not hard to render much of Los Angeles uninhabitable for

01:34:22.540 10,000 years.

01:34:23.880 It's far less hard once it was invented, but still you need the resources of a nation-state

01:34:29.340 to create the weapon, right?

01:34:30.800 Well, you actually don't. I mean, you could actually—if you're willing to die,

01:34:33.980 you can be the weapon. And what you need is the enriched uranium or the plutonium. But you could

01:34:38.280 literally—you wouldn't get the full yield you would want if you want to kill the maximum number

01:34:44.020 of people, but you could take two, like, you know, 50-pound plates of enriched uranium and just

01:34:51.740 put one on the floor and slam the other one on top of it, and it would go critical. You would not get

01:34:58.840 a—

01:34:59.720 Yes, but you would get—and you would be just kind of like the ultimate dirty bomb experience,

01:35:05.820 right? So you could actually be the bomb. But a much more reasonable thing to do if you're in

01:35:11.580 this business is to just do something that's analogous to the bomb design of Hiroshima and

01:35:16.500 Nagasaki, where you have a gun-style apparatus where you're shooting one piece of enriched uranium

01:35:24.280 or plutonium into the other, right? And just slam—essentially slamming them together harder

01:35:28.980 than you could physically. And again, that the yield there is not—it's not as complete as,

01:35:35.400 you know, a nation state would produce. But still, you could get a multi-kiloton yield.

01:35:42.480 There, the technical issue is just getting the fuel.

01:35:45.820 Getting the stuff, which does exist, yeah.

01:35:48.040 And so, yes, you do not need the tools of a nation state. You just need a few engineers

01:35:52.500 and machinists. You know, it's powered by ordinary explosives to get the things slamming

01:35:58.240 together. And I mean, there are a bunch of scenarios that have been described to everyone's

01:36:02.820 horror online, where you can do this in a shipping container, and you truck it into the DC, and

01:36:07.840 it can be activated with a cell phone. And William Perry has a terrifying bit of animation that he put

01:36:15.740 online that just shows you how simple and how totally destabilizing it would be to our society

01:36:23.520 to do this. So just imagine you build a simple device, which is just, again, just like Hiroshima,

01:36:29.740 you know, like a 15-kiloton explosion. If you put that, you know, right next to the Capitol building,

01:36:34.620 right, you just—now you have a continuity of government problem. You know, who did you kill?

01:36:38.680 You killed all the senators and congressmen and the president.

01:36:41.620 The Supreme Court and the Joint Chiefs, and yeah.

01:36:44.640 Imagine doing it in one American city, right, and then announcing, whether this is true or not,

01:36:52.180 who knows, but then announcing you have similar bombs placed in 10 other American cities.

01:36:58.340 Which you will not identify now.

01:36:59.600 Yeah, and you will do them—you'll do, you know, one a week until your demands are met.

01:37:05.140 How do we begin to respond to that, right? This is an act of terrorism, obviously orders of magnitude

01:37:10.420 beyond September 11th, which ushered in a decade of just derangement, you know, and cost trillions of

01:37:16.500 dollars in the aftermath, you know, at least two wars and financial crises. Imagine this happening

01:37:23.420 in one city. This is within the technical capacity of a group like ISIS or al-Qaeda. I mean, you don't—you

01:37:30.240 just need to get the fuel. And we have almost no way to prevent it. I mean, we don't—we're not screening

01:37:37.180 things at our ports so assiduously as to know this couldn't possibly get in.

01:37:42.320 Do you worry about bioweapons as well?

01:37:44.200 Yeah, you just have to imagine weaponizing something akin to the Spanish flu, which, you

01:37:52.040 know, killed something like 50 million people in 1918. The sky is the limit there. You could get

01:37:58.060 something that is as easily transmissible and is even more deadly. When you're talking about a

01:38:06.080 bioweapon, the worst possible case is something that is easily transmissible and that doesn't make

01:38:12.840 you floridly ill for long enough for you to do as much damage as you possibly can.

01:38:18.480 You sneeze a lot on lots of grapes, on lots of people.

01:38:21.300 For a good long time before you die.

01:38:23.060 Yeah. And then those people are sneezing on grapes in people and then nobody knows there's

01:38:26.460 an outbreak until there's a million infectees or something like that.

01:38:29.540 Yeah. Something like Ebola doesn't have going for it, you know, as bad as it is,

01:38:34.220 as horrible as it is, one of the reasons why it's not scarier is it is very quickly obvious

01:38:39.680 how sick people are. If you're talking about airborne transmission of something that has

01:38:44.380 very high mortality and a long incubation period, yeah, weaponize that. That is a civilization

01:38:52.900 canceling event if we don't have our act together.

01:38:56.660 And for now, George Church may be the only person who can do it. But in 25 years with biology

01:39:02.200 following what's sometimes called the Carlson curve, which is even steeper than the Moore's

01:39:05.700 law curve, who knows when 10 people, then 100, then 1,000 people. So I'd like to close

01:39:10.800 on something that I wrestle with a lot. You gave a great TED talk on the risk of super AI. I won't

01:39:17.580 make you replay it here because people can access it. I'll just pull two quotes from it to just set

01:39:22.960 the context. You described the scenario of a super AI having better things to do with our planet

01:39:28.700 and perhaps our atoms than let us continue to have them as being terrifying and likely to occur.

01:39:35.360 And also saying it's very difficult to see how they won't destroy us. And I don't think that those

01:39:41.820 are shrill or irrational statements personally. I also don't think it's shrill or irrational

01:39:47.240 to think that what George Church alone can do today will be the province of many millions of lab

01:39:53.920 techs, probably in our lifetimes. And with those two forces out there, I don't know what scares me

01:40:01.740 more. And I think about proliferating, democratizing, existentially destructive technology. Just about

01:40:09.060 the only thing I can think of that might protect us against such a thing would be an incredibly benign

01:40:15.240 super AI that has functional omniscience because of its ubiquity in the networks. And it has functional

01:40:23.000 omnipotence because of its mastery of, who knows, nanotechnology or something else. But boy,

01:40:28.520 we're both scared about a super AI. It's almost like super AI can't live with them, can't live without

01:40:34.420 them. How do we navigate those twin perils? And do we need to perhaps embrace a super AI as a

01:40:43.760 protective mechanism for democratized, super destructive power?

01:40:49.280 Yeah, well, I do think it really isn't a choice. I think we will develop the most intelligent machines

01:40:55.700 we can build unless something terrible happens to prevent us doing it. So the only reason why we

01:41:02.100 wouldn't build... The civilization gets thrown violently backwards.

01:41:05.140 Yes. I mean, so, you know, George Church loses his mind or one of his techs does, and we have some

01:41:11.420 pathogen that renders us incapable of keeping our progress going on the technology front. And you

01:41:18.880 just have to imagine how bad that would have to be in order to actually stop...

01:41:23.180 The march of technology.

01:41:23.920 Yes. Yes. You know, you'd have to have a world where no one understood how to build a computer

01:41:30.040 again, and no one ever understood how to build a computer again going forward from that point.

01:41:35.160 So beyond canticle for Leibovitz type of destructiveness. Yeah.

01:41:38.620 So if it's not that bad, we will keep making progress. And you don't need Moore's law. You just

01:41:44.400 need some increment of progress to continue.

01:41:46.940 You need the passage of time.

01:41:48.060 Yeah.

01:41:48.240 At some rate. Yeah.

01:41:49.580 And at some point we will find ourselves in the presence of machines that are smarter than we are,

01:41:53.120 because I don't think there's anything magical about the wetware we have in our heads as far as

01:41:57.460 information processing. So the moment you admit that this can be, that what we call a mind can be

01:42:03.320 implemented on another platform, and there's every reason to admit that scientifically now. And I leave

01:42:09.900 questions of consciousness aside. I don't know that consciousness comes along for the ride,

01:42:13.660 necessarily, if you get intelligent machines. And ironically, the most horrible vision is one of

01:42:19.640 building super-intelligent unconscious machines. Because in the presence of consciousness,

01:42:24.980 at least you could argue, well, if they wipe us out, well, at the very least, we will have built

01:42:29.400 something more important than we are. We will have built gods. We will have built minds that can take

01:42:35.380 more pleasure in the beauty of the universe than we can. Who knows how good the universe could be

01:42:41.640 inhabited in their hands. But if the lights aren't on, if we've built just mere mechanism that is

01:42:48.380 incredibly powerful, that can be goal-directed, but for whom there is nothing that it's like to be

01:42:54.440 directed toward those goals. Well, that really strikes me as the worst case scenario, because

01:42:59.320 then the lights go out if we... If we go out. So it sounds like you believe that the super AI

01:43:04.300 is inevitable, unless... Something equally terrible happens, yes.

01:43:08.960 So our best shot of surviving is to do all we can to make sure the super AI that one day

01:43:15.140 inevitably arises is benign. Yeah, it's aligned with our interests. Intelligence is the best thing we

01:43:22.240 have, really. It's our most valuable resource, right? So it is either the source of or the safeguard

01:43:29.140 for everything we care about. And there's overwhelming economic incentives for thousands...

01:43:35.620 Yeah, you get immediately rich. Intensely smart people, intensely well-capitalized companies to

01:43:41.840 go screaming down that path. Yeah. So all of the incentives are aligned to get into the end zone

01:43:47.360 as quickly as possible. And that is not the alignment we need to get into the end zone as safely as

01:43:53.780 possible. And it will always be easier to build the recklessly unsafe version than figuring out

01:44:01.680 how to make this thing safe. Yeah. So that's what worries me. But I think it is inevitable in some

01:44:07.100 form. And again, I'm not making predictions that we're going to have this in 10 years or 20 years,

01:44:11.040 but I just think at some point... And again, the human level bit is a bit of a mirage, because I

01:44:15.940 think the moment we have something human level, it is superhuman. Yeah. Oh, it blows past that.

01:44:21.200 Yeah. That's a mirage. And people are imagining somehow that that's a stopping point. It will

01:44:25.640 barely get there, and then we'll stay there for a long time. It could only be the case if we are

01:44:31.240 ourselves at the absolute summit of cognition, which just defies common sense. And we just know

01:44:37.760 that's not true. We just know it's not true. Just take, you know, the calculator in your phone. I mean,

01:44:41.200 that's not human level. That is omniscient with respect to arithmetic. Yeah. You know, and

01:44:45.960 having the totality of human knowledge instantaneously accessible through the internet.

01:44:51.600 I mean, if we hook these things to the internet, it has a memory that is superhuman and an ability

01:44:56.580 to integrate data that is superhuman. So the moment all of these piecemeal cognitive skills

01:45:03.820 cohere in a system that is also able to parse natural language perfectly, you know, that you can

01:45:11.700 talk to it and it understands. It does what you want. All of the answers to the questions are no

01:45:17.560 longer like series answers where they contain, you know, howlers, you know, every third trial,

01:45:23.760 but they're the most perceptive, best informed, most articulate answers you're getting from any mind

01:45:30.460 you ever interact with. Once those gains are made, they won't be unmade. It's like chess. It's like once

01:45:36.280 computers were better at chess than people, you know, and now we're in this, this sort of no man's

01:45:40.780 land, which again, which I think will be fairly brief where the, yeah, the combination of a person

01:45:46.520 and a computer is now the best system. But at a certain point, and I'm amazed that anyone doubts

01:45:52.260 this, but at a certain point, I think it will obviously be the case that adding the ape to the

01:45:56.680 equation just adds noise to the equation. And, and, you know, the computers will be better than,

01:46:02.000 than cyborgs. And once they are, there's no going back from that point. It may not be everything. It

01:46:07.720 may, there may be things we neglect to build into our AIs that turn out to be important for

01:46:13.020 human common sense. Or, I mean, this is, this is the scary things. We don't know what is required

01:46:18.140 to fully align an intelligence system with our wellbeing, you know? And, and so we could neglect

01:46:26.260 to put something like our common sense because we would don't perfectly understand it into

01:46:31.740 these systems. And then you can get errors that are deeply counterintuitive that are,

01:46:38.660 I mean, this is analogous to, you know, Nick Bostrom's cartoon thought experiment of the

01:46:42.480 paperclip maximizer. I mean, it's like, well, who would build such a machine? Well, we wouldn't,

01:46:46.680 but we could build a machine that in the service of some goal that was, is obviously a good one

01:46:53.460 could form some instrumental goal that we would never think an intelligence system could form and

01:47:00.820 that we would never think to explicitly prevent. Yeah. And yet this thing is totally antithetical.

01:47:05.960 It reaches some local equilibrium where it says more paperclips, good. Yeah. Going to do that for

01:47:11.040 a while. Yeah. And soon the universe is paperclips. Well, Sam, you have been extravagantly generous with

01:47:17.640 your time. I appreciate it. Not at all. It's a pleasure. And thank you very kindly. And we will,

01:47:23.980 I'm sure, remain in touch. Yeah. Yeah. And I wish you the best of luck, needless to say,

01:47:28.540 with your book and the podcast and everything else. Thank you kindly. It's a great idea that

01:47:34.020 you're combining both in this way. I think, obviously, this is the frontier of creative

01:47:38.180 use of these new media, and it's great to see you doing it.

01:47:40.980 If you're enjoying the Waking Up podcast, there are many ways you can support it at

01:47:48.640 samharris.org forward slash support. As a supporter of the podcast, you'll get early access to tickets

01:47:55.780 to my live events, and you'll get exclusive access to my Ask Me Anything episodes, as well as to the

01:48:01.060 AMA page on my website, where you can pose questions and vote on the questions of others.

01:48:05.560 And please know that your support is greatly appreciated. It's listeners like you that make

01:48:11.080 this show possible.

Making Sense - Sam Harris - October 06, 2017

The ＂After On＂ Interview

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