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EPISODE LINKS:
Sam's Website: https://samharris.org
Making Sense Podcast: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes
Waking Up App: https://www.wakingup.com
Sam's YouTube: https://youtube.com/@samharrisorg
Sam's Instagram: https://instagram.com/samharrisorg

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Full episodes playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4
Clips playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOeciFP3CBCIEElOJeitOr41

OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
3:38 - Empathy and reason
11:30 - Donald Trump
54:24 - Military industrial complex
58:58 - Twitter
1:23:05 - COVID
2:06:48 - Kanye West
2:23:24 - Platforming
2:41:21 - Joe Rogan
2:58:13 - Bret Weinstein
3:11:51 - Elon Musk
3:23:59 - Artificial Intelligence
3:40:01 - UFOs
3:53:16 - Free will
4:20:31 - Hope for the future

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The following is a conversation with Sam Harris, his second time on the podcast.

As I said 2 years ago, when I first met and spoke with Sam, he's 1 of the most influential, pioneering thinkers of our time.

As the host of the Making Sense podcast, creator of the Waking Up app, and the author of many seminal books on human nature and the human mind, including The End of Faith, The Moral Landscape, Lying, Free Will, and Waking Up.

In this conversation, Besides our mutual fascination with AGI and free will, we do also go deep into controversial, challenging topics of Donald Trump, Hunter Biden, January 6th, vaccines, lab leak, Kanye West and several key figures at the center of public discourse including Joe Rogan and Elon Musk, both of whom have been friends of Sam and have become friends of mine, somehow in an amazing life trajectory that I do not deserve in any way and in fact believe is probably a figment of my imagination.

And if it's all right, please allow me to say a few words about this personal aspect of the conversation, of discussing Joe, Elon, and others.

What's been weighing heavy on my heart since the beginning of the pandemic, now 3 years ago, is that many people I look to for wisdom in public discourse stop talking to each other as often, with respect, humility, and love, when the world needed those kinds of conversations the most.

My hope is that they start talking again.

They start noticing the humanity that connects them that is much deeper than the disagreements that divide them.

So let me take this moment to say with humility and honesty why I look up to and I'm inspired by Joe, Elon, and Sam.

I think Joe Rogan is important to the world as a voice of compassionate curiosity and open-mindedness to ideas, both radical and mainstream, sometimes with humor, sometimes with brutal honesty, always pushing for more kindness in the world.

I think Elon Musk is important to the world as an engineer, leader, entrepreneur, and human being who takes on the hardest problems that face humanity and refuses to accept the constraints of conventional thinking that made the solutions to these problems seem impossible.

I think Sam Harris is important to the world as a fearless voice who fights for the pursuit of truth against growing forces of echo chambers and audience capture, taking unpopular perspectives and defending them with rigor and resilience.

I both celebrate and criticize all 3 privately, and they criticize me, usually more effectively, for which I always learn a lot and always appreciate.

Most importantly, there is respect and love for each other as human beings.

The very thing that I think the world needs most now in a time of division and chaos.

I will continue to try to mend divisions, to try to understand, not deride, to turn the other cheek if needed, to return hate with love.

Sometimes people criticize me for being naive, cheesy, simplistic, all of that.

I know, I agree, but I really am speaking from the heart and I'm trying.

This world is too fucking beautiful not to try in whatever way I know how.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, dear friends, here's Sam Harris.

What is more effective at making a net positive impact on the world, empathy or reason?

There's the cognitive form, which is, I would argue even a species of reason.

It's just understanding another person's point of view.

You understand why they're suffering or why they're happy or just you have a theory of mind about another human being that is accurate.

And so you can navigate in relationship to them more effectively.

And then there's another layer entirely, not incompatible with that, but just distinct, which is what people often mean by empathy, which is more a kind of emotional contagion, right?

Like you feel depressed and I begin to feel depressed along with you because it's contagious, right?

We're so close and I'm so concerned about you and your problems become my problems and it bleeds through, right?

Now, I think both of those capacities are very important, but the emotional contagion piece, and this is not really my thesis, this is something I have more or less learned from Paul Bloom, the psychologist who wrote a book on this topic titled Against Empathy.

The emotional social contagion piece is a bad guide rather often for ethical behavior and ethical intuitions.

And I'll give you the clear example of this, which is, we find stories with a single identifiable protagonist who we can effortlessly empathize with far more compelling than data, right?

So if I tell you, you know, this is the classic case of the little girl who falls down a well, right?

You see the parents distraught on television.

You hear her cries from the bottom of the well.

I mean, there was an example of this 20, 25 years ago, I think, where it was just wall to wall on CNN, this is just the perfect use of CNN.

It was 72 hours, whatever it was, of continuous coverage, of just extracting this girl from a well.

So we effortlessly pay attention to that, we care about it, we will donate money toward it.

I mean, it's just, it marshals 100% of our compassion and altruistic impulse.

Whereas if you hear that there's a genocide raging in some country you've never been to and never intended to go to, and the numbers don't make a dent, and we find the story boring, right, and we'll change the channel in the face of a genocide, right?

It doesn't matter, and it literally, perversely, it could be 500, 000 little girls have fallen down wells in that country and we still don't care, right?

So it's, you know, many of us have come to believe that this is a bug rather than a feature of our moral psychology.

And so empathy plays an unhelpful role there.

So ultimately, I think when we're making big decisions about what we should do and how to mitigate human suffering and what's worth valuing and how we should protect those values, I think reason is the better tool.

But it's not that I would want to dispense with any part of empathy either.

Well, there's a lot of dangers to go on there, but briefly to mention, you've recently talked about affective altruism on your podcast.

I think you mentioned some interesting statement, I'm going to horribly misquote you, but that you'd rather live in a world, like it doesn't really make sense, but you'd rather live in a world where you care about maybe your daughter and son more than 100 people that live across the world, something like this.

Like where the calculus is not always perfect, but somehow it makes sense to live in a world where it's irrational in this way, and yet empathetic in the way you've been discussing.

Right, I'm not sure what the right answer is there, or even whether there is 1 right answer.

There could be multiple peaks on this part of the moral landscape.

But so the opposition is between an ethic that's articulated by someone like the Dalai Lama, right?

Or really any exponent of classic Buddhism would say that the ultimate enlightened ethic is true dispassion with respect to friends and strangers.

So that you would, the mind of the Buddha would be truly dispassionate, you would love and care about all people equally.

And by that light, it seems some kind of ethical failing, or at least a failure to fully actualize compassion in the limit, or enlightened wisdom in the limit, to care more, or even much more, about your kids than the kids of other people and to prioritize your energy in that way, right?

So you spend all this time trying to figure out how to keep your kids healthy and happy and you'll attend to their minutest concerns and however superficial.

And again, there's a genocide raging in Sudan or wherever, and it takes up less than 1% of your bandwidth.

I'm not sure it would be a better world if everyone was running the Dalai Lama program there.

I think some prioritization of one's nearest and dearest ethically might be optimal because we'll all be doing that and we'll all be doing that in a circumstance where we have certain norms and laws and other structures that force us to be dispassionate where that matters.

So like when I go to, when my daughter gets sick and I have to take her to a hospital, I really want her to get attention, right?

And I'm worried about her more than I'm worried about everyone else in the lobby.

But the truth is I actually don't want a totally corrupt hospital.

I don't want a hospital that treats my daughter better than anyone else in the lobby because she's my daughter and I've bribed the guy at the door or whatever, or the guy's a fan of my podcast or whatever the thing is.

You don't want starkly corrupt, unfair situations.

And when you sort of get pressed down the hierarchy of Maslow's needs, you know, individually and societally, a bunch of those variables change, and they change for the worse, understandably.

But yeah, when everyone's corrupt and you're in a state of collective emergency, you've got a lifeboat problem, you're scrambling to get into the lifeboat, yeah, then fairness and norms and the other vestiges of civilization begin to get stripped off.

We can't reason from those emergencies to normal life.

I mean, in normal life, we want justice, we want fairness, we're all better off for it, even when the spotlight of our concern is focused on the people we know, the people who are our friends, the people who are family, people we have good reason to care about.

We still, by default, want a system that protects the interests of strangers too.

And we know that generally speaking, just in game theoretic terms, we're all gonna tend to be better off in a fair system than a corrupt 1.

1 of the failure modes of empathy is our susceptibility to anecdotal data.

Just a good story will get us to not think clearly.

But what about empathy in the context of just discussing ideas with other people.

And then there's a large number of people, like in this country, you know, red and blue, half the population believes certain things on immigration or on the response to the pandemic or any kind of controversial issue.

Even if the election was fairly executed, having an empathy for their worldview, trying to understand where they're coming from, not just in the explicit statement of their idea, but the entirety of the roots from which their idea stems, that kind of empathy while you're discussing ideas, what is, in your pursuit of truth, having empathy for the perspective of a large number of other people, versus raw mathematical reason?

I think it's important, but it only takes you so far.

Right, truth is not decided by democratic principles.

And certain people believe things for understandable reasons, but those reasons are nonetheless bad reasons, right?

They don't scale, they don't generalize, they're not reasons anyone should adopt for themselves or respect, you know, epistemologically.

And yet their circumstance is understandable and it's something you can care about, right?

And so yeah, let me just take, I think there's many examples of this that you might be thinking of, but 1 that comes to mind is I've been super critical of Trump, obviously, and I've been super critical of certain people for endorsing him or not criticizing him when he really made it patently obvious who he was, if there had been any doubt initially.

There was no doubt when we have a sitting president who's not agreeing to a peaceful transfer of power.

So I'm critical of all of that, and yet the fact that many millions of Americans didn't see what was wrong with Trump or bought into the, didn't see through his con, right?

I mean, they bought into the idea that he was a brilliant businessman who might just be able to change things because he's so unconventional and so his heart is in the right place.

You know, he's really a man of the people even though he's a gold-plated everything in his life.

They bought the myth somehow of, largely because they had seen him on television for almost a decade and a half, pretending to be this genius businessman who could get things done.

It's understandable to me that many very frustrated people who have not had their hopes and dreams actualized, who have been the victims of globalism and many other current trends, it's understandable that they would be confused and not see the liability of electing a grossly incompetent, morbidly narcissistic person into the presidency.

There are many, many millions of people who I don't necessarily blame for the Trump phenomenon, but I can nonetheless bemoan the phenomenon as indicative of a very bad state of affairs in our society.

I mean, 1 is I think you have to call a spade a spade when you're talking about how things actually work and what things are likely to happen or not.

But then you can recognize that people have very different life experiences.

And yeah, I mean, I think empathy and probably the better word for what I would hope to embody there is compassion, right?

Like really, you know, to really wish people well, you know, and to really wish, you know, strangers well, effortlessly wish them well.

I mean, to realize that there is no opposition between, in the, at bottom, there's no real opposition between selfishness and selflessness because why is selfishness really takes into account other people's happiness?

I mean, do you want to live in a society where you have everything but most other people have nothing?

Or do you wanna live in a society where you're surrounded by happy, creative, self-actualized people who are having their hopes and dreams realized?

I think it's obvious that the second society is much better, however much you can guard your good luck.

But what about having empathy for certain principles that people believe?

For example, the pushback, the other perspective on this, because you said bought the myth of Trump as the great businessman.

There could be a lot of people that are supporters of Trump who could say that Sam Harris bought the myth that we have this government of the people, by the people, that actually represents the people, as opposed to a bunch of elites who are running a giant bureaucracy that is corrupt, that is feeding themselves, and they're actually not representing the people.

And then here's this chaos agent, Trump, who speaks off the top of his head.

Yeah, he's flawed in all this number of ways.

He's a more comedian than he is a presidential type of figure, and he's actually creating the kind of chaos that's going to shake up this bureaucracy, shake up the elites that are so uncomfortable because they don't want the world to know about the game they got running on everybody else.

So that's the kind of perspective that they would take and say, yeah, yeah, there's these flaws that Trump has, but this is necessary.

So I haven't bought the myth that it's, you know, a truly representative democracy in the way that we might idealize.

And, you know, on some level, I mean, this is a different conversation, but on some level, I'm not even sure how much I think it should be, right?

Like, I'm not sure we want, in the end, everyone's opinion given equal weight about just what we should do about anything.

I mean, there are many topics around which I don't deserve to have a strong opinion because I don't know what I'm talking about, right?

Or what I would be talking about if I had a strong opinion.

So, And I think we'll probably get to that, to some of those topics, because I've declined to have certain conversations on my podcast just because I think I'm the wrong person to have that conversation, right?

And I think it's important to see those bright lines in one's life and in the moment politically and ethically.

So yeah, I think, so leave aside the viability of democracy, but I'm under no illusions that all of our institutions are worth preserving precisely as they have been up until the moment this great orange wrecking ball came swinging through our lives.

But it was a very bad bet to elect someone who is grossly incompetent and worse than incompetent, genuinely malevolent in his selfishness, right?

And this is something we know based on literally decades of him being in the public eye.

He's not a public servant in any normal sense of that term.

And he couldn't possibly give an honest or sane answer to the question you asked me about empathy and reason and like how should we, what should guide us, I genuinely think he is missing some necessary moral and psychological tools, right?

And this is, I can feel compassion for him as a human being because I think having those things is incredibly important and genuinely loving other people is incredibly important and knowing what all that's about is that's really the good stuff in life and I think he's missing a lot of that, but I think we don't wanna promote people to the highest positions of power in our society who are far outliers in pathological terms, right?

We want them to be far outliers in the best case, in wisdom and compassion and some of the things you've, some of the topics you've brought up.

I mean, we want someone to be deeply informed.

We want someone to be unusually curious, unusually alert to how they may be wrong or getting things wrong consequentially.

And insofar as we're gonna get normal mediocrities in that role, which I think is often the best we could expect, let's get normal mediocrities in that role, not once in a generation narcissists and frauds.

I mean, it's like, I mean, just take honesty as a single variable, Right?

I think you want, yes, it's possible that most politicians lie at least some of the time.

I think people should be generally honest, even to a fault.

Yes, there are certain circumstances where lying, I think, is necessary.

It's kind of on a continuum of self-defense and violence.

So it's like if you're going to, you know, if the Nazis come to your door and ask you if you've got Anne Frank in the attic, I think it's okay to lie to them.

But you know, Trump, there's arguably, there's never been a person that anyone could name in human history who's lied with that kind of velocity.

I mean, it's just, He was just a blizzard of lies, great and small, you know, to pointless and effective, but it's just, it says something fairly alarming about our society that a person of that character got promoted.

And so, yes, I have compassion and concern for half of the society who didn't see it that way, and that's gonna sound elitist and smug or something for anyone who's on that side listening to me, but it's genuine.

I mean, I understand that like, like I barely have the, I'm like 1 of the luckiest people in the world and I barely have the bandwidth to pay attention to half the things I should pay attention to in order to have an opinion about half the things we're gonna talk about, right?

So how much less bandwidth is somebody who's working 2 jobs or a single mom who's raising multiple kids, even a single kid.

It's just unimaginable to me that people have the bandwidth to really track this stuff.

And so then they jump on social media and they get inundated by misinformation and they see what their favorite influencer just said, and now they're worried about vaccines.

We're living in an environment where the information space has become so corrupted, and we've built machines to further corrupt it.

We've built a business model for the internet that it further corrupts it.

So it is just, it's chaos in informational terms.

And I don't fault people for being confused and impatient and at their wits end.

And yes, Trump was an enormous fuck you to the establishment and that was understandable for many reasons.

To me, Sam Harris, the great Sam Harris, is somebody I've looked up to for a long time as a beacon of voice of reason.

And there's this meme on the internet, and I would love you to steel man the case for it and against, that Trump broke Sam Harris' brain.

That there's something, it's disproportionately to the actual impact that Trump had on our society.

He had an impact on the ability of balanced, calm, rational minds to see the world clearly, to think clearly, you being 1 of the beacons of that.

Is there a degree to which he broke your brain?

Otherwise known as Trump derangement syndrome.

Yeah, I think Trump derangement syndrome is a very clever meme because it just throws the problem back on the person who's criticizing Trump.

But In truth, the true Trump derangement syndrome was not to have seen how dangerous and divisive it would be to promote someone like Trump to that position of power.

And in the final moment, not to see how untenable it was to still support someone who, a sitting president who was not committing to a peaceful transfer of power.

I mean, if that wasn't a bright line for you, you have been deranged by something because that was 1 minute to midnight for our democracy as far as I'm concerned.

And I think it really was but for the integrity of a few people that we didn't suffer some real constitutional crisis and real emergency, you know, after January 6th.

I mean, if Mike Pence had caved in and decided to not certify the election, right?

Literally, you can count on 2 hands, the number of people who held things together at that moment.

And so it wasn't for want of trying on Trump's part that we didn't succumb to some real, truly uncharted catastrophe with our democracy.

So the fact that that didn't happen is not a sign that those of us who were worried that it was so close to happening were exaggerating the problem.

I mean, it's like, you almost got run over by a car, but you didn't.

And so, the fact that you're adrenalized and you're thinking, boy, that was dangerous, I probably shouldn't wander in the middle of the street with my eyes closed.

You weren't wrong to feel that you really had a problem, right?

And came very close to something truly terrible.

So I think that's where we were, and I think we shouldn't do that again, right?

So the fact that he's still, he's coming back around as potentially a viable candidate.

I'm not spending much time thinking about it frankly because it's, you know, I'm waiting for the moment where it requires some thought.

I mean it did, it took up, I don't know how many podcasts I devoted to the topic.

It wasn't that many in the end, against the number of podcasts I devoted to other topics, but there are people who look at Trump and just find him funny, entertaining, not especially threatening.

He's like not a, you know, it's just good fun to see somebody who's like, who's just not taking anything seriously.

And it's just putting a, you know, a stick in the wheel of business as usual again and again and again and again.

And they don't really see anything much at stake, right?

It doesn't really matter if we don't support NATO.

It doesn't really matter if he says he trusts Putin more than our intelligence services.

None of this is, it doesn't matter if he's on the 1 hand saying that he loves the leader of North Korea and on the other threatening, threatens to bomb them back to the Stone Age on Twitter.

It all can be taken in the spirit of kind of reality television.

It's like this is the part of the movie that's just fun to watch, right?

I can even inhabit that space for a few minutes at a time, but there's a deeper concern that we're in the process of entertaining ourselves to death, right?

That we're just not taking things seriously.

And this is a problem I've had with several other people we might name who just appear to me to be goofing around at scale.

And they lack a kind of moral seriousness.

I mean, they're touching big problems where lives hang in the balance, but they're just fucking around.

And I think they're really important problems that we have to get our head straight around.

And we need, it's not to say that institutions don't become corrupt.

And I think, and I'm quite worried that, both about the loss of trust in our institutions and the fact that trust has eroded for good reason, right?

I think, you know, they've become infected by, you know, political ideologies that are not truth tracking.

I mean, I worry about all of that, But I just think we need institutions.

We need to value expertise over amateurish speculation and conspiracy thinking and just bullshit.

What kind of amateur speculation are we doing on this very podcast?

I'm usually alert to the moments where I'm just guessing or where I actually feel like I'm talking from within my wheelhouse and I try to telegraph that a fair amount with people.

Like I mean, you can invite someone onto your podcast who's an expert about something that you're not an expert about and then you, you in the process of getting more informed yourself, your audience is getting more informed.

So you're asking smart questions and you might be pushing back at the margins, but you know that when push comes to shove on that topic, you really don't have a basis to have a strong opinion.

And if you were gonna form a strong opinion that was this counter to the expert you have in front of you, it's going to be by deference to some other expert who you've brought in or who you've heard about or whose work you've read or whatever.

But there's a paradox to how we value authority in science that most people don't understand.

And I think we should at some point unravel that because it's the basis for a lot of public confusion.

And frankly, it's the basis for a lot of criticism I've received on these topics, where people think that I'm against free speech or I'm an establishment shill or it's like I just think, I'm a credentialist, I just think people with PhDs from Ivy League universities should run everything.

It's not true, but there's a ton of, There's a lot to cut through to get to daylight there because people are very confused about how we value authority in the service of rationality generally.

You've talked about it, but it's just interesting, the intensity of feeling you have.

You've had this famous phrase about Hunter Biden and children in the basement.

So let me give another perspective on the situation of January 6th and Trump in general.

It's possible that January 6th and things of that nature revealed that our democracy is actually pretty fragile.

And that Trump is not a malevolent, an ultra-competent malevolent figure, but is simply a jokester.

And he just, by creating the chaos, revealed that it's all pretty fragile.

Because you're a student of history, and there's a lot of people, like Vladimir Lenin, Hitler, who are exceptionally competent at controlling power, at being executives and taking that power.

Controlling the generals, controlling all the figures involved, and certainly not tweeting, but working in the shadows, behind the scenes, to gain power.

And they did so extremely competently, and that is how they were able to gain power.

The pushback with Trump, he was doing none of that.

He was creating what he's very good at, creating drama, sometimes for humor's sake, sometimes for drama's sake, and simply reveal that our democracy is fragile.

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Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs | Lex Fridman Podcast #365