#468 — More From Sam: Gratitude, Bad Conversations, Conspiracy Addiction, Waffle House Teleportation, and More

15:54Sam Harris:Get off social media. I think that would be to uncouple us from all the maniacs, from the 10 % of us that are trolls and lunatics and bots and grifters and just dial down some of that noise so that we can get a little more signal, I think that would be good. If all the social media people pulled the plug on social media, I think they would all deserve, I told Jack Dorsey this when he was running Twitter, if he just pulled the plug on Twitter saying, sorry, this didn't work out, guys, he would deserve the Nobel Peace Prize. And I think that's still true. It's probably even more true now.

16:28Jaron Lanier:I'm going to shift topics here. It's a great question from a Substack subscriber. You said conversations with people you strongly disagree with can be unproductive, hard to fact check in real time, prone to confusion. But you've also argued that conversations are only alternative to violence. And your early debates on religion showed you engaging calmly and rigorously across deep disagreement. In recent years, many of your guests seem to largely share your views with differences mostly in emphasis. There's a real value in surfacing expertise, reinforcing important ideas. but do you worry it comes at the cost of one of your genuine strengths, modeling how to engage thoughtfully with opposition?

17:05Jaron Lanier:Most real-world disagreements are messy and emotionally charged. Isn't there still value in demonstrating how to navigate those well, even if the conversation isn't perfectly clean?

17:15Sam Harris:Yeah, up to a point. I mean, I think some of those conversations are useful, and I keep looking for the ones that I think will be useful. I mean, I think there's generally greater utility in when there's something to learn about an issue or something to figure out, bringing on someone who really knows their stuff and just helping me learn more in real time in front of my audience. So I'm thinking about the consequences of Trumpism and having Trump for a second term and just the way the rest of the world perceives us and the loss of American leadership and et cetera, all of that. If I bring on someone who I know I'm going to agree with, but who just knows much more about certain details than I do.

17:56Sam Harris:I bring on someone like Ann Applebaum, right, who can just give me the view from the other side of the world with much more historical context and who's just deep in the weeds on the way propaganda works and the way democracies unravel and all the relevant historical analogies, right? So I'm not going to disagree with Ann about much, if anything, but that's not the point. The point is to hear what she has to say and to learn a little bit more each time I do that. I think that's usually more useful than me getting some person on who stridently disagrees with a position I already have, and I just know going into it that it's just going to be an exercise in my attempting to showcase their errors, which I already understand to be errors, right?

18:41Sam Harris:So someone who doesn't really understand jihadism at all and doesn't believe in it and thinks it's all economics and politics and bluffing, okay, I can get that person on for another two-hour round of brain damage, but it really is just brain damage, right? Now, it's not to say that it's not going to be useful for some people in the audience to see me hit those pitches again and again, but I've done it so many times, I'm not sure about the value of continuing to do it. And it also runs the risk of being confusing to some people anyway, because certain moves are reliably confusing, right?

19:18Jaron Lanier:Well, I think people like the conversations you're having. I think it's just, it feels as though you've been just avoiding the chance at having a bad conversation and they feel that many of them can learn from a bad conversation.

19:29Sam Harris:I just don't see, like, I mean, who are we talking about? I mean, like, I'm going to talk to someone like Hassan Piker. Would that be fun? No, not really. I mean, it's just, I don't think, I don't think anyone should be listening to this guy, right? So it's like, it just seems like...

19:43Jaron Lanier:Well, that's a different point. I think what they're saying is there are bad conversations that they're constantly having and they can still learn how to have a good conversation and a bad conversation or how to navigate a bad conversation. And with you lately just saying, fuck it, I'm not going to have bad conversations anymore because this is not the best use of my time or I'm not going to spend two hours on this. I think that a lot of people are saying, well, even from those bad conversations, I don't think they mean the Omar Z's conversation examples.

20:09Sam Harris:Well, I mean, so I'm going to talk to Ben Shapiro. I anticipate that being a potentially bad conversation, at least for half of it. I mean, half of it will agree about certain things, but part of it will be exposing a fair amount of daylight between us around Trump and current American politics. So I'm going to go into that thinking we both might get somewhat uptight in this conversation, at least for part of it. And I'm not avoiding it. I think it's useful because Ben is a serious enough person with a big enough audience that it's useful to try to kind of make some sense in his direction. Would I talk to Candace Owens?

20:46Sam Harris:I don't think so. I mean, she's got an even larger audience, but she's a total lunatic. And I'm not sure, I mean, apart from, I mean, I could approach it the way I approached the conversation with Doug Wilson, the pastor who I knew just how far out he was as a fundamentalist, but I approached that differently than I might have. I mean, I was not looking for conflict. I was looking, I trust, in that case, I trusted my audience to understand what's wrong with a pastor who will sign off on maybe one day bringing chattel slavery back because it's in the Bible, right? So that's obvious enough that I can realize, I don't have to dunk on that point.

21:27Sam Harris:I don't have to say, oh, well, I just hope it's clear that I'm against chattel slavery. So it's just, you can just be more of an anthropologist there rather than somebody who's going to dig in and really have a debate. My conversation with Ross Doufette, we did not agree. That had the quality of a debate about religion. I think he's more of a religious extremist than people appreciate. And I feel some of that came out in our conversation. I mean, he's surprisingly extreme in his claims to, you know, his faith claims, given that he's also trying to function as a normal journalist at the New York Times.

22:04Sam Harris:So those are not totally, those are somewhat adversarial conversations, but they're not. To talk to someone like, I don't know, again, I just brought up Hassan Piker at random, someone like him, I mean, he's just kind of a performance artist. I mean, he's a deeply confused, I think, fairly amoral, fairly juvenile person in his ethics, right? I mean, he's just a, and he's just a bit of a nutcase and dishonest. And so it's just, it's such a mess. I mean, there's so much bad faith that you have to anticipate going into a conversation like that. My first question is why do it? Because it can stand the chance of being genuinely confusing, certainly to anyone who's sort of in his audience, right?

22:46Sam Harris:Because there's just so much, it's asymmetric warfare. It's so much easier to make a mess than to clean it up, That's why I wouldn't talk to someone like RFK Jr. I mean, RFK Jr. is basically a nutcase, right? I mean, there's something wrong with the guy. He's a liar, absolutely a liar, but he's also a kind of a confabulator. He's a bullshit artist. And also I just think a little crazy, right? So you're dealing with all of that. It's very hard to do in real time. Again, for the kinds of things he's crazy about, what you want is someone who's deep in the weeds on the science of vaccines and immunology and just, you know, virology and all of it, right?

23:24Sam Harris:So I'm the wrong guy to have that conversation. I've always said that. It's not to say I couldn't take a month of my life and get up to speed on some of that, but it's just not worth a month of my life to do that. So all of it is just, at this point, you have to have a life is too short module in your brain and consult it occasionally. And for many of these conversations that people seem to want me to have, I have to say life is too short for many of them. It's not to say, I mean, given the right candidate, you know, I might, I might jump at the chance. Again, I mean, you know, the monk debates, I think they asked me to debate Tucker Carlson and I was surprised to find myself saying yes without any reservation really, because Tucker has become such a fixture in our politics, but that seems to have evaporated.

24:10Sam Harris:So I don't, I don't know what happened there. I'm I'm sure he said no. But so I would do that. I would do something like that. But again, it really has to be worth it. Well, Rogan has said he doesn't want to talk to you publicly until you've debated Brett Weinstein. Is that something you consider doing? Oh, well, no. I mean, for the same reasons, I wouldn't debate RFK Jr. I mean, it's just, it's very disconcerting not to know whether someone has lost their mind, right? When you look at someone like Brett speak, he just seems to be the picture of reasonableness. He's not getting blown around by his emotional life, certainly not in any obvious way when he's certainly not on a podcast with Rogan.

24:52Sam Harris:So he's not an Alex Jones-like character where you look at the way he's delivering the lines and you think, okay, this is kind of a case study in chemical imbalance or something. right? Like what we need is a psychopharmacologist before anything else happens here so that we can try to get this guy back to some physiological baseline. That's not happening with Brett at all, and yet the things he says are equivalently crazy. And the certitude with which he says them, it's totally indefensible, right? So you take his recent appearance on Rogan and you stick his claims into any LLM, and what you get is just a litany of obvious errors.

25:31Sam Harris:And I did that for Joe. I sent him a link to my chat GPT session. Like, Joe, just here's a sanity check. Listen to what the robots say about what Brett was giving you on this most recent podcast. And he didn't seem to want to do that. So he's still convinced that Brett was right about everything, though Brett thinks that 17 million people were killed outright by the vaccines and that ivermectin is still worth taking. I don't know how to interact with that. But what it requires is if it were going to be done at all. I mean, Brett is just the right, you know, Brett is not someone to take seriously on this topic.

26:02Sam Harris:But if you were forced to take him seriously because he's made so much noise about it, what you want is someone who's deeper in the weeds on the relevant science than either of us are and let that guy or gal have the debate. And that's what I urged Joe to do. I mean, Joe was wrong there. I wasn't urging that I do a post-mortem on COVID about RFK Jr. or Brett or anyone else, any other lunatic he's had on his podcast. I was urging that he have the relevant experts do it. It's not my wheelhouse. Unlike many of these guys, I'm not going to pretend it's my wheelhouse knowing that I can be a quick study and sound like I know what I'm talking about.

26:45Sam Harris:I'm not an immunologist. I'm not a virologist. I'm not an epidemiologist. You want to be all three of those things. Like everyone else on the internet? Yeah, to have this conversation responsibly, but I know enough of what mainstream science thinks about what happened during COVID to know that Brett doesn't make any sense on this topic.

27:04Jaron Lanier:Yeah. Another question while we're on Rogan. You've been critical of Rogan's irresponsibility in the spread of misinformation, but he's taken basically the same approach since he was bullshitting stone in his living room with an audience of a few thousand. Not his fault. His audience has become huge. Isn't the real problem that the epistemic institutions have trashed their credibility and the audience is lacking discernment?

27:23Sam Harris:Well, it's both. But I think I sent you this clip of the algorithm served me of Joe talking to Theo Vaughn. And Theo was just kind of melting down around his anxiety about everything. It seemed super worried about the war in Iran and worried about Israel, I guess. I forget about some of the specifics of the clip, but they went on for like 10 minutes, kind of casting doubt on everything. and then they had seemed to have a lot of time for some, I think it was CIA conspiracy theory, which was getting delivered to them on what looked like a short YouTube clip or a TikTok video by someone they liked.

28:00Sam Harris:And, you know, it was probably a rehash of MKUltra or some, you know, old story about the CIA putting LSD in the water, something they did in the 1950s or something. But, you know, it was a - Which they need to do again now. Yeah, but it was a completely paranoid story about the CIA trying to make us all dumb so we'll be more bovine and compliant. And I mean, the image I got is just two kind of pyromaniacs, just lighting matches on a landscape that they had spent years soaking in gasoline, right? It's like there's, I mean, and this really is, it's relevant how large the audience is for this. It's relevant at just how much cultural damage is being done every time these guys basically play the just-asking-questions routine on socially combustible topics with tens of millions of people listening, right?

28:53Sam Harris:It's just, it's completely irresponsible. It is genuinely dangerous. It's genuinely corrosive of our culture. It's genuinely misleading of their audience. And they, because they're not journalists, they feel no responsibility to get their facts straight. They certainly don't correct their errors. And I mean, they don't have the mechanism by which to correct their errors. It's just not... They'll even admit that this might be some tinfoil... I think Theo said that in the middle of this clip. Yeah, like this might be tinfoil hat time. But still, there's still just flicking matches at everything, right?

29:24Sam Harris:And the worst thing about all of this is their addiction to a conspiratorial framing of everything. That is, if you can extract any lesson from what's happened to our politics in the last decade and the role that people like Rogan have played in the unraveling of everything and, you know, and the way in which social media has weaponized all this and the rise of people like Tucker and Candace and Nick Fuentes and the fact that we've got Trump a second time around. And central to all of it is this addiction to conspiracy thinking and contrarianism and, what I've called the pornography of doubt. And Joe has been as addicted as anyone and has brought it to scale perhaps more than anyone.

30:13Sam Harris:And it's totally unprincipled. It is genuinely confusing to millions of people. I mean, you've got young people getting raised on a diet of this bullshit. It's divisive. It amplifies the worst in us. And it's undermining of, yes, our institutions have done something to lose credibility, right? They have become politicized in ways that they shouldn't have become politicized. Yes, all of that's true. The remedy for that is not a torrent of bullshit from podcasts and the platforming of proper lunatics and people who think they were denied the Nobel Prize when they have almost no scientific reputations to protect.

30:51Sam Harris:No, the remedy is more good science and good journalism and real intellectual integrity and holding institutions to account in serious ways, not spreading lies and half-truths and cockamamie conspiracy theories. And I mean, really, you look at that clip of Joe and Theo, who are both good guys. I mean, the paradox here for me ethically is that what I'm talking about is a species of evil, right? Given its consequences, it's a species of evil, right? It is like at the top of the list of what ails us in our society. It is the thing that is preventing us from solving real problems in this world. There's no question it is getting people killed and will continue to get people killed.

31:35Sam Harris:It is absolutely toxic. And yet many of the people participating in this are just good guys who are just having fun and who are just entertaining. They think there's no stakes, right? They're just like athletes, right? They're just having fun. They're just playing a game. Joe's just playing a game, but it has real, it's a game with real consequences, right? It's just, it's like, you know, how, how would you play tennis if you knew that every time you, you know, lost a point, people would, would die, right? I mean, like that, that's, that's the kind of game that's being played with information now.

32:05Sam Harris:And so people like Joe and Elon and, uh, you know, people who have audiences in the tens and even hundreds of millions have a real responsibility to get their heads out of their asses. And, um, they're not showing any aptitude for doing that. I'm going to move to another question.

32:21Jaron Lanier:I don't like that you seem to use the term woke in the same pejorative way that those on the right do.