Sam Harris on Silicon Valley’s Slide into Techno-Authoritarianism

21:18Kara Swisher:Sure, but we talked about the excesses of the left, which were obvious, and that is certainly a rabbit hole. My point is, to say tech regulation could usher in the Antichrist and the destruction of a country.

21:28Sam Harris:That is as extreme as it gets. Yeah, that honestly seems crazy to me. But what I'm just trying to do is draw some point of contact between statements of that kind that seem extreme and cultic and weird and proto-fascist to some set of concerns that I consider rational. So Peter, if I were sitting across, I don't know Peter very well, I know him, but I think we would both agree that Western Europe has a problem of assimilation with its Muslim community that we're happy to not have here in America and we don't want in America. So in some sense, we would both agree with the project of let's not let America resemble Belgium with respect to this variable too much.

22:18Kara Swisher:Sure, but how does it get to anyone who wants TREC regulation as the Antichrist?

22:22Sam Harris:That's a step way down.

22:24Kara Swisher:I don't even understand it. I just, I think part of me thinks it's cynical.

22:28Sam Harris:Well, I think so. I mean, if you imagine jumping from the critique of DEI, right, so what DEI was, in their view, is just the nullification of anything like meritocracy. We're not going to care about getting the best man or woman for the job. We're just going to care about checking quotas because we're so guilty about, you know, our race has passed. And so that, from a kind of their pure entrepreneurial frame, looks like just a race toward mediocrity and failure. And they don't, you know, so they don't want to be forced to do that. Yes, I get it. I get it.

23:07Kara Swisher:It's the extreme nature. And also, by the way, it's a meritocracy, not a meritocracy. It often is friends of friends and friends of Peter. And now it's friends of Trump. Oh, yeah. Because they've gotten, you know, triggered by an obnoxious college student who's kind of allowed to do that on some level when they're younger. But, you know, and it's sort of a bad definition of DEI because excesses are different than, wow, this seems funny that only white guys can win. Like, hmm, this seems on you, unless they're better, right? But what –

23:37Sam Harris:Well, I mean, what you have in the Trump administration is DEI for conspiracists and loons and grifters and sycophants. Exactly. I mean, this is not – if you care about meritocracy, then you should care that we have the least qualified, you know, high-level state servants we've ever had. I mean, it's just incredible. I mean, there's a few exceptions there, but it's incredible to see who's making these decisions. We've got people who are used to doing condo deals trying to figure out the fate of nations.

24:05Kara Swisher:Right, right. Exactly. So that would be Mr. Whitcoff. The venture capitalist Mark Andreessen did an interview with the New York Times back in January, where he explained his shift from Democratic voter to Trump supporter in 2024, although he wasn't very Democrat. I didn't even know his politics, I'll be honest with you. And one thing that comes through in the interview is his core belief that tech companies are run by good people doing good things that make the world a better place. Now there's plenty of evidence not that way. So the spread of election disinformation, deep fakes, loss of privacy, lack of safety, increasing polarization, loneliness epidemic.

24:38Kara Swisher:I've been speaking to parents who alleged their children died from suicide by the encouragement of chatbots. Very compelling and depressing situation. So this shift to MAGA, does it have to do with pure ego? I feel like I was a little too mean to Andreessen, and suddenly he's the good guy. And he couldn't even imagine that some of these things are problematic. It seems like their feelings are hurt a lot by the general public seeing them as bad guys. And so they blame Democrats, who mostly were hand in glove with them for a very long time, by the way.

25:08Sam Harris:Well, there is an asymmetry here, which I've noticed, among people who are public figures to one or another degree, who got crosswise with the left and got vilified by people whose politics they really shared across the board. I mean, people who support gay rights and, you know, gender equality and everything, just everything on the list, legalization of drugs, et cetera. But, I mean, what you found is just the kind of the narcissism of the small difference on the left to a degree that no one had ever really experienced before. And you would just be defenestrated the moment you got slightly out of step with the, you know, whatever, you know, shibboleth was then being uttered.

25:51Sam Harris:And then they got, you know, simultaneously love-bombed by everyone right of center, you know. So you have the—I mean, it's not just MAGA, but it's just everyone right of center will accept your pilgrim's progress rightward without any judgment. I mean, you're absolved of all your sins, and no matter how much you criticized these guys in the past, the moment you see the light about how awful wokeness is, they embrace you with open arms. And so to some degree, I feel like we've witnessed this very weird sociological experiment where lots of people with fairly prominent platforms just got inducted into a kind of cult because their families were treating them terribly.

26:37Sam Harris:And it just felt better, right of center, complaining about the left and how crazy it was.

26:43Kara Swisher:And when you think about that, it is, a lot of it's hurt feelings. It honestly feels like it in a lot of ways. I'll make the argument that they may have gotten defense-traded, but there was a net right there. They didn't get that hurt. They got to come back. They're richer than ever. It's not—it's feelings. They had a lot of feels about whether people liked them or not. Yeah.

27:04Sam Harris:Well, and the most interesting thing from my point of view is the total lack of moral sanity and integrity displayed by everyone involved here. Because, I mean, many of these guys were out of the closet hating Trump the first time around for all the plausible reasons. I mean, even J.D. Vance said that Trump is either, you know, an asshole of the first order or America's Hitler, right? And yet no one ever has to give a rational accounting of how their views have changed. I mean, you know, after January 6th, some of the guys on the All In podcast, I think it was Chamath most vocally, you know, in the aftermath of January 6th, I think he said that, you know, Trump should be in jail for the rest of his life, right?

27:49Sam Harris:So how these guys went from there to where they are now has never been explained, right? And they feel no burden to explain it because they have cultivated audiences that simply don't care about these kinds of ethical incoherencies.

28:05Kara Swisher:Now we're doing this. Yeah, it's really quite interesting. We'll be back in a minute.

28:19Kara Swisher:For the last 10 years, everything in American politics has basically revolved around one man. And as a political journalist who came of age during Donald Trump's rise in 2016, I've had a front row seat.

28:31Sam Harris:I am officially running for president of the United States. It's going to be only America first. America first.

28:43Kara Swisher:Thousands of supporters of President Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol building. But is it possible to talk about politics without talking about Donald Trump? That's the question I'm going to ask in our new show from Vox.

28:57Sam Harris:The idea of like a post-Trump or not exactly Trump-focused show can exist because he's not really driving any agenda items. It really does feel like so reactive. You know, I think this Iran thing is also going to cause a big split in the GOP. So far, it doesn't among like people who say they're MAGA voters are still with Trump. But like for the first time, you see on a major issue, open opposition from the start of this war. I'm Estet Herndon and welcome to America Actually.

29:24Kara Swisher:Hi, I'm Brene Brown. And I'm Adam Grant. And we're here to invite you to the Curiosity Shop. A podcast that's a place for listening, wondering, thinking, feeling, and questioning. It's going to be fun. We rarely agree. But we almost never disagree, and we're always learning. That's true. You can subscribe to the Curiosity Shop on YouTube or follow in your favorite podcast app to automatically receive new episodes every Thursday.

29:53Sam Harris:This week is the 50th anniversary of Apple. And so this week on The Vergecast, we're taking stock of where Apple is five decades into its existence. How's the company doing? And we also decided to do something slightly ridiculous, which is identify and rank the 50 best Apple products of all time. After a lot of hours of debating, I think we finally got there. That's on The Vergecast this week, along with the state of open AI as it raises a ton of money, tries to go public, and tries to convince you that you also love AI. All that on The Vergecast, wherever you get podcasts.

30:28Kara Swisher:Let's move on to where the shift towards authoritarianism in tech leaves everyday people. In an interview with The Atlantic's David Fromm, you said we are in a Tower of Babel moment, that informational guardrails are gone, and in their place is a kind of, quote, new religion of anti-establishment conspiracy theorizing. Expand on that. As a neuroscientist, why do we struggle to sort through the glut of information online and distinguish the good from the bat.

30:54Sam Harris:Well, I think what we're finding, I mean, we sort of always knew this, but in the presence of the internet and social media, it's just become excruciatingly obvious is that some percentage of us really have a taste for conspiracy thinking. And, you know, so it's not that we just believe one of them.

31:11Kara Swisher:Not a new thing.

31:12Sam Harris:No, it's not new at all. I mean, it's, you know, obviously it was with, you know, JFK and before, but you find that it's almost, it's just this kind of characterological trait that, you know, you love one of these anti-establishment narratives and you seem to love all of them. And someone like Joe Rogan is one of the poster boys for this style of thinking, right? It's just like the contrarian take on some world event is endlessly interesting. And it doesn't have to, and the search for anomalies in the standard interpretation is endlessly interesting. And what you get there, I mean, it's certainly when it gets weaponized on social media, is you get just the utter derangement of our politics.

31:55Sam Harris:And it happens on both the left and the right, but it certainly happens more on the right. And traditionally, it's been more on the right. So you get, you know, Candace Owens, who, you know, within minutes of Charlie Kirk's assassination, was cooking up some alternate theory about what happened there. And it has, she has an audience of millions who want to hear about this, right? And so I don't know if you've ever followed how crazy she's gotten, but I mean, she and Alex Jones are one-upping each other into some sort of mystical state of confusion. So everyone is captured by the algorithm, And it's a very perverse and weird algorithm as you go right of center.

32:41Sam Harris:And it's one that's being consciously gamed by Russian bots and troll farms. I mean, it's just like we've built this digital infrastructure and invited our enemies to weaponize it against us. And we've monetized their efforts to drive us crazy in some kind of psyop.

32:59Kara Swisher:Tell me, you know, as a nurse, why does that work, the inability? Does it distinguish the good from the bad? Is it the glut of information? Is it how it's delivered? What is different here? Because there's always, there was always a JFK, alligators in the toilet, whatever causes cancer.

33:17Sam Harris:There's a range. I mean, a lot of people don't fall into this bin, but many of us are very uncomfortable without cognitive closure. I mean, just admitting that we don't know why something happened or we just have some probabilistic sense of, you know, I feel like maybe it's a 50 % chance it was this or a 50 % chance it was that, and I'm okay with that. There's this desperation in many people to feel certainty on whatever point they're entertaining. And what conspiracy thinking offers you, I mean, it offers many things, but it offers this kind of race to cognitive closure, which is very entertaining.

33:59Sam Harris:It's also very empowering for the disempowered. I mean, if you're somebody who doesn't feel like you're at the center of the action or you're, you know, the world is the way you want it, it's very tempting to become part of a conversation that puts you, this, you know, this person on the fringe who no one's listening to, at the center of the truth, right? You have the true epistemology, right? And so it's a kind of pornography of doubt, in my view, and a kind of religion that gets spun up around achieving cognitive closure based on not especially rational thinking.

34:41Kara Swisher:Right. So one of the most striking examples of that supports the idea that we're in a Tower of Bevel moment is the ascension of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime vaccine skeptic. I just spent the day at University of Pennsylvania, and they're all going to flee the United States, all these amazing scientists, you know, in mRNA and other things, by the way. 20 years ago, the U.S. was on the verge of halting the spread of measles. Now, thanks to the spread of vaccine misinformation, outbreaks are getting worse. There's a big one in the wake of Thanksgiving. Two children died of measles this year.

35:10Kara Swisher:I think there was zero for many, many years. And when the Biden administration pushed platforms to deal with COVID and election misinformation, they got accused of censoring conservative voices. So what's the solution? Or are we just going to continue to go into this pornography of information and being misinformed?

35:29Sam Harris:Yeah, well, you know, barring some real consequence that gets everyone's attention, I think we are. I mean, you know, some kind of economic or epidemiological or environmental catastrophe that is just unignorable. I mean, when you look at COVID, COVID was almost the worst case scenario because it was bad enough so that our seemingly rational response to it at every stage along the way was seriously disrupting of society. But it wasn't so bad that you couldn't have a wide diversity of opinion about what was rational to do. And you have a lot of people who could just say, well, this is just a cold and I don't care about it.

36:11Sam Harris:And that was, you know, while that wasn't strictly rational, lots of people got away with living that way. And they can now say, see, this was all much ado about nothing. And you had a lot of liberals trying to, in their own authoritarian way, trying to control my life. And I'm going to have none of it. And so I feel like we probably learned many of the wrong lessons from COVID.

36:36Kara Swisher:It wasn't killer enough. It didn't kill us enough. Yeah.

36:38Sam Harris:And so, yeah, you could imagine. And it also, it killed old people preferentially and not kids preferentially. And so, I mean, next time around, we might be in the presence of a virus that is killing kids, right? And that will provoke a very different response, I think, or one would imagine.

36:53Kara Swisher:Right. But what about, well, that's what measles are, by the way. What would you say, it's just not widespread, it's just a small group of people, but what about January 6th? Why wasn't that enough? It was one of the most witnessed live events, live stream on TV. It was appalling to watch.

37:06Sam Harris:Yeah, yeah.

37:07Kara Swisher:It didn't work.

37:07Sam Harris:But you could, I mean, then you're Tucker Carlson and you can show the weird footage of cops just, you know, obviously scared cops just letting in a mob because they knew they were not in a position to resist the mob. And so it looked like just kind of the friendly opening the door to, you know, and some kind of collaboration with the crowd. And so what was this, a false flag operation? And then you get this discourse of this counter narrative, which is obviously crazy. Right. But again, what is so corrosive here is that now we have a culture, or at least parts of culture, that doesn't care about hypocrisy and lies on any level.

37:45Sam Harris:So Tucker suffered no rebuke from his own audience when it was revealed that for years he had been pretending to like Donald Trump, and yet behind closed doors he was texting that he thought Trump was a demonic force and he couldn't wait to be rid of him.

38:05Kara Swisher:Yeah, same thing with Dan Bongino just recently. I was paid to make things out. Right.

38:08Sam Harris:So, I mean, I just, you know, perhaps you feel the same way. I cannot imagine having an audience that would stay with me should it be revealed that I was that duplicitous, right? I mean, like, just perpetrating a fraud on them for years, just pretending to think one thing and thinking the other thing.

38:26Kara Swisher:You don't have a mother who loves Fox News then. It works. Cognitively, it works.

38:32Sam Harris:I mean, that's a culture that doesn't care about the truth, even, you know, and doesn't care about being lied to, even by the people they are putting their trust in, you know. In Trump, we have somebody who lies with a velocity that we have never witnessed in public life. And yet his fans, it's not like his fans don't think he lies. They know he lies. They just simply don't care. Don't care.

38:57Kara Swisher:Right, right. Right. And speaking of which, it's the reason dictators like Russia's Vladimir Putin love the idea of politicizing truth. No one knows what to believe, so people often end up going along with the narrative push by those in power. In this case, the power to influence opinion is concentrated in the hand of a few billionaires outside the government in tech. And in this case, people like Musk, they're mainstreaming fringe ideas like the Great Replacement Theory and vaccine skepticism or whatever. I just spoke to journalist Jacob Silverman, who wrote the book about Silicon Valley's radicalization called Gilded Rage.

39:26Kara Swisher:He said it's – get that, get it. He said it's disturbing that we're still not really having a conversation about the lack of accountability that these leaders, these tech leaders face for their behavior. But that said, the polls are showing the public, the wider public, is deeply distrustful of these people, both on the left and the right. So is that conversation gaining traction from your perspective? It feels like it, but perhaps not.

39:51Sam Harris:I mean, AI, if anything like the dreams of AI are realized, leaving aside the existential concerns around the misalignment of AI with our well-being, but just if AI succeeds and basically cancels the need for most human labor, we're going to have a reckoning with wealth inequality that we just simply can't avoid any longer. So it's been coming for as long as we've been alive, really. But AI, I think, is going to force the issue in a way that will be undeniable.

40:27Kara Swisher:Yes, which people feel in their bones, right?

40:29Sam Harris:You can feel people feel it, even if it is overwrought. And also, I mean, just if jobs, especially white-collar, you know, higher cognition, higher status jobs evaporate preferentially in the face of this tech, I just think, yeah, they'll be, you know, the pitchforks are coming, whether they're carried by people who were, you know, used to be plumbers or people who used to be software developers. I just think in success, we're going to have to figure out how to have a far more equitable society than we have.

41:04Kara Swisher:Yeah, I've always told them that. I'm like, you're just pushing off the day where you have to armor plate everything.

41:08Sam Harris:Yeah.

41:10Kara Swisher:We'll be back in a minute.

41:18Kara Swisher:In every episode, we get a question from an outside expert. Here's yours. Hi, Sam. I'm Kim Scott. I'm the author of the book, Radical Candor. From where I sit here in Silicon Valley, it seems like affluence and courage have become negatively correlated here. The wealthy believe they have too much to lose if they speak out. What is so alarming to me now isn't that an authoritarian president and a small cadre of right-wing tech execs want to take over. What is truly surprising to me is that the same people who once believed in the power of technology to strengthen our society and our democracy have gone ominously quiet.

42:01Kara Swisher:Fear is a tyrant's best weapon. The people in Silicon Valley who have made fortunes still have a platform and a voice. Now is the time to use them and to stand together in solidarity. Our silence will not protect us. Why do you think more people are not speaking out? And how should we be speaking out? That's a great question.

42:25Sam Harris:Yeah. Well, so, you know, we're watching the ruination of so much that we care about, right? I mean, if you look at the stature of our country on the world stage, right, and what our country represents to our, you know, allies and former allies and for the countries that aspire, can only aspire to be democracies, right? I mean, we used to stand for quite a lot in the, I mean, it's not that we don't have things to apologize for. We have a checkered past. I mean, it's been 250 years. But on our best days, we really could be credibly be said to care about, you know, whether you, you know, killed or jailed your journalists or, you know, rigged your elections or imprisoned your political dissidents, right?

43:15Sam Harris:And now, as a country, we seem to only care about whether you give our president and his rapacious family a hotel deal in your capital city, right? I mean, or whether you buy their, whether you enrich them directly by buying millions of dollars worth of, or billions of dollars worth of their cryptocurrency. I mean, that's where, it's an extortion racket that we're running on the world stage at the moment.

43:41Kara Swisher:So why aren't people saying things? I mean, both of us are smaller than all those people from a financial point of view. And I have an independent company, you have your own independent. We've, you know, we sort of carved out these podcasts, little islands or whatever, that seem immune at this point. But why haven't others spoken up? What is your sense? They're terrified. They call me. I get a lot of out of going. Good job. Good for you. I was like, yeah, and you. Please step up. Well, I mean, so it's often a story of incentives.

44:12Sam Harris:I mean, so I think there is something perverse around the incentives of running a public company and imagining that your fiduciary duty to shareholders is the kind of a master value, right, that covers every other conceivable sin, right? So you can literally, you know, shake hands with the next Hitler, because that is what the market, you know, your future in the market will require. I'm not saying Trump is Hitler, but I mean, you get my point. It's just a failure mode of capitalism that we have to correct for. And every one of these guys who we know thinks Trump is an imposter, really. I mean, even as a businessman, an imposter, right?

44:54Sam Harris:None of these guys think Trump was even a major real estate developer, you know, when he was a real estate.

44:59Kara Swisher:No, moron is what I hear from a lot. What a moron.

45:01Sam Harris:So they're pretending to lionize him. And again, I mean, some of these guys have$100 billion or more, right? You know, or, you know, I mean,$10 billion should be enough to inoculate you against these fears of being personally ruined by pissing off the president of the United States in our country, right? So this is what we needed. We needed someone like Jeff Bezos or Mark Benioff or any of these guys to say, listen, this is America. I'm not bending the knee to this maniac. I run a very important public company. If he seeks to damage it, everyone in the press is going to notice that and we're going to talk about it and we're going to ruin the political party that put him in power because this is not the kind of country we live in.

45:53Sam Harris:Right. And where where was that guy or gal who's running who's running a public company who's a nerd against personal harm because they, you know, this is still America and they're as wealthy as they could ever need to be. I mean, it's it's crazy making that that we don't have dozens of examples of that.

46:14Kara Swisher:I would agree. So let's get some solutions to finish up right now. Now, some of the biggest proponents of tech regulation are coming from within MAGA. Interesting. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis unveiled the Citizens Bill of Rights for AI. Steve Bannon has said AI is likely the most dangerous technology in the history of mankind. Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has also expressed fears about the expansion of AI with no guardrails. I don't agree with them on most things, and they always end up showing their actual ingredients very quickly. But is that a growing civil war within the populace and tech CEOs?

46:47Kara Swisher:Do you see that playing out and you imagine a scenario where populists actually win and regulate the tech companies?

46:54Sam Harris:Yeah, well, I can imagine if it became, you know, politically dominant, then it would be dominant. I mean, I don't know what the limit of influence is from the oligarchs at this moment. I mean, they don't get everything they want because in some sense they're not aligned. I mean, like, you know, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk can't get precisely what they want if they're competing in the race to space, right? Someone is going to get Trump's favor or not, right?

47:25Kara Swisher:Same thing with these media mergers, yeah.

47:27Sam Harris:Yeah, exactly. The media merger with Netflix now. So it's not – everyone's not aligned. But, yeah, I just – I can imagine that it will take something like a minor catastrophe to get everyone's attention. You know, if we do something with AI that is sufficiently destabilizing to our economy, right, if someone unleashes something that, you know, makes the NASDAQ go dark for a week, right, and no one can figure out, you know, how much money they have. Yeah. Right. I just think that's – something has to wake us up.

48:06Kara Swisher:Yeah, I was just called a non-pay trip by one of them, and I was like, oh, but you're selling chips to China? Okay, got it. Like, I'm not sure what to say. The Trump administration is sticking by these tech oligarchs. So with the help of AIs are David Sachs. I'm not a fan. Trump has promised to sign an executive order soon to bar states from passing their own AI regulations, something the tech leads really want. But a lot of people really don't. The do-whatever-you-want approach to the tech sector is what got us here in the first place, as you just noted.

48:34Sam Harris:So on a point like that, I would just say that there is a version of that that makes sense to me. I mean, I don't think we want 50 different sets of regulations around this kind of technology. I agree. But what it really demands is a sane set of regulations coming from the federal government.

48:50Kara Swisher:Which hasn't ever happened, you know. By the way, the tech leaders hated the Biden administration's push to regulate them. And Dresen called Biden's efforts to regulate crypto, a quote, a terror campaign. A little much, Mark. What would that entail? Because they, I mean, I write the annual story. Once again, we don't have tech regulation of any sort, even the most minor. The previous administration didn't get it right. This administration is letting all hell break loose. A federal system would obviously be best in AI, for example. But it doesn't happen because of the power of the people holding the purse sprangs.

49:24Sam Harris:Well, it also doesn't happen because of the perceived race that is existential against China in particular. Mm-hmm.

50:01Sam Harris:And perhaps, you know, the inadvertent bad outcomes of just the way people can use it. But there's the deeper problem that many people worry about, which is just the existential risk posed by the so-called unaligned AI, right? That we could build something that is super intelligent and becomes actually self-improving and that this technology can fundamentally get away from us, right? And what's truly alarming is that all the people, at least in the States, who are building this tech, I mean, people like Sam Altman, it's not like they think that those existential concerns are irrational. No, in fact, when you ask them, they put the probability of existential collapse at something like 20%.

50:48Sam Harris:They're not saying it's one in a billion, so don't worry about it. They're saying, no, no, this is a completely sane set of concerns. I'm not quite sure how we're going to avoid it. We hope as we walk these final yards into the end zone, we'll figure it out. But none of them think that, I mean, they all acknowledge that they're playing a game of Russian roulette and that there's at least one bullet in the cylinder. And we're just, you know, we're pulling the trigger because we have to, right? We economically have to. We're in a race against China.

51:24Kara Swisher:I called it the Xi or me argument with Mark Zuckerberg when I was interviewing him. And I was like, I don't like you either. But does it require some kind of true populist revolt that's centered on class-based politics, which Scott talks about, even if it has an anti-capitalist undercurrent in many ways? Although I would argue this Trump administration is socialist at this point, given all the things they're doing. What's needed for American democracy to thrive, if not populism? How do you envision citizens wresting power back from authoritarians and tech oligarchs?

51:55Sam Harris:Well, I don't know. I haven't ruled out the possibility that cultural change could surprise us and be sweeping. I mean, for instance, I think that as AI, you know, as the AI slopification of everything continues, we might get to a point where many people, maybe even most people, declare some kind of, you know, epistemological bankruptcy with respect to the internet or with respect to social media. I mean, it's like, if you're looking at a video and your first thought is now always, is this even real?

52:28Kara Swisher:Or this sucks.

52:29Sam Harris:Right. And that just gets locked in, right? It's like, okay, this looks like Vladimir Putin declaring World War III, but who knows if it's even real, right? Strangely, this could force a return, a new return to sort of traditional gatekeeping, right? But we might wake up in a world where all of a sudden you don't believe the video of Putin unless you see it coming from the New York Times or Getty Images or like some official gatekeeper. And this could make social media far less captivating for people. I mean, And one could hope that would happen.

53:07Kara Swisher:Yeah, there was an idea to mark the real stuff, not demark, not mark the fake stuff, which is kind of interesting to think about.

53:14Sam Harris:But, yeah, but, I mean, now there's kind of an arms race between, you know, detecting fakes and producing fakes. And maybe there's an asymmetry there where it's always going to be easier to produce them than to detect them. You know, I don't know. But I just think, you know, I mean, to some degree, we all have to kind of personally work this out with respect to social media. I mean, as you know, I deleted my Twitter account three years ago.

53:35Kara Swisher:I didn't delete it because I thought he'd do something shitty with my account. I just left it there.

53:40Sam Harris:Yeah. So, I mean, it's always humbling to confess that that's like the greatest life hack I've found in the last decade or more. I mean, it was just in terms of improving my life. It's just absolutely enormous. And I think, you know, it's possible that many more people will have a similar epiphany because there is something toxic about our engagement with these tools. I mean, leaving AI aside and its capture of our economy, just having our lives fragmented in this way by this digital bride. You know, I mean, we're just, you know, so much of your sense of what the world is and what you are in the world has been uploaded into this space, which, I mean, honestly, I mean, again, there are exceptions here.

54:32Sam Harris:But it is, it's easy to, you know, it's easy to say Twitter isn't real life if you're me, because, you know, I've taken steps to immunize myself against the pain of it all. But it really isn't real life if you're me. I mean, it's like it's so, it is so amazing how much it doesn't matter what happens on X. You know, even if it's Elon Musk attacking you by name and you're trending that day. Yeah, you know, it really doesn't matter. And so, you know, many people may begin to yearn for a life in the real world, reading real books and having real conversations face to face. And that might be a kind of spiritual awakening for our whole culture.

55:15Sam Harris:I mean, we might use these tools differently in the future.

55:17Kara Swisher:You do see younger people. Both my older sons just don't, what? What are you talking about? You know, they don't care. They use YouTube to watch TV. That's how I would put it. I don't think they use it to be influenced. I think they're just like TV. And it's their version of television, which I watch quite a bit. So this has been a relatively gloomy conversation, but really interesting. But you say you're hopeful. We're in a, quote, emperor's new clothes situation where the truth is obvious, but just going unacknowledged by most people. So what needs to happen to start for the kid to point to the emperor and say, ah, you're naked?

55:54Sam Harris:Yeah, well, the kid is certainly pointing. I mean, he's always pointing. But I mean, maybe as simple as just it no longer being Trump at the center of Trumpism, right? Like when you ask yourself, can J.D. Vance or any other plausible candidate, you know, inherit the mantle of the cult? And it certainly seems plausible that the answer to that is no. That's just for a variety of reasons. You know, the kayfabe of, you know, the professional wrestling, you know, vibe is not going to be sustainable. Right. And we might, you know, suddenly be confronted by a whole culture right of center that pretends never to have been as morally confused as they now are, right?

56:42Sam Harris:Lots of people come shuffling back into normalcy, pretending that they never got caught up in the denialism and the cultishness and the weirdness that is Trumpism. That's totally possible. They'll now suddenly care about, you know, alliances with our Democratic partners in Europe, and they're no longer fans of Putin, and they don't remember that anyone ever was a fan of Putin in the Republican Party. I mean, it's just—all that's possible, you know.

57:12Kara Swisher:Yeah, I don't know what happened. What did I drink last night?

57:15Sam Harris:No, no, I didn't—I wasn't at that conference.

57:18Kara Swisher:Yeah, yeah, yeah. And what are you going to say to them? I mean, oddly enough, Rachel Maddow said the same thing. We're going to have to let them, this is their last chance and they need to start to shift or they have an opportunity.

57:33Sam Harris:We might need something like a truth and reconciliation commission at some level. I mean, you know, for someone, again, for someone like Elon, who's acted like such a maniac, I don't know how you get back into normalcy without some kind of mea culpa. I mean, it's like, what were you thinking during Doge? Yeah, that's not happening. When you were little, I mean, like, you know, what were you thinking when you were bringing back neo-Nazis and conspiracists with great fanfare onto X at a moment when we were watching a global eruption of anti-Semitism, the likes of which we hadn't seen since the Holocaust?

58:13Sam Harris:and just, and meanwhile, you know, all in the name of free speech absolutism, but also then just kicking off journalists who you didn't happen to like and complying with the demands of authoritarians the world over, suppressing the speech of political dissidents in, you know, countries like Turkey, right? I mean, just like, who the hell did you become and how can you pretend to now be normal?

58:37Kara Swisher:Look, you're asking for a Scrooge moment. He wakes up Christmas morning and says, boy, buy me the turkey.

58:43Sam Harris:There'll have to be many Scrooge moments. Right.

58:45Kara Swisher:But what would you say if he called you and said, I am so sorry. I can't believe I attacked you. And he does attack you. He attacks me much less than you. I wouldn't even know if he's been attacking me, honestly. But I was the face of evil, I think.

58:58Sam Harris:Yeah. But are you pure evil? The last thing he said about me on Twitter was that I am pure evil. That's his favorite. So I have that over you, I think.

59:05Kara Swisher:I believe. I have art of evil. I don't remember.

59:06Sam Harris:I would have. Whatever. You have a heart filled with hate. Hey, argue with hate. That's right. I'm sorry. That's correct.

59:13Kara Swisher:What would you say? He called you and said, okay, I'm really sorry. I'm going to do whatever it takes to have reconciliation and truth. I mean, so that's an interesting question about essentially the physics of apology, right?

59:28Sam Harris:Like what constitutes an acceptable apology? And for me, it really, it requires that the person sketch some rational path from where they were to where they say they now are, right? So it's like, how is it that you think better of the things you did? And how are you now the person who views those things the way I view them? And so I'm willing to, I mean, apology and forgiveness, I mean, this is some of the best software we've got, right? I mean, like the capacity to forgive someone, I mean, it's absolutely indispensable, not just psychologically, but civilizational. And we celebrate, you know, people being, having changes of heart and being forgiven at the deepest level.

1:00:20Sam Harris:I mean, you know, like, but even just like, you know, a rapist or a murderer. I mean, someone, literally, you can get someone coming out of prison who really did commit the murders for which they were sent to prison. And now, you know, whether in a Christian context or just a secular context, you know, we acknowledge that people can apologize and be different people. So, but there has to be some intelligible path from there to here. And in the absence of that, it just seems like a bad faith maneuver. And so, I have no idea how I would respond unless I was in the situation.

1:00:58Kara Swisher:Yeah, I probably wouldn't let it back.

1:00:59Sam Harris:But it's not going to happen. I'm good for banning. I know it's not going to happen. I'm certainly not waiting for it.

1:01:04Kara Swisher:Certain people banish it, I say. Banish it without an E. Banish it. You are banish it. I don't think that's the worst thing society's ever done for certain people, but we'll see.

1:01:13Sam Harris:Life is too short, Kara.

1:01:14Kara Swisher:I understand that, but it's not that short, let me just say. Anyway, I really appreciate it.

1:01:19Sam Harris:It's just long enough for it to matter.

1:01:21Kara Swisher:Just long enough. Just long enough. Anyway, I really appreciate it, Sam. What an interesting, and we can whinge about things we disagree with later, but this was really smart, and I appreciate your thoughts on it.

1:01:32Sam Harris:Always happy to do it.

1:01:38Kara Swisher:Today's show was produced by Christian Castor-Russell, Michelle Alloy, Megan Burney, and Kaylin Lynch. Nishat Kerwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Bradley Sylvester. Our engineers are Fernando Arruda and Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following this show, you know the emperor has no clothes, and yuck when I think about it. If not, you're drowning in conspiracy porn. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On With Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On With Kara Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us.

1:02:14Kara Swisher:We'll be back on Thursday with more.