Sam Harris on The Democrats’ Far-Left Problem

19:07Scott Galloway:I am sympathetic, however, to the argument that, first off, I never underestimate the Democrats' ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. I was feeling so good about these elections, and I thought, oh shit. Then I saw Chevalier, and I'm like, she is about to become the poster child for Republicans. And when Mondani, I don't know if you heard this, he released a list of 950 ,000 names or addresses that were subject to attacks. I want to be clear, that was public information, but when you put it out and imply these people have done something wrong and you already have their tax, you know, you already have their tax filings and you could just tax them.

19:44Scott Galloway:I'm in, I'm actually in favor of the pied-a-terre tax. An absentee wealthy owner, in my view, should be subsidizing the property taxes of a nurse working at NYU Langone that has to spend 40 % of her income on rent. I was, I'm in favor of the tax. it's going to cost me a lot of money. I get it. But to release addresses, it feels like in some, implying you've done something wrong. That, oh, I'm going to dox. They have done something wrong and I want everyone to know who they are. This feels like just straight up doxing to me. Do I have this wrong?

20:30Sam Harris:Oh, no, it's dangerous. I mean, you're having CEOs assassinated at dawn on the streets of Manhattan, right? That's the context. This is, I mean, it's just deeply unethical. But again, these people are fanatics and they're not hiding their fanaticism. I mean, Momdani's smile is doing 90 % of the work. He is a fanatic. He's an ideologue. The DSA platform is insane. Wealth is evil, right? The accumulation of wealth is evil. Private property is evil, right? So forget about a pied-a-terre tax. Private property is something they want abolished. It's just not, you know, you can get stoned and not even understand how anyone could entertain these ideas in college.

21:19Sam Harris:I mean, it's just, this is, it's absolute madness. And again, not concealed. Everyone should go to, you know, you should drop the DSA website into the show notes, right? So people can just read the platform for themselves. You know, this is analogous to, I mean, it's understandable that some people don't immediately see what's dangerous about doxing. You and I are semi-public figures who occasionally receive death threats. And so doxing is a real issue. And when Mamdani stands in front of Ken Griffin's building and points it out as the signature example of everything that's wrong in our society at this moment, that a man could own, I think, a$238 million apartment.

22:08Sam Harris:Whatever you think about wealth inequality, that is dangerous. And the stuff that was happening, this goes back all the way to when, I forget the name of the group, but when people were, you probably remember this, there was a group that was hitting some prominent people in the face with pies, right? They would have like a pie of whipped cream and they did it to Bill Gates, I think, and they did it to a few other people. And this gets lots of laughs for people who are not thinking about it. But what that does is show how easy it is for anyone to kill someone in public, no matter how much security they have.

22:44So it's a mock assassination.

22:49Sam Harris:It's like, I could touch you. Watch this. And it is from the mayor of New York to be doing this to the richest people in New York. I mean, that is it's forget about the morality of it. I mean, just if you just want to safeguard the economic economic future of the city, why would you do that?

23:12Scott Galloway:Yeah, I think he's turned actually what I think is is good tax policy into a wanted poster in what it's so self-defeating. because I'm a believer that you can't continue to have$7 trillion in expenditures on$5 trillion in receipts. And do we need to raise taxes or cut spending? The answer is yes. But what Mondani has done is just made it more difficult to have more progressive tax policies locally and nationally because the Republicans will frame this as, see, they're not trying to be responsible. They see taxation as persecution. And he's just feeding into their talking points. And what I find generally speaking, and I see this a lot in England, is that people would rather like tickle the censors of upper middle class educated voters and reduce the tax base such that they can in fact afford the policies that they advocate for.

24:06Scott Galloway:Okay, one of the distinguishing features that I think is a real positive between America and Europe, I think Europe has basically decided with some of their economic policies that we'd rather be worse off as a whole, but feel more equal. And the U.S. has always said we're comfortable with a certain level of inequality as long as we're better off as a whole. Now, having said that, I think that's no longer the truth. I think that the truth, that compact has been broken, that the massive income inequality is now beginning to come at the cost of the entire economy and the lower middle-class households.

24:36But this feels oddly, I don't know, oddly like

24:41Scott Galloway:short-term, like, let's get a sugar high and then reduce the economic growth such that we can't afford to pay for SNAP and the things that we're advocates for. Do you worry, though, I am sympathetic to the argument that progressives, that we're spending too much time fighting each other, and it's taking away our ammunition and our firepower from the corruption, the weirdness, the anti-science of the left, that as Democrats, we're very good. And you've said this, I parroted this from you, that, OK, you're my ally. We're in the trenches together, but you're holding the gun, Ron. So I'm going to execute you at dawn.

25:20Scott Galloway:Do you worry that we're going to spend so much time doing the Republicans' work, being critical of one another, that we're kind of playing into their hands?

25:28Sam Harris:Well, I worry that framing it that way will cause people to hesitate to disavow the lunatics on the far left. I mean, it's just, it should be, we should be able to make very short work of the DSA, right? Just, there's no reason to talk to them. They should not be in the conversation, right? I mean, that's like, if we can't figure that out, it's just, there's no, there's no way we're going to win in 2028. I mean, it could be against J.D. Vance. It could be against Rubio. That would even be harder. You know, it could be against Don Jr. There's no way this country is going to elect communists, right, or communist adjacent people at the national level.

26:08Sam Harris:And, I mean, unfortunately, there are points of contact between the radicalism of the DSA and far more mainstream figures or seemingly mainstream figures, people like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. I mean, they have both said that it's, in so many words, it's impossible to become a billionaire ethically, right? All billionaires have, in some sense, committed a crime, right? They're guilty of fraud. They're guilty of treating people terribly. You know, try to run that analysis on Taylor Swift. Right. I mean, how does that work? Yeah. And so it's just it's just not it's the wrong center of gravity for a truly ethical and and and accurate concern around wealth inequality.

27:02Sam Harris:I mean, I think you and I are both as concerned about wealth inequality as almost anyone, but I think it's a real issue. I think it's the potentially society-shattering issue once AI gets fully rolled out in all the ways that it seems destined to be. we have to get our arms around wealth inequality, but to demonize wealth, right? And wealth creation and to not see that if you're adding enough value to people's lives at scale, it is possible in the current economy to get fabulously wealthy, right? In ways that are not unethical, right? People are just telling you that they love your work and they're going to give you another$5 and all of a sudden you're a billionaire, that person should not be burned as a witch.

27:52Sam Harris:And if you go far enough left and you don't have to go too far left, people can't figure that out.

27:58Scott Galloway:I just, I can't help. I feel as if we've made our bed here though, Sam. I feel as if the people of my generation have been practicing not capitalism, but cronyism and young people see all of this prosperity, which was supposedly capitalism that they were supposed to participate in. We privatized the gains on the way up. We socialized the losses on the way down to bailouts. We've spent an incremental$700 billion a year on seniors, an incremental$20 billion on children. Young families are struggling, and yet every day they get vomited on their phone, 110 reminders that they're mimetically not shaping up or relatively speaking to the other people.

28:39Scott Galloway:And what do you know, young people are conflating capitalism with cronyism. It feels like we had this coming in that I'm sympathetic to the fact that this notion of capitalism that people of our generation massively benefited from, they did not. And we haven't outlined a true vision. And the Democrats, too. The Democrats have been overrun. You know, taxes went down during Biden. The last 40 years, unprecedented prosperity, but the average 30-year-old is 24 % less wealthy. The average 70-year-old is seven. I mean, I feel as if we've had this coming. And quite frankly, a lot of this is our own fault because we're clinging to something that just didn't work for them.

29:25Scott Galloway:And now we're trying to dig our way out of a hole that we dug. I share your concern, but I feel like, quite frankly, the chickens have come home to roost. We liked capitalism as long as it was—

29:41Sam Harris:Let's be honest about where the biggest chickens are. I mean, now we just learned that you can pay—you or anyone like you could pay$100 ,000 a month to Trump to get early access to his Truth Social post to front-run the market. I mean, if that isn't inside a train date, I don't know what is, but apparently it's legal or it's legal enough for Trump to put a cash register on it, at least for this week. I mean, so the level of corruption in Trumpistan is something we have never seen in American history. I mean, it's like you and I could spend the rest of this hour just listing the things he's done to enrich himself by trading away the policies and institutions and reputation of our country on the world stage.

30:28Sam Harris:I mean, just the tariff policy that is everything. And he's made, you know, he and his family have made now billions of dollars in the last 12 months doing that. But it's, yes, yes, there's both sides to this story, too. I mean, I think Nancy Pelosi is one of the great stock traders of all time. So that's that.

30:48Scott Galloway:600 percent versus Buffett at 300 percent or S &P at 200 percent.

30:53Sam Harris:So the scale, but the scale matters. Right. And we have a we have to keep that in perspective. And we also have to recognize that for all the wealthy people being asked to pay more taxes, there's an understandable cynicism you meet first, which is, what is the government going to do? Show me the success story where giving the government more money has really worked in the way that you're hoping. And if you look at some of the wealthy, I mean, if you look at California and you look at the level of mismanagement here, it is easy to be cynical about the simply dumping more money into the machine of governance because the governance has been so bad.

31:42Um,

31:44Sam Harris:we, so we need, you know, of course, you know, in our brains, that's not an argument against taxation. That's an argument for good governance, right? We need competent people and good policies and we need to find bad incentives wherever they exist and root them out. And yeah, so if the teachers union is stifling our ability to ever fire a teacher so as to improve the quality of the schools, well, then that's something that has to be dealt with, right? And you need Democrats who are willing to go against the teachers union in that case. So we've got this system of incentives. And in particular, on the Democratic side, we have this coalitional structure to all our politics that is a real albatross.

32:27I mean, it's just not it makes it very hard to be honest about what's going to work and

32:32Sam Harris:to cut dead weight. So we have to, you know, we have a lot to sort out. But we are up against the most corrupt and self-dealing bunch of people we have ever seen. And that is worth demonizing and responding to. And we just can't, you know, but it's simply crazy to be demonizing wealth itself or financial success itself in principle as somehow, and make that a kind of load-bearing plank of democratic policy. We'll be right back after a quick break.

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36:40Scott Galloway:I want to talk a little bit about attention because I think of you as someone who focuses a lot on it and that is where we spend our attention and how it impacts our well-being and our sense of peace and I take August off and one of the things I try to do is I try to stay off of social media and I try to, I don't know, I call it almost like a 30-day really bad version of meditation. And I'm terrible at meditation. I've never given it much thought. You're obviously a real thought leader around meditation and have an app, a successful app, helping people embrace it and use it, incorporate it in a healthy way into their lives.

37:25Scott Galloway:When I think of meditation, I think of, okay, how do I be attentive to as little as possible as a means of almost like a disposal or a reset? And I might be thinking about it incorrectly. But how do you think about attention, the importance of a rinse cycle, and what's happening now with our attention? I'm addicted to my phone and I constantly want to pick it up and check my stocks or tweets or not tweets threads or see the latest news or news alerts or who's texted me a story or whatever it is. Talk a little bit about the attention economy. What you see is are the threats to our attention and where meditation and an attention reset, kind of where the Venn overlap is there.

38:20Sam Harris:Well, so the first thing to acknowledge is that all we really have is our attention. The quality of our life really is a story of what we're paying attention to and what we can notice. The quality of our attention and where it is aimed. I mean, that's even true more than of time. I mean, most people think that the time is the one non-renewable resource. And, you know, that's true. You just can't get this hour back. But the quality of the hour is dictated by what you're paying attention to. We all know what it's like to safeguard our time and then to somehow squander it, right? You set aside an hour to just have, you know, quote, quality time with your kids.

39:04Sam Harris:but then you've fucked it up by being on your phone or, or, or saying something petty or, you know, something went, you know, off kilter and it wasn't what you hoped it would be. And yet you still spent the time to, to have that mediocre experience. Um, attention really is the whole story and you are paying attention to something every moment of the day, right? The moment you wake up, your, your attention is seized by something. And you go from moment to moment throughout your life until you struggle to fall asleep again each night. And our attention is being, you know, this is an ancient problem.

39:46Sam Harris:And so when you talk about meditation, some of the best instruction in meditation came 2 ,500 years ago from the Buddha in India, 500 BC. and that was obviously a world in which there were no devices, you know, vying for our, you know, in competition with our natural ability to be distracted by the things we want and the things we don't want and the things we're afraid of and the things we regret. And so we're living in a, in a much more highly weaponized environment where this, you know, the smartphone in our pocket has canceled the very possibility of boredom, right? It used to be that you could get bored and you could become interested in that fact, right?

40:29Sam Harris:You're sitting in a waiting room, the doctor's taking an hour to see you and there's no magazines worth reading and you're just left with your thoughts. And you might have noticed in that situation that your mind is not at rest, it's not at ease. You're just, you're actually not comfortable in your own skin. You're looking, you're casting about trying to find something worth paying attention to and you're uncomfortable. Very few of us have that experience anymore because we can always relieve boredom by watching something or reading something or listening to something. And, you know, in some ways, that's a good thing.

41:03Sam Harris:I mean, I'm not, you know, I'm not really just I'm not advocating boredom in principle as a as a good experience. But what it what it used to allow many of us to discover is that there's something on the other side of boredom. Right. And and boredom really is an illusion. I mean, boredom really is just lack of attention. I mean, when you go on a meditation retreat and do nothing but meditate, you're in silence and you're doing nothing but pay attention to your moment-to-moment experience. You're not reading. You're not writing. You're not watching anything. Obviously, you're not having conversations with people.

41:36Sam Harris:You just are noticing sights and sounds and sensations moment by moment and the arising of each subsequent thought. When you just become the witness of your experience in that way, that is meditation. And the moment you can actually do it, the moment you actually build a little bit of concentration in that direction, you discover that boredom is a total illusion. Boredom is just an inability to pay attention. And if the breath can become, you know, just the feeling of breathing can become absolutely captivating, which it can, given sufficient concentration, then nothing in principle is boring, right?

42:17Sam Harris:But very few of us are ever moved to discover that now, and especially with a short-form video, you can just endlessly scroll your life away and get this dopaminergic relief from your general incapacity to just be comfortable in the privacy of your own mind. And, and, um, meditation really is the antidote to that, you know, and it's, I mean, the, the, the place to see it really is like when you wake up in the middle of the night, you know, it's three in the morning and you're, you're now waiting to go back to sleep. I mean, just, just, you know, who is it who wakes up there, right? How wracked are you by, by unpleasant life thoughts?

42:59Sam Harris:And, and, and, and how, how do you deal with those thoughts? I mean, a thought of, concern about whether you're a good enough spouse or parent or just what sort of rabbit holes can you get into at three or four in the morning? And just how fully have you made your own mind your friend in those moments? Or how fully have you failed to do that? I mean, most people's minds are sufficiently out of control that it's really analogous to having some lunatic kick down the front door of your house and, you know, every morning, the moment you wake up and just follow you from room to room talking to you and you can never get away from this person, right?

43:38Sam Harris:You're, you're just thinking, thinking, thinking every moment of the day and telling yourself the same stories over and over again. And for some reason you never get bored. I mean, you can perseverate on the same set of thoughts a hundred times. If you told your best friend those thoughts three times in a row, they would, they would suggest you consult a neurologist because you're repeating yourself, but you'll repeat yourself to yourself endlessly in the privacy of your mind. And people think this is normal, but I mean, it's all too normal in the sense that virtually everyone does it, but it's not normal in the sense of being good or compatible with real happiness.

44:16Sam Harris:And so meditation is just, in the simplest way to think about it, it is the ability to notice in each moment what you're actually noticing without being distracted by thought. I mean, you're just actually making clear contact with your life, including thoughts. It's not a matter of getting rid of thoughts, but it's a matter of noticing thoughts once they've arisen in your mind. And that's a very rare situation. What happens for most people is a thought arises and it sneaks up on us and it just feels like what you are. You know, it's like the voice in your head feels like yourself. Whereas there's a, in reality, there's a tremendous amount of space around it.

45:00Sam Harris:It's just a piece of language. It's just a bit of imagery. It's a little bit like a dream. It's like a waking daydream. And it's not, it's not yourself, right? It's part of the contents of consciousness and you can keep dropping back and just noticing that. And that's where the real relief that is often promised in meditation is to be found. Something you said that was actually very

45:24Scott Galloway:soothing for me was you said, think about when you wake up from a nightmare, you're convinced that actually happened, right? That you showed up, you showed up naked to your cost accounting midterm in business school, which is something I have over and over. As one does, yeah. Yeah. Or there's someone chasing you or someone you love is in trouble and you just can't seem to figure out a way to help them. And you wake up and you know it was a dream, but you're just still sweating. Your mind plays tricks on you. And that was very helpful for me to realize that when I'm really anxious, okay, this might, maybe there's cause for me to be anxious, but also maybe there's, again, as you said, that person is just haunting me and running around and convincing me of things that aren't as bad as they're telling me they are.

46:11Scott Galloway:I want to outline a scenario and get your advice. on how to be everyone. I think the word presence is overused. Like be more present. Yeah, I get it. I'd like to be more present. I'm walking with my son to dinner last night and I'm super excited this summer, taking a ton of time just to hang out with my boys. And he's like, who are you talking to? And I've now become my father where I start making hand motions.

46:36Sam Harris:You're actually vocalizing your thoughts?

46:37Scott Galloway:Yeah, I'm role-playing out loud. I'm in a conversation with someone at work usually and I'm actually using hand motions and talking. And, you know, which I think if I were a female in Salem, I probably would, and I had enemies, they would have said I was a witch. But my 15-year-old son goes, who are you talking to? What are you saying? And I get angry at myself that I'm not in the moment. I don't have presence. And other than just saying, be in the moment and be more present, are there hacks or practices that can help someone, a dad in moments where he has the opportunity to like, and I treasure those moments.

47:16Scott Galloway:I look forward to just hanging out. I, you know, we went to this, you know, this place called Jing last night. My son is the greatest dinner date in the world. He's curious. He likes food. And I get so angry that any portion of that, I just start to go to a weird place or I'm not in the moment. Are there hacks or exercises to get better at presence?

47:36Sam Harris:Yeah, well, meditation, specifically mindfulness, is that hack, right? And again, it's just, it's noticing thought as thought. It's noticing that you're talking to yourself. You're talking to someone who isn't there, right? I mean, if you're the one thinking the thought and you're the one hearing the thought, why do you have to say it in the first place? I mean, it's a very strange structure to this, where the I is talking to the me. And it is psychotic, you know, in a way. I mean, to verbalize it, if you were verbalizing it all the time, you know, if the thoughts you were thinking were always coming out your mouth and you're having a conversation with someone who isn't there, you know, that's the litmus test for being crazy, right?

48:18Sam Harris:I mean, the difference between crazy people and sane people, at least one, you know, one difference is we sane people, at least most of the time, know enough to keep our mouths shut, right? But we're still having the conversation and not knowing it. And it's the conversation that's dictating how we feels. Like you're, a thought about your mother is not your mother. And yet you're, you're, you're acting in that moment as though you don't know the difference. And again, it is very much analogous to being asleep and dreaming without knowing that you're dreaming. We all know our minds have this capacity to go, you close your eyes, you fall asleep by whatever method you found that works.

48:59Sam Harris:And, um, the next thing that happens or the next part of the movie of your next scene that dawns in your conscious life has nothing to do with you being in bed, right? You're, you know, you're on a beach somewhere, or you're having a fight in a parking lot, or you're, you know, your wife just broke up with you or, and your brain is, is, is so, um, unable to do the, the, the, the tiny bit, the tiniest bit of reality testing that would be required to notice this lack of continuity, you know, psychological continuity, right? The impossible has just happened. You got, you got into bed and you wound up in another country, right?

49:43Sam Harris:The laws of physics have been suspended for your benefit and you don't. And so the most surprising things about dreams is that we're not, is our lack of surprise when they arise. again, there's an exception with lucid dreams where you actually know you're dreaming and that's all of that's very interesting. But for the most part, most people's dreams are not lucid. Well, thinking without knowing your thinking in the waking state, right? Having an argument with someone who isn't there, you know, just rehearsing the argument you had yesterday with a colleague or, you know, an enemy or anticipating this thing that you're anxious about a week from now, but you're now getting anxious now because you're thinking about it without knowing that you're thinking about it.

50:24Sam Harris:This very much, I mean, this is also neurologically true to say, it has a lot in common with dreaming in the sleeping state and not knowing that you're dreaming, right? There's a kind of, you know, phantasmagoria that comes over you. You're in this sort of visionary state and you're not, and you're sort of decoupled from your immediate environment. And you could be so decoupled that you might even, as in the case you just described, start talking to someone who isn't there, even in the presence of somebody who is there, in this case, your son, right?

50:58Sam Harris:So yes, I mean, it's a very simple, it's not easy, but it's a very simple remedy for this, which is to pay closer attention. And the training by which you would get better at paying closer attention is mindfulness training, right? And it's just very systematically noticing. I mean, people, you tend to start with the breath in sitting meditation, just because the breath is always there and it's very easy to notice. But very quickly, you open your awareness to everything. It doesn't exclude anything, even thoughts. And you just systematically notice what's appearing in each moment. And every time you get lost in thought, you bring your attention back to to what is sound, sensations, or even thoughts themselves.

51:42Sam Harris:But the crucial thing to notice is that, you know, recrimination and, you know, hating yourself and disappointment and all of that's just more thinking. You know, you're, again, you're, you're just launched back into a conversation with yourself. Like, you know, so here's what that conversation sounds like. God, I just fucked it up again. I can't believe it. We were, we were going to dinner and, you know, I took the time and, but like, who are you talking to? You're, you're, you're, you're now, again, you're, you can hear the, the emotional valence of those kinds of thoughts. You're, you know, now you're, you know, what's the path to self-hatred?

52:16Sam Harris:Well, it's to be thinking self-hating thoughts, you know, castigating yourself to yourself without noticing it. It's a, it's the waking dream of that conversation. Again, to break that spell, it just requires more precise attention. And it is quite remarkable that the spell can be broken every bit as decisively as waking up from a dream. And then the dream logic no longer applies. I mean, if you're having a fight in a parking lot with some psychopath and then you wake up and you find yourself in bed, you know, there's no parking lot, there's no psychopath. There's nothing. That transition is total.

53:03Sam Harris:Right. And no part of it entails you having to figure out how to, you know, punch the guy in the face better. Right. Or, you know, you know, you get better at jujitsu, you know, by the by the dream logic, you know, you know, all of that has evaporated. And it's true to in waking life. I mean, you can be I'm not saying that thought there's never anything to worry about or never anything worth thinking about. but 99 % of our worry is wasted, right? I mean, the initial signal of fear or anger or whatever the negatively valenced emotion is, grief, right? That's information about your life or about your situation in the world.

53:49Sam Harris:But in the next moment, those states of mind are almost never valuable, right? I mean, the anger is almost never the state you want to be in to solve the problem that has made you angry, right? So anger is, anger, anger is useful for like five seconds. And then you want to be level-headed and figure out what, what, if anything is worth doing. And so it is with fear. You know, it's like you, you get some scary diagnosis and now you're having this adventure of, of, you know, calling doctors and scheduling medical tests, how much fear do you have to feel to do all of those things over the course of the next 10 days?

54:29Sam Harris:While waiting for results of an MRI, you got an MRI on Friday, and for some reason, we still live in a society where you can't get results until Monday because Saturday and Sunday are magic days where no one can do anything. This will be one thing the robots hopefully will help help us with. Um, you have to wait 72 hours to find out what's, you know, in your brain or body. Um, how anxious do you have to be over the course of those 72 hours? How many of those moments of, of adrenaline are wasted? All of them. Right. I mean, there's like you, you, you just needed enough adrenaline to go get the scan in the first place.

55:07Sam Harris:And then you, then you want to be as calm and honestly is filled with gratitude for the life you've already lived as you can be in the meantime.

55:23Scott Galloway:We'll be right back.

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58:46Sam Harris:That's O-D-O-O dot com.

58:56Sam Harris:We're back with more from Sam Harris.

58:59Scott Galloway:So just in our remaining nine minutes here, I want to go to a couple of the audience questions. So Anonymous asks, Scott, you're a self-described AI optimist. Sam seems more skeptical of the future. Sam, you've talked to both optimists and doomsayers. Where do you land on AI?

59:16Sam Harris:Well, I'm very worried that we are. We're in precisely the circumstance that many of us foresaw and have been worrying about for for more than a decade, wherein we can't. The incentives are such that we can't actually build it in a way that makes it likely we're going to not create some kind of doomsday failure mode for ourselves. I mean, we're in an arms race condition, right? And it's an arms race in multiple directions. It's an arms race for all these companies against one another domestically, and it's an arms race among nations, right? So we're racing China, but obviously Anthropic is racing OpenAI.

1:00:11Sam Harris:And under those conditions, we can't take the care I think we must take to be sure that we're not deploying something that could get away from us. Right. I mean, so this is the issue. This goes falls under the concern of the so-called alignment problem. Right. Once we build super intelligent AI, you know, AI that is more, I mean, arguably in many ways we've already built it. The LLMs we have are superhuman in so many respects, right? I mean, they fail in certain ways that are not human and are subhuman, but for the most part, they're superhuman already. What they're not currently doing is improving themselves by themselves autonomously, so called recursive self-improvement.

1:01:10Sam Harris:Once we have AI that is building the next generation of AI so as to be better and better and better, and we have something like an intelligence explosion, then the question is, have we engineered that explosion in a way that can be durably aligned with our survival, to say nothing of our best interests? and um it's there's a real concern that that problem might not even be solvable right i mean like there are not many examples it's something that jeffrey hinton one of the uh the patriarchs of this technology has been saying so it's not many examples of of a less intelligent species living in proximity to a more intelligent species and managing to control it right and um we are building something, we're building, we're building alien minds with which we will be in relationship.

1:02:00Right.

1:02:01Sam Harris:And if you're not envisioning that, if you think, oh no, they're not, it's not really a relationship. We can just turn them off whenever we want. Well, then you're not really envisioning true general intelligence. Uh, and, um, we're, I just, we're, we're building, we're building things that are going to be more powerful than we are. And we're, we will have to be living, uh, with them. And, um, it's, you know, it's, it's a system. It's not, you know, it's not just, it would be very clear if we're just talking about humanoid robots. Uh, but it's more than that. It's, it'll be integrated with everything.

1:02:39And, um, yeah, if it's not aligned,

1:02:44Sam Harris:uh, it's not, um, I mean, the, the, the general heuristic here, which worries many of us is that there has to be more ways to build unaligned superhuman AI than aligned superhuman AI, right? In the space of all possible super intelligences, one would expect that more of them than not would be less than perfectly aligned with our well-being across an indefinite future, that we know how to build these machines in ways where they're durably aligned with our interests, which is to say that let's say their reward function is that what they care about most is to better and better approximate what we want out of life, right?

1:03:30Sam Harris:I mean, they're perpetually uncertain as to how good life could be for us. And all they care about is making it better and better for us. And they're constantly open to dialogue about how to refine that project. As far as I know, no one knows how to do that.

1:03:46Scott Galloway:So just in the last couple of minutes here, I want to return to attention. So a late 20s Sam Harris, just have your PhD, just starting out, trying to find, you know, navigate the world, your place in it, find a way to be economically viable, find a mate. And think of attention as a capital that you allocate. Now think of the Gen X Sam who's got, you know, a great partnership, great kids. some economic success relevance, how has your allocation of your attention capital shifted? Like, what are you more, what is the greatest difference in the way you allocate your attention capital now versus a young Sam Harris?

1:04:30Sam Harris:Well, unfortunately, I'm not the greatest test case of this because, you know, in my 20s, I spent a lot of time focused on these, you know, deeper questions, however impractical. I spent, you know, well over a year on silent meditation retreats in my 20s. And I mean, I got my training kind of early on there before I built any kind of business or became a public figure or, you know, wrote any of my books. And so my, you know, it's, it's, I'm not the typical case, but I mean, the difference for me that I think is generic is that, you know, the, the, the truth of impermanence needs to become more and more salient as you get older.

1:05:18Sam Harris:I mean, it's not, it's, you know, it was salient for me pretty early in life, but, um, many of us, most, at least most of the time act like we have all the time in the world, right? It doesn't really matter how much time we waste. And there's just, there's always another day on the calendar that we can, uh, try to make the most of, and then squander a lot of it on our phones. Um, I do think it's worth, uh, you know, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and engaging, you know, a little more executive control over this whole project and ask yourself kind of in the aggregate, how you really want to live, right?

1:06:02Sam Harris:I mean, just what, what is, what, what matters to you and, and what is truly rewarding and what, what will allow you to get to the end of each day and each year and at the end of your life without regret. And, um, I mean, for me that, I mean, the, the, the real recipe is, you know, paradoxically, it's not worrying about the future. It's not worrying about the past. It's not, uh, being, uh, ambitious in all the usual ways. I mean, seeking happiness in all the usual ways. It's actually developing a capacity to be more and more present so that you, you kind of equalize your moments. Whereas like, even if you're just, you know, stuck in traffic, you can locate a depth of wellbeing that makes that not a problem.

1:06:48Sam Harris:Right. I mean, you're, you're, you're, the lesson of life, as far as I can tell, is that you can't become happy. You can only be happy. I mean, that's really, it's like, that, that is the, the structure of our psychology that, that goes unacknowledged for most of our lives. We live most of our lives thinking we can become happy. All we have, what we have to do is we have to get all the things and all the accolades and all the pieces in place such that we have a good enough story and good enough reasons to finally be happy. But for the most part, that's a mirage, right? And you need only look at all the super successful people who are obviously unhappy to be convinced of that, right?

1:07:32Sam Harris:I mean, there are successful people who are, and I don't mean just rich, I mean, you know, I don't mean just random billionaires who made their money in some terribly boring way or, you know, lottery winners. I mean, people who got, who are, who are incredibly creative and talented and had all their talents actualized and, and rewarded. And I mean, think of someone like, you know, Prince or Picasso or, or Steve Jobs, right? These guys were, were effectively geniuses. they got everything, you know, they could want, you know, they, they, they dug one, one well as deep as they could dig it and the world loved them for it.

1:08:11Sam Harris:And they were obviously unhappy people, right? I mean, there's, you know, to one or another degree, they were, they were schmucks. And so there's something more, something more is required. And that more is finding a way to actually fall into the well of the present moment more and more such that you can actually just love people and love your life and recognize how beautiful life is, even in its ordinary moments, right? And thought is not good enough for that project. You know, you're never going to have good enough thoughts about the past or the future to allow you to really live that way. And so it is, again, it does come back to this question of attention.

1:08:56Sam Harris:But riding on top of that, you know, I think you want to live an ethical and gratitude-filled life, right? You don't want to be, don't be Elon Musk, right? Don't be somebody who, you know, lies, you know, in Trumpian fashion about everything and demonizes everyone in sight and takes no responsibility for the harms he causes and, you know, worries about things like, you know, white genocide and signal boosts Nazis on the social media platform that he owns. And I mean, like the guy's a total, he's a first trillionaire, uh, and now first former trillionaire, but he's a total maniac, right? I mean, it's like that, that's what it looks like to have a mind that's out of control, right?

1:09:39Sam Harris:That's, that's what's being showcased for the entire world. Um, that's, there's nothing to emulate there as much as you might admire the fact that he can land a rocket on a, on a barge. That's a wonderful thing. But at what point, where is it written that you have to be an unhappy asshole to land a rocket on a barge? I don't think that's the case. Um, and so we should be drawing the right lessons from all of this, which is, um, you know, we need successful people who recognize that in their success, they really want other people to succeed too. Right. And there's a social fabric that they're part of that they didn't make.

1:10:15Sam Harris:And that's, that fabric can unravel. And, uh, when I look at the heights of our, certainly the world in which you spend a lot of time, you know, in and thinking about, you know, the heights of entrepreneurship and business. I'm not seeing many examples of truly ethical people who are modeling, you know, a real commitment to being a good citizen and a good steward of the future or anything much else that's worth caring about. I mean, there's kind of a rapacious feeding of the trough now and a shattering of our political lives. And we have to pull back from this brink because it's getting weird out there.

1:10:55Scott Galloway:Sam Harris is a neuroscientist and the host of the Making Sense podcast. I want to thank everyone for tuning in, for joining us. Also, if you want to find more of Sam's work, just check out his sub stack. And if you'd like to join future live streams, subscribe to Prop2Plus at prop2media.com. Sam, anecdote, I had lunch with a guy named Jay Suris, I believe his name is. He's the vice chair of UTA and on the Board of Regents for UC, and your name came up. And he said, oh, I went to high school with Sam. And I'm like, really? What was Sam like in high school? And he's like, I only knew him by reputation, but everyone in our high school that didn't agree on anything all agreed he was the smartest person in our high school.

1:11:37Scott Galloway:So you were developing - I don't know if that's true,

1:11:38Sam Harris:but Jay was ahead of me. He was a year ahead of me. So yeah. Well, it's high praise though.

1:11:43Scott Galloway:He said, the only thing we knew about Sam at that moment when he was like 16 was he was the smartest guy in our high school. Anyway, Sam, always enjoy the conversation. Appreciate your wisdom and friendship. And just quite frankly, you have taken so much shit online. I know it's cost you a little bit economically. I know it's cost you some clout. And I take inspiration from you because Honey Badger don't give a shit. I really do think you have a moral compass and you're willing to take the bullets as long as you think you're, you know, saying what you believe.

1:12:15Sam Harris:Getting off social media is the life hack that I recommend there. Tell me about it, brother. You don't even see it. I don't even know what shit you're talking about at this point. It's quite amazing.

1:12:26Scott Galloway:Karras Fisher sent me this thing saying, a guy who came in third place for the L.A. Moral race is shitposting me on Twitter. And I'm like, I'll just take it as a badge of honor. I don't even want to go on. I don't even want to see it. Anyways, have a great rest of the week, Sam. Yeah, you too, man. And thanks, everybody. Thanks for tuning in.

1:12:45Scott Galloway:This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez and Laura Janair. Cami Reek is our social producer. Bianca Rosario Ramirez is our video editor. And Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the PropG pod from PropG Media.

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