← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
The Border, DEI, Trump, Islam, BLM & the Misinterpretation of Data | Sam Harris PT 2
00:58:56
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- [00:01]
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- [00:44]
Tom Bilyeu
Welcome back to Impact Theory. As we dive into part two, Sam Harris and I confront the urgent matters of systemic racism. Trump the problem with the right. And rehash an old beef he had with me and Konstantin Kissen's position. Let's get back into it. All right, on that note, I actually owe you a public apology.
- [01:04]
Sam Harris
So
- [01:07]
Tom Bilyeu
you had come on my show, so I had seen the, the trigonometry clip that you did that went crazy viral and I watched it and I was like, okay, hold on. Sam is somebody I respect tremendously. You're one of the most important parts of the sense making apparatus, I think literally for the world, certainly for me. And I'm seeing people again, use memes, just be like, oh, we don't have to pay attention to Sam. Now, to your point about selfishly, Selfishly, that's just from where I'm standing, that's a terrible thing for the world. So I wanted to go in and really understand it. And so I came up with a breakdown of what I thought you were saying and you and I discussed it and then Konstantin and I discussed it and then, much to my dismay, you name check both Konstantin and I in a later podcast, Real Life. I'm no longer going to try to explain myself to people because people just cannot understand me. And you said, look, I think Tom and Konstantin are good guys.
- [02:03]
Sam Harris
I'm in the communication business full time, but I've admitted that I can't correct someone's misperception of whatever they thought I said and I'm no longer going to try. Yeah, it's a pretty forlorn position to
- [02:17]
Tom Bilyeu
have arrived at, but understandably, obviously one
- [02:20]
Sam Harris
I can't totally hold to. But. But yeah, I mean, that was a moment of just. I mean, it was kind of comic despair because I realized that like I had spoken to both of you independently for something like three hours on that topic, and still you both seemed to be converging on what I viewed as a misunderstanding of my actual position.
- [02:40]
Tom Bilyeu
I will not speak for Constantine, but I will speak for myself. I was aghast when I heard it because I thought you were so wrong. And I felt that I had so come to your aid giving like the only plausible explanation that there was for what had happened. And then I went in, researching for this episode, rewatched all of it, including what I said, and I really was wrong. So it's one of those. When I went into the research, I was like, there's no universe in which I don't understand. So to be confronted with the fact that I did get it wrong is utterly fascinating. So I want to present now what I think you were saying in that.
- [03:17]
Sam Harris
Okay.
- [03:17]
Tom Bilyeu
And again, it's not necessarily that I agree and I touched on some of this earlier in our interview about where I don't agree in that I think it has a second order consequence you may not notice or may not care about. I don't know. But. So anyway, here's the take from that clip where a lot of people were just like, Trump, derangement syndrome, you can't be trusted. So for people that don't know, it was about the Hunter Biden laptop and you said more or less obviously a paraphrase, there's no corruption you're going to find on that laptop that is going to be more troubling than the corruption that I already know that Trump has.
- [03:51]
Sam Harris
Right.
- [03:52]
Tom Bilyeu
And given that the laptop was a political game that was being delivered, one needs to acknowledge that and be willing to play an equally effective. You didn't say political game, but that felt like the undercurrent like you, you just have to meet that with. And it was a coin toss up. You're very clear on that. You're not sure what the way to go was, so you just thought better to go slow now, because there was a few things you, you started to say. There's nothing that could have been on and then you stopped yourself. But me and others put that together with, oh, you were about to say there's nothing that could have been on that laptop. Combined with an.
- [04:30]
Sam Harris
Well, in your defense, I said that Biden could have the corpses of children in his basement.
- [04:33]
Tom Bilyeu
Exactly.
- [04:34]
Sam Harris
But it was clearly a joke.
- [04:35]
Tom Bilyeu
And, and so, but those things end up getting conflated. And then through it all, what I thought you were saying is I sort of parsed through it and thought, okay, how could. Knowing that Sam is a well intentioned person, what could he have meant? The first erroneous conclusion I came to was you believed Trump was an existential Threat to the world. Now, in rewatching the clip, you're very careful. You said, Trump is an existential threat to democracy, not to the world. So I missed that. So that was part of my thing. And I was like, okay, Sam is saying if he's an existential.
- [05:09]
Sam Harris
And again, I was not speaking especially well on that podcast. So I said a few things that were genuinely misleading. So I used an asteroid hurtling toward Earth analogy. And that immediately puts people in mind of, okay, I think Trump is an existential threat to the life on this planet. Right? But I wasn't using that analogy to make that point. I was using it to make the other point, that we were talking about conspiracies and whether conspiracies are ever legitimate. And my point is, if there's an asteroid hurtling toward Earth, if people are going to conspire behind closed doors to figure out what to do about that, we don't care about conspiracy. Nothing intrinsically bad about people coordinating their efforts in private to figure out how to solve an emergency. But again, there was a lot of. That was easily. That podcast was so easy to clip to my disadvantage. But the truth is, any podcast is. This podcast is. I mean, there's no question that someone can take out a snippet of something I've said in the last two plus hours and make me look like a racist who doesn't care about inequality in our society and thinks, whatever. Let me just. There's so many bad intentions adjacent to an honest diagnosis of any specific problem in our society. It's so easy to look like you're getting tipped over into someone who just doesn't care about suffering in this world. Anything I've said about Islam or Gaza or race in America, it all is easily caricatured or misunderstood. And so it's always a tightrope walk. And I can only be as careful as I can be in talking about it. But in that case, it sounded like, to the naive ear, and that this clip was engineered to produce that effect. It sounded like I was saying, you can throw all of your commitment to honesty and integrity out the window because this was such an emergency, you're justified in lying, burying evidence, throwing all your journalistic scruples out the window, ignoring real stories, just to get the political outcome that I, Sam Harris, want, which is Trump not having a second term right now.
- [07:41]
Tom Bilyeu
I think the harder part of all this is that even I didn't respond to the clip. I had responded to the full interview, and even I took that away, doing what I Consider pretty careful analysis. My presentation, first to the world and then to you is my presentation to the world is. I think it is incredibly important to steel man somebody's argument when you don't agree with them in a way that they would recognize. And so I steel man your argument, really believing I had found a path forward where I could understand you because it was. You've been so useful in my life thinking through difficult things, that I was very reticent to say Trump, Trump really broke your brain or whatever, right? Because then I'm. I'm. I start going, ooh, like there's some major discounting there. And so I found it ended up being wrong. And I found that I was wrong because I steel manned the argument in a way you did not recognize. And you gave me. I mean, this is podcast sort of back and forth. We weren't doing it directly, but you gave me feedback that you did not recognize my steel Manning of your argument. And so then I went back and was like, let me see who's right. And that has. It's really been a really positive loop. Now part of just my innate thing is I don't trust myself to get things right. Very skeptical of myself that just in the way that people ought to be, quote, unquote, skeptical of the science, I think it just makes sense to always be looking for, is there really something here? Just assume for now that it is my fault. And so in seeing that, I would encourage the world to always do that. Don't think somebody your enemy. Think instead. Okay, can I say what they're saying in a way that they would recognize and actually get them to confirm that where you can. Okay, so that did me very well in this argument. Now, my request to you is, ironically, all the stuff that I've been belaboring in this talk is actually more or less about Israel, Palestine. And the reason is I feel completely ill equipped to think through the problem other than through first principles, which will give me some of the way. But I feel ill equipped to think through the problem of Israel, Palestine. And I see people using a memed version of things you've said to just be like, you're racist, basically, like anything that they're conflating, you saying that a tenant of radical Islam leads to the holy war of Jihad, that's a problem. Uh, and so we'll get into that in a second. But because they're like, I'll watch people like, I'll listen to your podcast, be like, whoa, these are incredibly useful points. And then I'll see People do commentary on the same podcast and they just loop around, this is racist, racist, racist. I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. And so because they'll often bring up the, that sequence of people misunderstanding I'm putting together, you saying, I'm no longer going to care if people understand. I'm just going to put my ideas out and then what comes, comes. Unfortunately, what comes is that because it's impossible to detect all the ways that somebody can misunderstand something, that your ideas will get distorted more and more over time and more and more people will just reject somebody who's good at thinking through these problems. Okay. So ultimately my request there is hopefully, you see by pointing out that somebody, well intentioned, really didn't understand you, that they went and did the work and now can represent your thinking in a way that you recognize. Yeah, yeah.
- [11:27]
Sam Harris
Well, I appreciate that. Thank you.
- [11:28]
Tom Bilyeu
For sure. And then now we can talk about why I think that, and I don't, we don't necessarily need to go into this super deep. We can just say we, we agree to disagree. But I, it what I hope you take away from this is merely that some people can be reached. So here is where I disagree with the statement that you're making.
- [11:53]
Sam Harris
Now we're back to Hunter Biden laptop,
- [11:55]
Tom Bilyeu
or is Hunter Biden laptop, which, which I will thumbnail sketch. And please tell me if this does not sound right. I will thumbnail sketch to what I said a moment ago is you there wasn't going to be anything on that laptop that proves corruption beyond what you already know Trump has. Trump is an existential threat to democracy. Joe Biden is not. When somebody is using political gamesmanship, and I think this is what you're referring to when you talk about an out in the open conspiracy, you're not trying to hide that you believe that Biden is the right person to get elected and so you would never lie. That crosses a line for you. You were clear on that. You said that. But that given that this was time to cause maximal disruption, the response should be in that context. And so the response should be either to slow roll it or maybe someone like the New York Times, if they can really get their facts together quickly enough, coin toss, maybe they should debunk it. They definitely should not have silenced the Washington Post.
- [13:04]
Sam Harris
New York, New York Post.
- [13:06]
Tom Bilyeu
So Twitter. Yeah. When you go back and look at all those, you really do lay those out. So now though, even though I understand all of that and it's a very nuanced position and does not strike me as crazy at all. However, it strikes me as not advantageous in a world where the second and third order consequences are. It's very hard to put all of that together, to parse it. And because of that, then people meme it and they just go, see, this is just evidence that there's nothing on that laptop. Sam doesn't even care. Sam's just a shill for the left, and he's broken on Trump. And I think that you could actually debate the points of, is Trump an existential threat to democracy? What would have needed to be on that laptop where you're like, oh, shit, Biden is actually more corrupt than Trump. And then you can lay out why you think Trump is corrupt. Where the line is for you, where if this thing had been like, if Joe Biden is taking bribes from this country and this amount, whatever, I don't know. But if you give people that, then they can be like, okay, cool, I get it. Because the initial thesis of this episode is we are falling into conspiracy land. People's desire for conspiracy, their appetite. That's a better way to say it. Their appetite and openness to conspiracy is skyrocketing. And if they don't have the institutions and experts that they can turn to, I think all hell breaks loose for the reasons that I outlined at the beginning.
- [14:38]
Sam Harris
Well, so we're in a vicious loop here because we're awash in misinformation and lies. And so our information landscape is just polluted with toxic waste. And the problem is any effort to clean that up, certainly any effort that the government exerts, whether it's through laws or just through encouragement. The government talking to social media companies, like, really be nice if you stopped this particular bot army that is lying about election fraud, please, would you do that? Anything like that? Anything that the technocrats do, the people who own the platforms, to dampen down, to bias the algorithm against what they consider to be misinformation. All of that looks like the Orwellian confirmation of the worst fears of conspiracy theorists. We, our own institutions, look like the bad guys. We're being gamed moment by moment by China and Russia and Iran and who knows who else we're being. Our youth is just being preferentially misinformed by TikTok. And they think to take the one case that the IDF is guilty of genocide in Gaza, right? And that meme spreads to the ends of the earth. You've got billions of people for the first time recognizing how awful war is. But this is a moment for which they blame the Jews for everything. So you've got antisemitism skyrocketing. Any attempt to modify that algorithmically boosted catastrophe is perceived as a conspiracy and maybe a Jewish inspired conspiracy. If you're on this particular topic and it just gets framed as this is the real enemy, authoritarian control of our freedom of speech. This is censorship. Now we have to figure out how to break that spell because we have a misinformation problem, we have a cyber war problem. We are being gamed by outside actors that don't wish us well. And it's not all coming from Russia and China, but they're fanning the flames of our own ambient partisanship and noise and they don't have to do much work to do it. We're so at each other's throats politically that they just have to keep touching us, just keep, keep black lives mattering us over here and keep libs of TikTok over here and we can't recognize one another, right? So we have to acknowledge that problem and we have to get the people. This is why I think there's something especially culpable about alternative media. The space in which you and I live now, the appetite in alternative media most of the time is for the contrarian anti establishment take on everything, right? In the worst case, it's the Alex Jonesification of everything. This is where Bret Weinstein, I think, has been part of the problem. He's been captured by this conspiratorial take on more or less everything. And whether the fault is him or the fault is his audience, or whether it's a falie a deux there, it's part of this problem. And so we have to figure out how to reboot from there somehow. And then, yeah, I mean, to come back to the Hunter Biden laptop story for a moment, for me, it was very simple. It was not that I think Trump is an existential risk to all of humanity or that he's Orange Hitler. It's that here we had a sitting president who would not commit to a peaceful transfer of power. That for me was such a shocking violation of our political norms. And just like the main guardrail on the viability of our democracy, right? It's like, it's not even. I'm not even sure what to put before that. I mean, it's just like, it's like the rule of law is the most important thing. The following, the Constitution is the most important thing. But this particular law, right, that we're going to abide by a legal election and transfer power peacefully is maybe there's something in front of it, but it's, you know, it was it there. There literally is no other, no other concern. There's literally nothing could be on that laptop that would rise to the level of superseding that concern, right?
- [19:37]
Tom Bilyeu
Nothing that you can imagine.
- [19:39]
Sam Harris
Nothing that I think is remotely like, well, I'm sure I could imagine something.
- [19:44]
Tom Bilyeu
I think for people to understand what you're saying, give them an example what could have been on that laptop where you'd be like, okay, now this is admittedly worse.
- [19:53]
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- [20:55]
Sam Harris
It would be hard because, well, I mean, it would have to be. A criminal intent on the part of Joe Biden. I mean, Hunter Biden is irrelevant to me really, but some criminal culpability of President Biden or not yet President Biden, candidate Biden, at that point, that was as seditious to the, the norms of our democracy as not committing to a peaceful transfer of power.
- [21:32]
Tom Bilyeu
So taking money from China, let's say,
- [21:35]
Sam Harris
yeah, it's not as bad. I mean, it's bad, it's awful. And to my knowledge, nothing like that has been established on the basis of the laptop. But I mean, all of that would be awful and disqualifying. But it's not as disqualifying as being a sitting president who will not commit to a peaceful transfer of power. I think that's just an absolute no go zone and it should be completely discrediting to his candidacy now, I mean, the fact that he is the Republican candidate, given that history and given that we didn't have a peaceful transfer of power, given what happened on January 6th, I mean, as much as you want to discount that and say that some of that was just live action role play and it wasn't real. To call them insurrectionists is an exaggeration. Price all of that in. We still failed to have a peaceful transfer of power for the first time in our history. And it was because of him. It was because of what he. The kind of populist lunacy he had consciously stoked, and he had done it throughout his entire presidency, and he did it for a full nine months in the run up to the election. He was not committing to a peaceful transfer of power. He was seeding the concern that the election was going to be a fraud in advance. And so it was the most malicious use of presidential power I had ever seen directed against our own society and our own democratic norms. And I think, yeah, it's a 20 megaton political problem. It's not the end of the world, but it is potentially the end of our democracy. I mean, if we have a president who will not leave and we have a constitutional crisis that we cannot solve, if Mike Pence and half a dozen other people had behaved differently on that day, I don't know where we would be. Right. I mean, who would have sent in the troops to get Trump out of power when he's still the president who's not giving up power and calling the election a fraud and his vice president isn't confirming the electors. Right. Because he's created a perfect personality cult under him. And we were very close to that. I mean, it was a handful of Republicans who still cared about the Constitution, who kept us from blowing through the last guardrails on our democracy. And so all the Republicans who are minimizing what happened on January 6, I think are being completely deluded and irresponsible and setting the stage for something awful to happen in November. I don't know. It feels like half of our society is poised to not accept the results of the next election, no matter how well run it might obviously be. And let me just step back. I think it's disastrous that Biden is the candidate. I think it's just been colossal malpractice on the part of the Democrats to leave us in this position that we're running a. A obviously moribund candidate against a former president who has showed his commitment to violating our most important political norms. There's one thing you said earlier that I just want to close the loop on, because certain points are very easy to knock down. So this allegation that my criticism of Islam has anything to do with racism, is it's absolutely easy to see that that is a logical fallacy. First, everything I say about Islam and even everything I say about Muslims as people, which I'm never really talking about. I'm always talking about ideas and their consequences. But even if I was just going to talk about Muslims as people, Islam is. Muslims exist in a hundred countries and. And many of them are white, like me. It's got nothing to do with race. And conversely, I have said again and again and again that I think some of the most important people in the world and the first people I would bring to the front of the line for immigration in our society are genuinely liberal Muslims and secular Muslims and above all, ex Muslims. Ex Muslims, for me, are just like superheroes because they know exactly what the problem is. And so you take someone who was born in Pakistan and who speaks Urdu, take someone who was born in Iran who speaks Farsi, you take someone who was born in Egypt and speaks Arabic, and they are ex Muslims. There's no one I want more in our society than those people, because we have a problem. We have to inoculate the Muslim community against religious extremism. And there's nobody better to do that than the people who know exactly how bad religious extremism is. And the ex Muslims know it better than anyone and have taken great personal risks to announce themselves as having disavowed that ideology. If you hold those two statements together, you understand it's logically impossible to make the allegation of racism in anything I say about Islam. It's just a non sequitur. It's got nothing to do with race.
- [26:52]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, no, that one I will agree with. We may want to come back to how it gets memeified. I don't know on that one, though, if it matters. But I do want to close the loop on the laptop just by putting forth what I know. I can speak for myself. This is what I would want. And I think that I represent a lot of other people when I say what I would have wanted from you in that moment. Since I'm already. I count myself as one of the people that just grows more conspiratorially minded by the day. And look, I'm trying to resist that gravitational pull, but when I encounter you encountering that laptop, I want you to do the emergency podcast, do go live for 18 hours, like, whatever it takes, and go through and say, let's pretend, because to your point, doesn't seem like anything, just like absolutely outrageous has ever been pinned down off the laptop. But let's say that it had been and it was extraordinary. But still, for you fell below the threshold of Trump is going to destroy democracy and just say, here are the things that he's done. These are absolutely horrible things. This is gross mismanagement of the Democratic caucus, whatever it's called for party, for making him the candidate. But the reality is, I think that this is way worse than anything that you. The things that Trump is doing, namely that he's refusing to peacefully transfer power. That could be the end of our democracy. That, to me, isn't just slightly more important than this obviously horrible shit over here. And therefore, I just want to go over and over and over this so that everybody has the information that they need. And I trust you, dear people of these great United States, to make the decision for yourself.
- [28:34]
Sam Harris
But the thing is, I know you can't trust the people to make that decision rationally.
- [28:37]
Tom Bilyeu
And that's why people twig out.
- [28:38]
Sam Harris
Yeah, but they're just wrong. So, listen, we just know. There's just enough known about cognitive bias that we know that. I mean, there's something called the illusory truth effect, which is, even if you're repeating a story, the more you repeat a story, even if you're repeating it for the purpose of debunking it, the mere repetition effect of it gets lodged in people's memory, as there was something about that story that was true, even if it's a complete debunking. So knowing that you're not serving the interests of the public by saying, listen, sunlight's the best disinfectant, we're just going to talk about it for four hours on Joe Rogan's podcast in front of 40 million people. We're debunking it, but we know that in this case, it's never going to be a perfect debunking. In fact, there's just going to be awful stuff there that might be lured. It could be analogous to showing a picture of a dead baby pulled out of rubble and knowing that this is so inflammatory that literally 100% of people seeing it, their gut reaction will be, there is no earthly justification for that, ever. Anything that produces that is evil. Oh, the IDF produced that. Well, the IDF is evil. Right. That is just a. The human moral imagination in one of its failure modes. We know we are psychologically ill equipped, and I know my audience, or any audience is psychologically ill equipped, and I am ill equipped, if I'm a member of that audience, to process certain things in a way so as to get the right punchline, especially when the clock is ticking in the middle of what is a kind of political emergency, which is, again, a sitting president who's not committing to a peaceful transfer of power. And we're talking about a few percentage points in the election. And again, we have the example of what happened to Hillary Clinton the year before when James Comey said, just out of an abundance of scrupulosity, I'm going to just revisit this whole email server concern. There's a lot of emails here. You're not going to be able to read them in time. We've only got two weeks and I'm going to hit you with 40,000 emails here. But let's talk about it as I'm doing, just doing. I trust the American people to decide about these emails that refer to pizza parlors. And half of America is going to think that this is code for a pedophile rape cult. No, I know that half of America is predisposed to think that there could be a pedophile rape cult in the basement of a pizza parlor that doesn't have a basement. I mean, that's the country we live in. We have to be honest about that. I know that. And yes, it's just. And again, when I think it matters, I ignore every. All of the liabilities I just spoke about. I know that some significant percentage of any audience, perhaps yours, will hear half of what I say about Islam and half of what I say about race in America or half of what I say on any other polarizing topic and think, okay, that guy's a racist asshole or that guy's a neocon warmonger or whatever it is. And I know they're going to miss the point. I know it's impossible to speak carefully enough or full enough, comprehensively enough so as to close every loophole that people want to rush through to malign you and hate you and distort your message.
- [32:25]
Tom Bilyeu
And.
- [32:26]
Sam Harris
And it's just, it goes with the territory. But I just think we have to be aware that there is often a liability in just even having the conversation. Like the wrong message is going to be delivered at scale just because we're choosing to talk about that topic at that moment.
- [32:50]
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- [33:20]
Sam Harris
And so that's like the first editorial decision can be. Let's just wait on that. Let's talk about that in a month. Right. I mean, I haven't talked about the trans topic very much just because I think it's. While it seems politically super important, it affects a tiny number of people, and there's way too much brain damage that comes with that topic. You have a crazy level of activism in proportion to. To the size of the problem. Right. And it's just not worth it. It's not worth weighing in on any side of it. I mean, I'm comfortable with my attitude toward it. I feel nothing but compassion for people who really have gender dysphoria. And I think they should get all the help they want and need and we should have political equality for them. And over here at the extremes, where it's obviously social and contagion among teenage girls and it has nothing to do with a real condition, it's a social problem that we should get our hands on. And all of these weird political ramifications where you've got people who were men 15 minutes ago now competing in women's sports and winning titles that belong to the girls. That's completely dysfunctional and obviously just rubbing people the wrong way for reasons that are totally understandable. And yet, if you really are a transgender athlete, we should figure out some way for you to be athletic and without distorting everything, because there's only five of you within 500 miles. And it's just there are trade offs. This is a situation where there are trade offs and there's not going to be a perfect solution. But I have always felt that I don't want to. There's no reason for me to be a person who dedicates 10 podcasts to that topic. Given the size of the problem, which is small, and given the level of brain damage that comes at you when you say anything like what I just said for the last three minutes. It's just not worth it. You got to pick your battles.
- [35:35]
Tom Bilyeu
No, I get that. And I think that your point about trade offs is the right point. That's really what I'm trying to drive home. I think that you. I mean, you're so consistent in your position, but I think you're making a trade off on the way that you approach.
- [35:52]
Sam Harris
You're talking with Hunter Biden.
- [35:53]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. Where you say that.
- [35:55]
Sam Harris
Well, that's why, honestly, I really did say it was a coin toss for me. I don't have a settled opinion on it. It could be argued either way. And I know that there are journalists even at the New York Times who disagree with me.
- [36:11]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. But I'm just saying, go back to the thing that I will zoom in on in this exchange is there's a second order consequence to you saying that we just can't. We know enough about the cognitive biases of people at scale in this country to know that they're not going to look at a debunking of this and understand the argument that even if he is corrupt, it's just not as bad as breaking democracy. And so I'm being very consistent. Me, Sam Harris, I'm being very consistent. And this is what I make the decision on. People just aren't going to hear that. And when you say that we can't trust them to make the decision, even if you're right, because this goes back to trade offs that like for instance, me in that situation, I fully accept that to. And this is how my mind thinks of it. To preserve the integrity I want to feel towards what I want democracy to be. I have to let democracy be jeopardized. I have to let it go all the way. I have to let. This is just my take.
- [37:15]
Sam Harris
But it's not a suicide. Democracy is not a suicide pact. Right? I mean, it's like we don't. If you know you're jeopardizing democracy, you don't have a democratic obligation to watch it go off the clip.
- [37:29]
Tom Bilyeu
So here's from my frame of reference, which I fully recognize as being that one, and that's totally distorted, but from my frame of reference, it is a subversion of democracy to keep information from people because you don't think they can make an educated decision. I get that. It happens.
- [37:45]
Sam Harris
Well, no, because there's an infinite amount of potential information, you as the New York Times or you as a podcaster or you as anyone, can only get a hold of so much of it. You're always making editorial decisions. You're always deciding. The New York Times today has to decide. Well, how much are we going to focus on the border? Are we going to publish another article about the border? Are we going to wait a week? Is there anything new that it's all just seat of the pants intuitions of just what is rising to the level of interest with Hunter Biden's laptop, the way it, when it appeared, how it appeared, the optics of its appearing, it certainly looked like it should have been Russian misinformation I mean, why on earth would there be a laptop just sitting in a random computer store that happened to be Hunter Biden's? Right. So it was easy to see all the biases against it being legitimate. Seemed completely legitimate. And worse still, there just wasn't that much. There wasn't enough for a very calculated reason. We weren't given enough time to really do due diligence on it. I mean, I don't know how much information was in there, but it was just thousands upon thousands of emails and texts and documents. And that was engineered to be that way. Right? So, I mean, Rudy Giuliani was wearing his cynicism and malice on his sleeve in how this was presented. It was just like, I know this is only, you've only got 10 days to figure this out, and I know that there's just a blizzard of weirdness in here. And once you open this box, it's just going to be so lurid and we're going to be looking at naked photos of crackhead Hunter and it's going to be massively embarrassing and so salacious that it's going to suck up all the oxygen. It's all we're going to be talking about. Do you really want a president whose son is sniffing blow off of a hooker? And it's like, we know that we have a society. We know that we have a machinery of click based journalism that's not going to be able to help itself from focusing on that. And we know that we have a society wherein the optics are often everything. It's like, we know that in a presidential debate, it has nothing to do with who's got the better policies or who can demonstrate better knowledge of what's actually happening in the world. We know that if one person is just more charismatic and gets a few laughs, that person's gonna win the debate for 90% of America. Right. And so knowing that it sort of matters, is it even worth having? If you have a malicious con man who's just funny and charismatic, which is basically what we have in the person of Trump, is a debate even a good idea? It's worth asking whether a debate is a good idea. I mean, I happen to think the fact that Biden wants to debate him is just a sign of the desperation of the Biden campaign. But otherwise it's probably a bad idea. But this is not a matter of violating the norms of democracy. People can get whatever information they want. No one's going to pass a law to say that Rudy Giuliani couldn't Leak Hunter Biden's laptop. Giuliani's not going to get thrown in prison. This is not a violation of anyone's free speech. The New York Times can just make the editorial decision. We're just going to wait two weeks on this. This is just too much like Hillary's emails and an October surprise. We don't want to be a part of this. And the truth is, again, I thought it was a coin toss. And I know I've spoken to New York Times journalists who don't agree with me about it.
- [41:52]
Tom Bilyeu
I think that's fair. My thing is I just want that all to happen out in public, which is where we disconnect. And I get that. We just have different base assumptions. My base assumption is that the second order consequence of people feeling like there are people somewhere making a decision about what they get to see because they don't trust them to be able to make these decisions creates this sense that I live in conspiracy land. And, and I think that that is worse than another four years of Trump who was unable to subvert democracy in his first four years. So I look at that and go, yeah, don't love that. That's my candidate. However, it's worse.
- [42:38]
Sam Harris
What was worse than another? Because what. The only thing that happened, I mean, the thing that happened that I think shouldn't have happened was Twitter suspended the New York Post's account. But short of that, if Twitter hadn't done that and the New York Post ran with the story but the New York Times didn't, that's worse than having Trump win an election he wasn't going to win. But for the airing of a laptop story, which still seems like a non story to me. I mean, I know there are people who are deep in the weeds of that laptop who think there's a lot of interesting stuff in there, but literally nothing of real importance has emerged from that laptop and gotten into my newsfeed.
- [43:25]
Tom Bilyeu
This just comes down to how do we read the value of certain things. So for me, the whole idea of the consent of the governed, that's super important. The idea that things that I'm not being knowingly manipulated, that once people feel like they're being knowingly manipulated, even though
- [43:42]
Sam Harris
they are and always have been, but you're always being. It's not a matter of knowing. I mean, that's one way to describe an argument when you don't agree with the argument. But the argument was, This is a machine, very likely has all the appearance of a machine of political misinformation, partisan misinformation, designed to affect an election at the very moment the election's about to be run. Right? And the question is, do we collaborate naively with this or do we just wait? Now, it's not to say that we're never going to look at this laptop. It's just to say that do we give Rudy Giuliani, again, who's the least scrupulous person on planet Earth, next to the person whose interest he was trying to serve? Do we give him everything he wants when he wants it, when we know what his intentions are and we have no reason to trust any representation of the contents of this thing being real? It all takes too much time to figure out? Or do we wait a beat? It just seems. I mean, given what, again, four years before, we saw what it looked like, Literally, it was. It looks like Hillary, very likely at that moment, would have won the election, but for what Comey did.
- [45:14]
Tom Bilyeu
My thing is because I can now track your value system, your base assumptions, what matters to you. I completely understand where you're coming from. I just have a different value system around. That second order consequence of it has made people feel that they've got yet more evidence that they're being manipulated by. I mean, let's just call it elites is just a simple way.
- [45:43]
Sam Harris
But everything is a manipulation at that level. I mean, so I get if somebody's
- [45:48]
Tom Bilyeu
lying, they're falling into conspiracy land.
- [45:50]
Sam Harris
No, but everything is like, everything is a choice. And more information, more accurate information even, isn't always better. I mean, for instance.
- [46:02]
Tom Bilyeu
But do you think that I don't understand what you're saying? Because really, if you like to defeat my stance, you would have to come at me and say, where you're going wrong is being worried about people falling into conspiracy land. It. It is not going to have the negative impact on human flourishing, which, Tom, you said is what you want. It's not going to have the negative impact on human flourishing that Trump getting back into office will have. And then it's like, okay, then we can debate the merit of that. But every word I say for me is downstream of. I believe the second order consequence of making people lose faith in their experts and institutions is creating so much derangement. I'm actually way more afraid of that than I am that we might get four more years of Trump, because we might again get four more years of Trump. And honestly, I'm not even sure if people take RFK off the ballot, I don't know what the fuck I'm going to do, because I've Got one candidate that is obviously in cognitive decline. Good luck convincing me otherwise. Which means even if I elect him, he's not the one running the country. That freaks me out, that doesn't feel democratic. And then on the other hand, I have Trump, who, like, there's so many things there that make me uncomfortable, I don't even know where to begin. And so I feel like, okay, now I'm left with these absolutely horrendous options. And so all I focus on in this moment is I don't trust myself to be the arbiter. So that means that I, this is just me. This is just how I see the world. I don't think that we can make that anyone ought to make the decision, even though it is clearly a malicious thing that's being done by them to very much try to make sure that their candidate wins. I see that with eyes wide open. So October Surprise. Totally get what they're doing. It's a total manipulation. But the only thing with my worldview that I think is a bigger mistake is to do a thing that makes people lose more fucking trust in their institutions. Because to me, that moment feels exactly like the hey, everybody, don't wear masks because they don't work. But by the way, save them for our healthcare professionals. It's just like things like that make me go, this is all a big fucking lie. This is fucking crazy. And so you're turning me, a by nature rule follower, and into somebody who's just pushing back against everything. And I think continuing to push people like me farther into thinking everybody's fucking lying to them and being paranoid and being like, is this all a conspiracy? That is the more unwise.
- [48:32]
Sam Harris
Yeah, well, so to be clear, I never thought that lying was part of the ethical response.
- [48:40]
Tom Bilyeu
You're very clear about that.
- [48:41]
Sam Harris
Never lies. And then the noble eye, in my view, always backfires or virtually always backfires.
- [48:47]
Tom Bilyeu
And I want to remind people you've been very clear about that 1,000%.
- [48:50]
Sam Harris
Yeah, it would entail no line. It would just entail. It could just be. We're working on the story right now.
- [49:00]
Tom Bilyeu
I am zoomed in on one comment that you made, which is you said, knowing the cognitive biases of people at large, we cannot simply present this, combat it with logic and expect that it won't influence.
- [49:14]
Sam Harris
Here's another example that's just relevant for my personal life. And it's like, so I put myself among the people in this regard. So if I have to take a medication for some health condition and my doctor recommends it, my doctor who I trust. I found this doctor, and I've settled on this doctor because I trust him. He recommends it. He's done it with all his patients, and it's important that I do it right. How much time am I going to spend looking at the possible side effects? Am I going to really get into the fine print? And am I going to go online and seek out the bulletin boards where people for the last 10 years have been complaining about how this drug ruined their lives? And I know that it's as scrupulously as you present that information, it is so hard to appropriately respond to it. Because in certain cases, depending on who you are, the mere idea of certain possible side effects is enough to make you feel like, fuck. It's just, I know I'm a bad judge of probability, and I know it's only, you know, it's less than 1% of people had this thing, but I'm going to feel so stupid if I'm one of those people. And it's just. That's like. It's just not worth it. So I'm not going to take the drug. Right? And understanding all of this about myself, in certain cases, obviously, I look at what's possible, but in other cases, I think it's just not worth it. I don't actually even need those facts. If I start feeling worse taking the drug, well, then maybe I'll look at what the side effects are. But I don't actually need to be. I don't need to. To engineer the nocebo effect for myself. I mean, the placebo effect is a very real thing. And the nocebo effect, the negative placebo effect is also a real thing. And so you tell people, listen, this drug is great, but you might start feeling weak and nauseated, and your workouts might not be as good, and you're like, what percentage of people are going to actually start feeling that way? And it's just pure nocebo effect, right? It's going to be a high percentage. So knowing that about the human mind, it's totally rational to say, listen, I'm going to bet on the fact that if this drug got. If we have institutions that I can trust, and this is why it's important to have institutions we can trust. If we have a drug approval process that I can trust, if we have an fda, I can trust if I know that this thing has been run. I mean, in certain cases, you have tens of millions of people who have taken this drug before you. If I can trust that, if I can trust the clinical experience of my doctor. I'm going to outsource my moment to moment intuitions about whether I should be taking this drug to all of that collective intelligence and place a bet that I'm not one of these statistical outliers whose head falls off when I take this pill. I'm someone who's actually going to take it and it's actually going to have its intended effect, which is to mitigate the illness that I've been suffering that sent me to the doctor in the first place. And that's totally rational. Now for some people that might sound like, okay, you're just, that's the ostrich strategy. You're burying your head in the sand. But the reality is there's a consequence to being the sort of person who goes down the rabbit hole and just studies side effects and horror stories for everything. And literally you can do it for everything. And you'd be paralyzed. If you weighted everything with the same emotional intensity, you would be paralyzed. I mean, something like 7,000 people die every year. This used to be the case. I don't know if it's. Perhaps a number has grown. I think it was the Internet will correct me if I'm wrong. It was something like 7,000 people die every year in America from non steroidal anti inflammatories like Advil, ibuprofen. I take Advil all the time. I get migraine headaches, I take Advil. Advil works. How much time should I spend thinking that? I know there's possible GI problems with
- [53:52]
Tom Bilyeu
taking Advil, but Sam, the analogy, at least for me, is very clear. But the thing I want to make sure that we draw a straight line to is given that I think that that's a completely rational way to do a lot of things in life. And all of us are going to make a balance of, okay, am I just going to trust that big connective tissue blob of things that have other people taking it? Testing, fda, all of it.
- [54:15]
Sam Harris
And just to finally close the loop on that, I mean, just imagine the analogy of me deciding to have a whole series of podcasts on all the people who've been killed by non steroidal anti inflammatories. And to interview the widow of the guy who just took to Advil the first time he even took Advil and he just died outright on a vacation. Those people exist, I'm sure, and I could talk to them and I could make this my hobby horse. Seven thousand people a year, every year, are dying. Even one death is unacceptable. Look at this kid that I'm from Gaza, that's unacceptable. We're worried about 7,000 kids in Gaza who died because of the IDF and we're calling it a genocide. I'm telling you that 7,000Americans are going to die from Advil this year. This is an unacknowledged genocide. It'd be completely delusional. Use of my time. Obviously, I'm not tempted to do it, but so much of what we're doing in alternative media is analogous to that sort of thing. You can amplify the noise into some or find some tiny signal that seems like the most important one and amplify it and disregard all of the other noise you're amplifying in the process. And it just strikes me as irresponsible.
- [55:37]
Tom Bilyeu
I hear that. However we imagine you were doing those podcasts and you were uncovering true things where you really have been lied to. Sometimes by a small degree, sometimes by a horrendously large degree. Large degree. Sometimes where you're like, well, I could give them the benefit of the doubt, but other times you're like, this was just blatant lying. And you know the famous phrase, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you. Yeah, and you can flip that. Just because they're after you doesn't mean you're not paranoid. Like, we keep finding out that we really have a reason to be paranoid. And so all I'm saying in this is that there is the second order consequence of saying, I know that there are these cognitive biases. I the people will fall for them and therefore they will not make a wise decision and they will reelect somebody that is a threat to democracy potentially. And it's a towing cost. I don't know what the right answer here is. I just know that slow rolling going a beat is the right answer. People just start to pick up on like, oh, wait, we can't be trusted. Like, wait a second, what do you mean? And so it's that just another.
- [56:47]
Sam Harris
In that case, I mean, the weighting was also just on. No one could be trusted to do a good enough job to actually present the final story in the time allotted. That's why it was an October Surprise. That's why he didn't leak it six months before the election course.
- [57:02]
Tom Bilyeu
I mean, all of this really does come down to what trade off are people comfortable with? I feel you've been very articulate. I feel you've also been amazingly clear and consistent. And so I feel now that I have actually been able to map some your worldview. And while we disagree on sort of
- [57:20]
Sam Harris
what if you can put it on a bumper sticker I'll be.
- [57:22]
Tom Bilyeu
Well that'll be. Ah. Actually I think we could get pretty close to a bumper bumper sticker which would be. Let me really try. Given the fallibility of the human mind you must rely on experts and institutions as a part of your sense making apparatus. That's a long bumper sticker.
- [57:50]
Sam Harris
I agree with that.
- [57:51]
Tom Bilyeu
You're to do so puts you at risk of catastrophic error.
- [57:57]
Sam Harris
Yeah, I mean that's a point we haven't made explicitly until now but I certainly agree with it. We just can't. There's no substitute for institutions and institutional knowledge and it's like we just. If without them each of us is forced to reinvent civilization on his own every time he gets out of bed
- [58:14]
Tom Bilyeu
in the morning and that is what's happening essentially. It doesn't feel like that much work. But you're creating an N of one frame of reference.
- [58:21]
Sam Harris
Yeah.
- [58:22]
Tom Bilyeu
Where you see a world that is slightly different than the world the next person sees slightly different than the next and the next. And certainly the world of independent media is generating that at scale. Social media is generating that at scale. To Konstantin's point though, there's no putting the toothpaste back in the bottle. So then it just becomes a question of how do we deal with that and my solution and your solution somewhat in practice though I have heard your very well articulated disagreements. Mine is you just have to put all the ideas, even the crazy ones, if they have a sufficient amount of popularity on the table and debate the merits and then whatever comes, comes. And that terrifies me because I see us racing in a direction that I think is just really horrible for human flourishing. But I just come back to the world gets to be whatever the world wants to be. And if the world wants to be majority Muslim then they're going to get it. It just is. It's just a fact of the way that this all works. And so the only thing that you can do is fight at the level of these are the ideas that I believe in. And I think that the service that you do particularly well is give people the language that they need to grasp and convey ideas that otherwise by themselves that they might not be able to think through. And now me pitching back to the world again is what I hope they hear is even if there are times where they don't agree with you, if they can map the base assumptions that you have or the value system that you have and go, okay, cool. I see what he believes and then I get why he takes that there. I don't share those beliefs. And so that's a part where I'm going to say, I can't just outsource to him thinking through this one. I either have to do it myself or I'm going to work with other people that maybe align in those values and that that's fine. What drives me absolutely fucking crazy is when people need everyone to see the world exactly the way they see it, and they're not looking for tension. And if they looked for things that countered what they already believe and they hungered for people that think differently than they think and that they find a wise path forward by knowing where they're trying to end up, using data to tell if they're getting there, and then testing their ideas against other people who actually disagree with them, I think they've got a way better shot.
- [60:45]
Sam Harris
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I agree there. So thank you for the conversation.
- [60:50]
Tom Bilyeu
Obscenely generous with your time. Where can people connect with you?
- [60:54]
Sam Harris
The Making Sense podcast or the Waking up app? Those are the two places I'm spending most of my time.
- [60:58]
Tom Bilyeu
They are both brilliant and I spend a ton of my time there as well. All right, everybody, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace.
- [61:11]
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