← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Understanding Power, Corruption, Politics, AI, Religion, Tribalism & Free Speech | Sam Harris PT 1
01:37:39
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Tom Bilyeu
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Sam Harris
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Tom Bilyeu
it done Today's guest is none other than Sam Harris, an author and public intellectual who introduced millions to mindfulness and meditation and quite honestly helped shape an entire generation of thinkers as a part of the fabled intellectual dark web and representative of the new Atheist movement. But he also sparked a ton of outrage with his recent controversial take on how information regarding a major political candidate should be new unknowingly positioned to influence a Democratic election towards a desired outcome. Coming into this episode, I was not sure how to reconcile those two versions of Sam Harris. He is one of the clearest thinkers I've ever had the pleasure of sitting down with, but in a world where it's hard to reach a consensus on what truth actually is, I'm very skeptical of anyone who wants anything other than as unvarnished an information stream as they can get. I really believe that people should distrust themselves more and simply hunger for as many people to get access to information as possible. Sitting down with Sam, though, I was once again impressed by his openness and willing to discuss difficult topics head on without any hiding or shucking and jiving. While there are certainly things that we don't see eye to eye on, I was grateful for my time with him and think you guys will be too. And if you guys hate anything that either of us have to say, fair enough. But at least you have access to our unvarnished thoughts and can make up your own mind. Since I know you won't want to miss out on Part two, be sure to subscribe now on Apple podcasts to get part 2 ad free when it drops, as well as access to hundreds of Archived episodes and extras that you won't find anywhere else. I'm Tom Bilyeu and now I bring you Sam Harris.
- [02:39]
Sam Harris
Culture is software. We know it's continually failing us. We should not have a significant number of Americans alleging the election was stolen.
- [02:48]
Tom Bilyeu
There was a pretty gnarly one two punch between Covid and Trump that I really think caused a sense making apparatus to fall apart in some way. My question is, can we stop the rise of evil or is that already a fallacy? And if we can, then how?
- [03:06]
Sam Harris
Well, I mean, I think your first point is that we didn't have anything like a consensus around what was going on. I mean, people were siloed into various echo chambers and just not converging on an assessment of just what the facts are about anything. I don't consider myself the best judge of how this happened because there were people who were sufficiently far from me on the information landscape so that I just ceased to understand how they could be thinking and doing what they were thinking and doing. I mean, I'm not seeing their social media feedback, I'm seeing some fragments of what they're finding persuasive. But it's just amazing to me that there are, I don't know what it is, 30, 40% of American society still thinks that Trump was not only fine, just better than fine, it's just impeccable on some level ethically, and that January 6th was a non event and that there was really nothing at stake there. It's all just been, you know, insanely. It was, it was a combination of nothing happened, but everything that did happen was, you know, antifa or, you know, Trump trumped up by the CIA or, you know, it was just, it was not violent, but the violence was, was, you know, from some other source. I mean, this is not a coherent view, but you literally have something like 100 million people who think that it was just no factor. I mean, there was just nothing. The only thing bad that happened is that the election got stolen from the rightful president, which was Trump. I don't know how you are paying attention to anything like a valid source of information. And you still believe that, right? And there are people who believe that or pretend to believe it enough that they're, I mean, I do think they're people who are just being fundamentally dishonest with their audiences. So you have, it's amazing how it can come down to a couple of dozen personalities that, that really are close to the lever that moves public opinion here. So you have someone like Tucker Carlson, who we know on the basis of the Dominion lawsuit Behind Closed Doors was talking about Trump as a demonic force. He couldn't wait for him to disappear from the public conversation. He hated him with passion. Those are basically verbatim quotes of his text messages behind the scenes at Fox that got entered into evidence in the Dominion case. And, and yet his public facing message is all Trump supporting conspiracy, theorizing all the time. For years he was the most watched person on Fox and pretty soon he'll be the most watched person wherever he finally hangs his hat. But his Twitter videos get apparently tens of millions of views. So he's got this enormous audience that seemingly doesn't care about his hypocrisy, which is amazing to me. I don't know how you maintain an audience with this kind of loss of face. The mainstream media was not shy in advertising the discrepancy between what he was saying behind closed doors and what he was saying on his show. So either you have 100 million people who just simply never watch any mainstream media product or read it, and that's quite possible. But the basic problem, before anything, before we think about antithetical ethical commitments or political commitments or people who disagree about evil, really at bottom we just can't even converge on a discussion of facts. People just can't agree about what is happening, much less why or what should happen.
- [06:47]
Tom Bilyeu
The thing that we have to start with one to set the table is, is that what people are doing, that they really do all have their own good intentions, they all think that they have spotted the evil, but they're just spotting it from different sides. If that's true, then people's behavior at least makes sense. I understand how it's self motivated now, it's never going to be that pure. I'm sure there are also some people that are just grabbing for power. But if, if the, the public response is okay, I see from where I'm sitting from my side that the other side is evil and I need to really react accordingly. Then, then it starts to make sense. Now if that's what's going on, then it becomes, okay, well now we need the sense making apparatus by which we figure out what is evil, what is the right response. And the first step in that is going to be, I think to identify what's. We need some anchor in the storm that we're going to say, okay, this is the foundation and we're going to build up from here. There has to be a mechanism by which we start to figure all this out. And so I'll lay out my Rough thesis as a way just to sort of guide the conversation. So I think that there's something about the modern world, largely as it's married to technology, that creates this inability to get people to share a narrative which allows us then to approach any issue from the same perspective of what we're trying to achieve. So you've got velocity of information. So information is just coming at us so fast and furious. I've heard you talk about Alex Jones in that context of like, hey, this guy just talks as fast as he can, throwing out so many points at you. Each one just makes you look uneducated. If you're like, I didn't know what that was. And you're like, you find out it doesn't even exist. And so that is social media. Just the rate at which information can come at you is so fast. The business model of social media is that whatever grabs attention is going to be monetized. So then people very quickly realize the more salacious, the more sort of grand and aggressive, the more likely it is to get attention. So now it's coming at you hyper negative and hyper fast. When you combine that with this sense of everything has to roll up into a headline. So all of these ideas are incredibly nuanced. The problem is to get them to propagate on social media, they have to be a headline. It has to be something that's memorable, it has to be something that's easily digestible, and it has to be something that's repeatable. And when you repeat it, that the other person's like, oh, that's sick. You got it just right. And now they want to go tell somebody else. And so for anybody that's being bombarded with all this information as a way to wrap their heads around it, they just pick a team, and then the team just tells them, these are all your positions. So now all you have to memorize are the headlines for your group. And I actually am deeply empathetic to that because holding onto the nuance of a complicated situation is already very difficult. When you are able to roll that up into a headline, it becomes something that you can hold onto far more easily. But then the truth of the on the ground interaction points all get lost. And so as I was watching all of this unfold, then it became those 12 people that you're talking about. And certainly I will put you as one of them. It began to be unclear, like, okay, wait, what is the foundation that you're building on that you level up from this? And so what I want to through in the beginning here is what is that foundation. So in a world where the sense making apparatus is dealing with velocity of information, misinformation, power grabs, corruption, but you can actually hide a lot of that through velocity of headline, rolling up a complex topic into an oversimplification, where do we get the bedrock? Now, I am aware of the not debate, maybe it was a debate that you and Jordan did about what is truth. And I know that you can devolve into madness, but like if you were to give a simple explanation of how you ground yourself when you think through these things, what does that look like?
- [10:49]
Sam Harris
First of all, not being tribal. Right. So not caring really about, I mean I care about source, I care about sources of information as a proxy for just not having to figure out everything from bedrock every time. Right.
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Tom Bilyeu
So meaning expert.
- [11:08]
Sam Harris
Yeah, I think you can default to expertise most of the time, all the while knowing that expertise can fail. It's just a sanity sparing and certainly time sparing practice to say, okay, most of what is printed in the New York Times has to be, to a first approximation, mostly true. Otherwise the New York Times is no longer the New York Times. Now I think there have been moments where, and certainly on specific topics where it's been valid to worry that the New York Times is no longer the New York Times. They're sort of systematically getting certain topics wrong or shading the truth as an expression of obvious political bias. So there are moments where all of our institutions have, if not frankly failed us, showed a capacity to fail us at times. And what that did to much of the country is just torpedo any trust in institutions. Right. So the trust in the mainstream media is at its all time low, I would imagine. Certainly last time I looked at a poll on that topic that seemed to be the case. But so it is with government messaging on virtually any topic in particular, public health, our scientific institutions, our universities. And all of this is understandable in that in the last, you know, six years, post Trump and post Covid, we had this almost perfect storm politically where there really did seem to be a capture of the mainstream institutions by a very intolerant and really at bottom, illiberal political ideology. I mean, it's supposedly liberal, it's far left, but it's, you know, in terms of its style of thought, it was, you know, we were edging toward, you know, Chinese show trials. I mean it was really, it was just the kinds of, and the truth is you didn't need that many specific cases to feel like, okay, you've seen enough. There's no reason to listen to these people ever again. Right? I mean, if you're somebody who's just poised to throw the baby out with the bathwater, you just need to hear one case of someone being defenestrated at the New York Times for is not surviving one specific blasphemy test. And that's, you know, then. Then there's just no then. The New York Times is no better than the Epoch Times or Breitbart or anything else that is in. In the business of. Of, you know, putting things in font and. And shipping them. And it's all journalism. Right. You know, so. So for me, it was. It was. You had to recognize that though our institutions are challenged, there is still such a thing as expertise. There is still such a thing as institutional knowledge. There's a need for institutions that we can trust. Certainly when you're in the middle of a pandemic, we need a CDC and an FDA that we can actually trust. Right. So the fact that we felt that we couldn't quite trust them is an enormous problem. And the thing we need to shore up is the trustworthiness of indispensable institutions. It's not that we need to tear everything down to the studs such that there are no institutions. No one thinks in terms of institutions. It's all just podcasts and substack newsletters as far as the eye can see. And we're just going to all do our own research. Right. It's not to say that doing your own research is never valid and it's never even important. I mean, there's certainly cases where one person can pull at a thread long enough that something really important unravels and we're all wiser for it. Or that one individual, given a specific problem in their lives, let's say a medical problem, they do their own research and they discover the remedy for the thing that was ailing their family member or whatever, and the doctors didn't do it, and the CDC didn't do it, and the FDA was wrong and they found the thing that helped. Okay, great. Generally speaking, when times are good, doing your own research is just, frankly, a waste of time. And when things really matter is very likely a dangerous waste of time. Right. It's like you don't get on an airplane and decide, well, I'm not so sure I trust the pilot or the guys who repaired the engines. I'm going to do some of my own research here. Let me in the cockpit. I want to interrogate some of those dials and switches. It's like, that's not a situation where anyone would tolerate this sort of contrarian, anti establishment. I'm going to innovate, just break stuff and see what happens. And the problem is, in many respects, we are at 30,000ft together, all of us, all the time, and we're having to figure out what is real and what to do. And we do need experts that actually warrant our trust because they are, in fact, experts. Right? So when, you know, there's just specific cases, like what's really happening in Ukraine and why and what should we do about it, right? Should we be sending them arms? Is Putin lying about the last thing he said was true on the ground? When our State Department has a press conference and tells us what's going on, we need a State Department that we trust to inform us. And when the New York Times has some point of view on what's happening there, we need a New York Times that is sourcing information in a way that is valid. We can't have everyone trying to get to ground truth based on their own private efforts to come up with what we should all think about Ukraine or what we should all think about MRNA vaccines or whatever it is.
- [17:12]
Tom Bilyeu
But people do feel that, and I certainly felt that at the beginning of this. So as I hear you say, so remember my, my initial question is, what's your foundation? And the foundation felt like you want it to be experts, but you understand how much they've eroded their credibility. So my question, because I don't disagree with you, if I was at 30,000ft, I don't want people going in and trying to mess with the pilot. But I think that the analogy might not quite be right for what we went through. We. What it felt like. I'll just speak for myself, but I think I represent a lot of people. What it felt like was, oh, I'm realizing that the pilot is lying to me. Now, I'm willing to be generous and say the pilot is lying to me because they're trying to stamp out evil and they really believe that, that to trick the American public into taking a vaccine, whatever is the right answer, and that they are doing it with a big heart and that they really just want to help people get where they're going. But, like, when they said, you know, masks don't work, it was just like, come on. Like, that doesn't make any sense. And then they flip and they're like, no, of course, actually, masks do work. And we were just lying to you because we needed to get them into the medical professional's hands. So it's like just slowly, slowly they start eroding and you suddenly realize everybody has an agenda. Now that I get it. But where it starts to be a problem for me is when, if, if we understand that experts have an agenda. And, and I'll even. I had Peter Attia on my show, who's a medical expert. Amazing. And if, if he tells me to do something, I basically just do it. Like, he's unbelievable. And he. In his new book, he talks about how you actually can be fat and healthy. And when he said that, my first impulse was, Peter, you can't tell people that because even if it's true, it's in such a, like, edge case, narrow percentage. And the vast majority of the bell curve are all people who are fat and unhealthy. And if you give them the out, they're going to take it, they're never going to make any changes and they're going to die and they're going to raise their kids worse and their kids are going to have shorter life expectancy. And I really had an emotional response of like, you can't tell people that even if it's true. But in that moment I realized, oh, this is the very thing that drives your voucher.
- [19:33]
Sam Harris
Yeah.
- [19:33]
Tom Bilyeu
So I'm like, you. You can't. So I was like, well, if it's true, it's true. And the consequences are going to be what the consequences are going to be. So then I start going, okay, then if I can't just more myself around, experts are going to know and they're going to be able to say. Because I don't think 3 years ago Peter would have written this book. I don't think he had the insights into it. So even somebody as bright as him, over time is changing. So experts don't really know what's right and what's wrong, especially not in a hot and heavy situation like that. On top of that, there are inevitably going to be things that I think should be said, somebody else thinks shouldn't be said, or vice versa. And so now you get to. Okay, well, if we can all agree we're only going to say what's true. Like even that I think is a task. But let's say that we all agree that we're only going to say what's true. Now this gets really complicated. And I will put forth that what I think is quote, unquote true is based on perspective, interpretation, and reinforcement. So there's physics, which we don't even understand fully, and then there's everything else. And Because a gigantic part of everyday truth, and I don't know if that will help us get to a sort of in the weeds, working definition, but everyday truth seems to be predicated on that. You have to take into account the person's perspective. So how do they see the world? Blue, Red.
- [21:08]
Sam Harris
Right.
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Tom Bilyeu
You have to take into account their interpretation. So looking at data, some people are going to say, no, it doesn't show that. It shows this. And you can get people that look at the data and just violently disagree on what it shows.
- [21:21]
Sam Harris
Yeah.
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Tom Bilyeu
And then you've got the reinforcement. So if they put out a tweet saying their version of the truth and they get a wall of reinforcement, then they're just one that feels good. They're going to see it more and more and more and more and more. And so just the sheer repetition of it all.
- [21:38]
Sam Harris
Yeah.
- [21:39]
Tom Bilyeu
Any of those pieces feel wrong?
- [21:43]
Sam Harris
Well, I think the thing you pointed to there in your conversation with Peter is important to focus on because people have a very hard time just keeping track of everything that's said and keeping things in proportion. And so I think your intuition that it's dangerous to be precisely true on that point because most people, most of the time, will draw the wrong message. That is the style of thinking, as you observe, that our public health officials were too encumbered by. Right. Like, they were aware that they were messaging into a very dirty information landscape. Right. It's just polluted with conspiracy thinking and frank lies. And we had a president who was, you know, by turns minimizing everything and lying about it. I mean, just telling pointless lies. Like, you know, we have 15 cases and it's going to go away, you know, immediately. Right. And so the end, there was just this basic fact that's quite inconvenient in the case of a pandemic, that it's this moving target where we're finding that we don't actually don't understand what we thought we understood yesterday. Right. So the message is changing. It's not that we have a completely clear message that is still difficult to parse, and we have to be careful. We have to talk to people like children, or at least in a kind of paternalistic way, and say, okay, listen, most fat people are not healthy. It's generally not healthy to be fat. Virtually every fat person would be healthier if they were less fat. But it's still possible to be healthy if you're fat. And there are people who are skinny who are not healthy. And it gets confusing, but you can't really go wrong with this basic message that you want to be thin and fit and you want to do the things you want to be on your way to being thin and fit. At minimum, you want to be active, you want to be eating well, et cetera. In the case of COVID the truth was getting overturned by further revelations. I mean, the truth with respect to the disease, the epidemiology of it, how contagious it was, how dangerous it was, we were getting new variants, or literally the disease itself was changing. What we understood about vaccines was changing. You know, initially, in the beginning, there was every reason to believe, at least there was every reason to hope that the vaccines would block transmission. And therefore not getting vaccinated was a decision not just with respect to your own health, but the health of the people around you. Later on, that began to unravel and it was clear, okay, that doesn't really block transmission all that much, maybe a little bit, but not really. So therefore it's a personal decision and it's not, you know, a decision that you're making for others. You're not a bad citizen, therefore, if you don't get vaccinated. We were messaging into an environment where there's so much misinformation around, specifically things like vaccines, right? There's literally like an anti vaccine cult that was, had been. Has been working in the background of our culture for decades. And this was their moment to really kind of seize the reins of, you know, social, the social media conversation at least. So it was understandable that our public health officials and doctors generally felt like, okay, we gotta keep this really simple. This has gotta be idiot proof. Get faxed. Covid is dangerous. Wear a mask. You know, don't wear a mask when you're stealing the masks from people who don't get, who are first line responders, who need the ppe. But once we had enough, wear a mask. And the problem was when that began to unravel, there were so many clear moments of dishonesty where anyone who was going to have their trust broken with mainstream institutions just, they broke up right there. And they seemingly broke up permanently. It was just, okay, you're going to tell me that I have to get vaccinated because it stops transmission. And now I'm hearing that it no longer stops transmission. Okay, I'm done, right? And then the other problem is that now we have an information landscape where basically everything survives. There is not the normal Darwinian contest between sources of information where if something gets sufficiently discredited, you never hear from it again. The Internet is big enough and friction free enough such that you can be a complete lunatic who everyone knows is a complete lunatic, and yet you create an ecosystem that enough people love and you can figure out how to monetize it. You can have an audience of a million people forever, it seems. Right. And literally you could be saying that, that, you know, the craziest case is something like QAnon, where it's like the actual claim that people are bonding over is that the world is being run by child raping cannibals. And among those cannibals are people like Michelle Obama and Tom Hanks. And I mean, it's just.
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Tom Bilyeu
I always knew it.
- [27:12]
Sam Harris
Yeah. I mean, so it's like, okay, we're really saying that these people are cannibals and pedophiles and we're going to spend a lot of time having this conversation amongst ourselves. We don't care if the rest of the world thinks we're crazy, because in this space, this is just our playground. This is our information playground. There's nothing. We're not bumping into any hard objects here because we have as much information real estate as we want to carve out for ourselves. I mean, that didn't used to be. It used to be that if you wanted to publish books or publish print newspapers or magazines, you needed enough contact with the normal kind of reinforcement of just mainstream consensus that you would survive financially. There's something about the Internet that has just made the cost of spreading information go to zero. And when you're dealing in bits and no longer dealing in atoms and everything survives and persists in some basic sense.
- [28:19]
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- [29:19]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. I think it's important to really understand what that mechanism is. So it's what I'll call velocity of information. If you have a better name for it, I'm all for it. But there's something about packaging an idea up in an environment where there's so much information, all you can digest is the headline. When something is hyper transmittable that it just has, you know, whether it's clever, it rhymes it, whatever that has just that little bit of extra juice on it. It's something that's funny memified that it's, it's really going to burn through culture.
- [29:52]
Sam Harris
Yeah.
- [29:52]
Tom Bilyeu
Now for me, where this all begins to become deeply problematic is that it? It isn't so much that just the Internet is forever, it's that Socrates hated democracy because he didn't think people were smart enough to parse through the information. And he thought you shouldn't be able to vote in this thing if you're not educated on this thing. And the reality is most people aren't going to be educated and therefore democracy is really not going to survive. So I take a totally different approach to this, which is I think that if you create an environment where everybody gets to vote in a world that has the velocity of information that we have, information is free to send, it's easy to package it up, roll up into headlines. There's no doubt that a lot of misinformation is going to get out there. And people just don't even know where to check, where to turn to know who's who, what's what. That will have very negative consequences. But the only flip side of that that I see is top down authoritarian control. Where it's like I decide, whoever I is, the government, Twitter, YouTube, whoever, they decide what's real information and what's not. Because what people are trying to get back to is what you were talking about before, where information velocity was slow, that you had to go to a print piece of newspaper, they even put extra checks where it was like it had to be vetted by three sources or whatever. And I'm not saying yellow journalism didn't exist, of course it did. But there were self imposed constraints. There was a business model that let even those self imposed constraints really be financially viable. It was just harder to do, harder to get out there. And so by reducing it, there were only so many narratives that you were going to be able to get out. So even if New York, you know, back in the 20s or whatever had 50 newspapers just in New York City, that's still Only New York City. You're not dealing with a global readership, right? So you have just this natural constraint. Now, once nature isn't giving you the constraint anymore, the second you want that constraint from the top down, you now step into what I call the trifecta of evil. And the trifecta of evil is three books that I read. They technically have nothing to do with each other, but just completely explain how all of this goes awry and has made me absolutely terrified of top down authoritarian control far more than I am afraid of the absolute chaos of a thousand Alex Jones. So the three books are the Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Mao, the Unknown Story, and then the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. And those three books tell you just how wrong things go when people are told, shut up, your opinion doesn't matter and this person knows better and you're just going to get in line.
- [32:46]
Sam Harris
And the great thing about the Mao book is that I hadn't realized how evil Mao was. I mean like, I thought he was like a junior level of evil compared to Stalin and Hitler. It's just like. But you read that book and it's just, I mean the details are just so sadistic and. Sadistic. Unbelievable.
- [33:04]
Tom Bilyeu
I literally had no idea when I started reading that book. The fourth, if I were going to do an honorable mention to give Stalin some more love would be Red Famine. Yeah, that book is, is shocking. Shocking. Have you read it?
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Sam Harris
No, but I've, I've read a lot about Stalin.
- [33:23]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. I don't know if I can recommend it. There's this one part where a woman telling a tale, a woman comes up and looks through another woman's. This is in The Ukraine, starving, 1921 or whatever, and she looks through the window and catches her neighbor eating her seven year old daughter.
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Sam Harris
Right?
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Tom Bilyeu
And just like, yeah, I just, I can't imagine. So that, that scares me a lot more than we're all having a hard time figuring out what is true. Now I have a pitch for how I think we figure out what is true. That is certainly going to be flawed. But the, the first thing I want to, to either agree, debate, whatever is. Do you agree that this is sort of the sequencing of events, that we have this wall of information, it's coming in too fast. It's all rolled up into headlines. There's no nuance. Most people probably aren't smart enough to deal with the nuance anyway. And now temptation one is to just go, oh dear elites pre masticate all of this for us. And Tell us what to do. We tried that. They have agendas. Even if they're really being sincere and trying to be good, they have agendas. And that just feels absolutely shitty. Feels like you're being manipulated. It breaks all your trust. Can't do that. So the other one is, you know, just absolute top down, do what the fuck you told, shut up, and this is it. Both of those strike me as horrendous. And that leaves the third option, which is free speech, which has become contentious somehow. So as a child of the 80s, to me that's like the greatest thing ever. I'm all for free speech. I love what Elon is doing on Twitter, I think it's amazing. But at the same time, I know that's not widely shared. I'm not even sure where you fall down.
- [35:03]
Sam Harris
Yeah, no, I can push back on some of that. Well, so a couple of distinctions. One is that it's not just that everything gets boiled down to headlines, right? I mean, that is a problem. Sometimes the headline doesn't even faithfully represent what's actually in the article. And many people only read the headlines, they never even read the article, Right? So there's that problem. That problem's been with us for a while. There's the algorithmic boosting of outrage and misinformation preferentially, which is the problem, and on social media and the distinction. So I would make one distinction, which is, and this is many people have made this like freedom of speech and freedom of reach are different things, right? So you should be free to post whatever you want to post, but it is a choice on the side of the social media company to preferentially boost or dampen whatever they want to boost or dampen, right. So as to change the character of the conversation. And they have to make decisions there to make. No decision is itself a decision. So if you're going to make it completely flat, people will have one experience. If you're going to tweak it algorithmically, people have a different experience and that is a business choice that they are incentivized to make largely because they have a terrible business model. I mean, the gaming of attention is a bad business model, I would argue. So the fact that it's an ad based attention economy has a lot to do with what we, with the original sin of social media, I think, is the business model. And if these were all subscription businesses, I think we could have a different, we could have a different landscape there with respect to social media, but still there would be a moderation burden and it's something that it seems like they're never going to get right even. I mean, except for in the presence of something like omniscient AI that we could trust, I don't see how your effort to moderate what hundreds of millions of people say to one another, or even in some cases, billions of people, that's always going to produce casualties. It's always going to produce somebody who was just a completely valid academic who just took an edge case position and got flagged as a Nazi or whatever. And there has to be some process of appeal, et cetera. The other distinction I would make is that there's a big difference between governments silencing speech and actually punishing people for errant speech, and companies, private companies, or even publicly held companies deciding that they want to be associated with or not associated with certain kinds of speech. Right. And so when I look at this from through a free speech lens, from a US centric First Amendment lens, we should acknowledge that most of the world doesn't have the protection of the First Amendment and they're worse off for it. And so if you're living in the UK and you're perceiving this debate, you're looking at it as someone who feels stifled by the reality that you don't have a First Amendment to default back to. And that's, you know, I've been slow to appreciate just how different that is politically and ethically for people. So speaking from the US context, I think we have it right that the government should not make any kind of speech illegal with a few exceptions like inciting violence. So I think you should be free to be a Nazi and say your Nazi things, and you should be free to reap the reputational costs of that right. People now know you're a Nazi. They don't want to do business with you. They vilify you on their forums. But the question is, should a platform like Twitter or any other platform be legally required to associate with Nazis? Right. Can they have in their terms of service, a no Nazis policy? And I think my free speech concern now is aimed at the owners and employees of those platforms. So I'm thinking about the person who starts a social media company. The truth is, we're going to do this. This is an experiment, because as you might imagine, my faith that you can actually produce a social media platform that works is pretty low. But for waking up my meditation app, we are going to launch basically a forum of some kind and that will very quickly have tens of thousands and even some hundreds of thousands of people in it, presumably, should I be able to have a no Nazis policy now? I'm not expecting any Nazis. I mean, first of all, this is a subscription business, so there's already a gatekeeping function that is helpful there, I think, ensuring a kind of good faith and quality. But anyone who needs free access to Waking up also gets it. So there's a lot of free users of it. So it's not a perfect paywall. I think when I start a platform like that, first of all, I should be able to just zero it out overnight. Like, if it's not working, if I don't like the way this is working, I should be able to just send everyone email saying, sorry, you guys broke this place. I don't like the conversation. This is over. Right? Actually, I told Jack Dorsey when he was still running Twitter that he should just delete it and he'd win the Nobel Peace Prize and he would deserve it. So I think you should be free to delete your social media account if you in fact own it. And you should be free to decide, okay, these are the standards of conduct in this space. Like it's, you know, this is true. If you open a restaurant or if you open a movie theater, if you open any public space, it doesn't change. If it's merely digital, you should be able to set the terms of service. And if it's a no Nazi space, well, then Nazis are not welcome here. Right? So you. If you demonstrate that you're a Nazi, we kick you out of our platform.
- [41:29]
Tom Bilyeu
Now I. So I'll grant you that any company should be able to do what they want to do. If Hooters wants to hire only attractive women, by all means, let them hire only attractive women. If someone wants to do a female only company, I don't have a beef with it. I don't even have a beef. If Harvard only wants to, you know, if Harvard wants to make it near impossible for an Asian student to get in, as long as they are clear and transparent and don't take government money, I'm all for it.
- [41:53]
Sam Harris
Right?
- [41:53]
Tom Bilyeu
I don't care. But the transparency matters to me. But my real question is like, as we think about actually solving the problem. And so I'm asking this largely in the connotation of 2024 is coming. We're going to be running into this again. I really think the right way to set the table is you've got people on the left and people on the right who both think that the other side is evil. They both think that they have recognized the problem reincarnate. And if we don't establish a new sense making mechanism for a world in which the velocity of information is this fast, AI is coming. So deepfakes are going to be a real thing. We need a method that we can all rely upon in order to think through these problems. Well, and so where I come down on free speech isn't whether a private company should be able to limit the reach of somebody that's a Nazi or say I don't want Nazis on my platform, that's fine. There is a real consequence to that though, which is then it just bifurcates and you get the right and the left because that's really what's being argued about. As far as I can tell, there's, I have not seen any of what I would call real Nazi like stuff. It's normally just behavior. People don't like it, it's coming from the opposite side of the aisle. So when I say okay, what is the right way to deal with this? My answer is I think everybody needs to distrust themselves a little. So they should not assume that they are right. Everybody should be willing to put their ideas forward on how they think through the problem. So rather than only listening to experts, it's like, hey, I'm an expert or I'm not. But this is how I think about the problem. This is how I've ended up with this conclusion. I've looked at this or I've studied that, whatever, but this is how I come to this conclusion. And then to want the collision of ideas. And the second people are more worried about bad ideas being out there, they're either saying I completely give up to this velocity of information problem. So we have to just choke it and we have to make sure that there's, there's only the authorized information or you accept the, the consequences of letting the ideas battle it out in the public consciousness. And as far as I can tell, the second you say the people aren't smart enough to battle these ideas out, the system of information distribution is so broken that it's, it's unsafe maybe isn't the perfect word, but you'll never get a good outcome by doing that. You can't have democracy like it. It is literally only in the face of the ability for people to say what they believe is true and to battle out those ideas that we have any hope of people really understanding as close to the sort of unsculptured way of presenting an idea that we're going to get. And look, there are going to be people that won't be able to navigate that mess. And so I'm certainly not saying that this is perfect, but when I step back and look at the reality of the landscape that we're in, algorithmically controlled, all of that, everybody has a voice in social media, et cetera, et cetera, I don't see a way around it.
- [45:01]
Sam Harris
Well, so we don't have a pure democracy. Right. It's not like you just get online and vote and it's one person, one vote. And then we decide whether we go to war with Russia based on the tally, we pick representatives. And there, I think it's important that we have representatives who are not blown around like weather vanes by just whatever's happening on Twitter that day. Right. So, yes, they need to care about what their constituents want. But. But I think it's good that there's a looseness of fit between what 500 people in the government do and the cacophony on social media that may be to some degree informing their impression of what their constituents want. So we need serious people in serious roles of responsibility. And insofar as we're losing that, and there's definitely signs that we are losing that. I mean, we've got at least one person in Congress who, when our state is on fire, she speculates that maybe it's Jewish space lasers starting those fires. This is Marjorie Taylor Greene. Yeah, yeah. Marjorie Taylor Greene has heard that there were some space lasers put up there by Jews. I think it was Rothschild funding that could start fires. And we might want to look into that. Right. So insofar as that is happening, that we're getting people so anti establishment that they are effectively lunatics in positions of real power, I think that's a. Maybe that problem has always been with us to some degree, but at least I am perceiving it certainly post Trump as uniquely worth worrying about at this moment. That populism is tending to promote candidates that almost by definition have fewer institutional commitments with all the good and all the bad that that entails. Right. But there's a lot that's good that if you care about the last hundred years of scientific knowledge and your statements about, say, something like climate change is going to be constrained by a basic awareness of what most climate scientists most of the time think about climate change, you're one kind of representative. If you're somebody who's just going to freewheel based on what they heard Alex Jones say, literally, Trump gave his first interview, I think, to Alex Jones. There's a difference of kind of the center of narrative gravity there in populism that I think we need to worry about. And there's obviously right wing and left wing variants of populism. Both are problematic, but we have to recognize that there are asymmetries. So what you seem to be recommending is that we basically talk to everyone, give everyone a fair hearing. It's only when you just bring sunlight to everything that people are going to be able to make up their minds and they're not. And they're going to. Left and right are still going to demonize one another, but we're going to approach something like maximum understanding if we just talk about everything. So why not have RFK junior On your podcast? Rogan brings him on the podcast and just rfk, give me the world as you see it. Tell me who killed your father, who killed your uncle? What do you think about these vaccines? Do vaccines cause autism and just let him go for four hours? The downside with that is that even in the presence of somebody who is a subject matter expert, who's there to provide some kind of guardrails to that conversation, there is an asymmetry between the time and effort it takes to make a mess and the time and effort it takes to clean it up. Right. And whether it's even possible to clean it up given the resources available. Right? So if somebody is, if someone's just going to make up lies in front of you, even if you're an expert in that area, there's only so much you can do because they're playing with a completely different kind of information physics, right? They're just going to make something up. So you might be a, a climate change expert or a vaccine expert. And if you have somebody who's a pure conspiracy theorist on those topics, in my experience, you're sitting with someone who is very often unscrupulous enough to just make stuff up or to be so delusional in the way they have interacted with even valid information in the past that the word salad they're going to produce is effectively just a tissue of lies. And yet there may be no way to actually interact with it in an honest way in real time, on Rogan's podcast or anywhere else so as to properly debunk it. So you can't.
- [50:21]
Tom Bilyeu
Let's take RFK Jr as an example. Do we think that he is wrong and well intentioned, or do we think he is sinister?
- [50:34]
Sam Harris
Well, wrong and well intentioned can cover for a lot of dangerous error, right? I mean, you can really make a mess being wrong and well Intentioned. I think with him, he's so, he's got so much sunk cost. He's so. First of all, there's so many, like there is a, just a, a characterological psychological phenotype that just is addicted to the contrarian take on more or less everything. So it's just like. And it's not an accident the people who are all in on the JFK conspiracy, no way it was a single shooter. No way Oswald was a patsy, whatever it is. Right. Those people by and large tend to just jump on all the other conspiracies, whether it's, you know, the moon landing or 911 truth or it's like they. And you have someone like RFK Jr. Where it's, it seems I don't know the man, but I've, you know, I've been paying attention of late. It seems like there's, there's almost no conspiracy that he doesn't have an appetite for. Right? So when someone says, well, what about Bill Gates injecting transponders into us with the vaccine? He's got time for that, right? He doesn't say, oh no, that's. I mean, you really think Bill Gates is doing that? That's just. Isn't that obviously bullshit? No, no. He's like, well, this is something we really have to look into. It's like, I don't have verbatim what he said on that, but it was, he's way too open minded on points like that. Right. And so it is with everything. And now it's deeply inconvenient for someone like me at a moment like this to have to recognize some of these conspiracies turn out to be true. Right? And some always looked plausible from the very beginning. So, like the origins of COVID coming from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Right. Like, is it a lab leak or is it the wet market? Well, it always looked plausible that it could be a lab leak, Right. That was always a valid thesis worth worrying about and investigating. And it was never racist to speculate that that might have been the case. Right? So the fact that our medical establishment tried to tamp that down in a completely bad faith way, and maybe for reasons that are. If you dig deeper into Fauci and into the other players, maybe they really are. There are some deeply invidious things to discover about people's conflict of interest and research we funded and now we don't want to admit we funded or whatever it was. I mean, there was that moment in Congress where Fauci and Rand Paul were kind of debating the meaning of gain of function research and Fauci looked like to many people's perception and actually shared it at the time he looked like he was just doing this sort of talmudic hair splitting on what the phrase gain of function meant. Whereas Rand Paul was saying just be honest with the American people. Like, you know, that if you are changing the function of the dynamics of a virus such that it spreads more among humans, that's gain of function, you know, by any other name. So maybe there's something sinister beneath all of that. Right? So here's one conspiracy among all these other conspiracies that, that people, people were branded as conspiracy theorists for entertaining and yet it was always plausible to be worried about that.
- [54:18]
Tom Bilyeu
But this by the way is exactly the thing that I'm worried about. So it becomes very easy to shut people down to say, oh that's just conspiracy and to start having the apps get involved. So YouTube marking it as like, oh, you talked about Ivermectin this, shutting this episode down. Like just so many things coming at you at once trying to say this is outside the Overton window. And so my, my whole thesis is, is very simple, that the, in a world where there's too much information coming in, the answer cannot be to choke it off, to try to limit the amount of information because you will get that wrong. It is manipulative by its very nature. The closest thing you're going to get is to let ideas battle out. There are going to be consequences. I want to be very clear there. We probably, when it comes to things like this, you were better off when you had trusted but hyper limited media sources that could at least get everyone to walk towards the exits in a calm and orderly fashion. So I'm not denying that. But that world is over. And so now you really only have two options that I can see you either top down, clamp down, or, and I'll lead people back to my trifecta of evil or you go, there are going to be consequences to letting people battle the ideas out in public. And they're going to be a lot of people that get confused by things that should never be taken seriously. And they're going to be taken seriously and we're going to have lives lost because of that. But it will balance out and we won't have lost all of our faith. And you're not going to get the small guy trampled to death, sent off to the gulag, killed because he's an inconvenient voice, whatever the case, which Also opens the door to the power grabs. And now you get will to power, which we saw a lot in Covid was like, oh, I can get a little bit of power. And so it draws people into that. So you get power grab. Power grab. So when I think back, and in fact, maybe the right way to ask the question is, and, and I want to keep this tied to rfk. I don't, I don't want to depart from that yet. So you've got rfk. Your view is that he's making things up, that it's conspiracy, maybe just personality wise, he's drawn to it. I don't hear you saying that you think he's sinister. Just, that's just how his mind works. Other people, though, think that he's bang on, that he's right. You've already admitted that he'll probably end up being right about some of these things. I know you well enough to know you're going to say, well, there's nuance. And if you're right for the wrong reason, you really do have to think that through. It's not enough just to be right. We'll set that aside for now. So you've got this guy conspiracy minded, not being sinister, probably will be right about some of these things, but probably you still don't want him to be platformed. And then it becomes, well, but, but
- [57:05]
Sam Harris
the crucial distinction again is between it being illegal to platform him or just the choice for any private.
- [57:11]
Tom Bilyeu
I only care about the choice. I want to know why. Because you are such a potent sense maker. There's so many of us that are like children of Sam Harris, where you really helped us think about putting these ideas together. And then there's something in this one, two punch of COVID Trump where all of a sudden I felt like, wait, I've been using the tools you gave me. And now the way that now I feel like you're using a different set of tools. And so I'm trying to remap, like, because here's how I approach you right now. Obviously I've watched some portion of the Internet go, sam's brain broke. He used to be Sam Harris. Now Sam Harris, you did your own podcast about it, which is brilliant, by the way, where you're like, some portion of my audience thinks like, what have you done? I forget the exact phrase you used. But like, you're so aware of how people have responded, but you've stayed really steady. So I'm like, okay, then maybe there's something here I'm just not getting, which is why I keep laying my thing out. Because you don't feel erratic to me. But I want to understand you're layering ideas that allow you to make sense of this in a way where you're calm. If people are going to freak out on Twitter, I'm just going to step back. I'm going to keep doing my thing. Being with you does not feel like I'm in the presence of someone who's on a manic episode or anything. You feel, as ever, sort of calm and centered. And so because I am skeptical of my own approach, I want to understand yours. Now, I'm not going to pull back on the parts where I think that it doesn't make sense. I'll say it doesn't make sense, but I actually do want to understand. So where I was going with that is I don't worry about illegal. Not illegal. I just want to know why you think it makes sense to deplatform or to not platform. Maybe a more accurate way to say it. To not platform someone like RFK Jr. When the founding fathers said, hey, the one thing you don't want to fuck with, make sure people can say whatever the hell they want.
- [59:11]
Sam Harris
Okay, well, it matters what the platform is. So, you know, with it, with a podcast, it's very simple. You're only going to do. I'm only going to do, you know, 40, 50 podcasts this year. I just have to make a choice. It's an editorial choice. It's a publishing choice. What do I want to pay attention to? Whose book do I want to read? Who do I want to talk to?
- [59:30]
Tom Bilyeu
You know, most people you have said don't like. There are certain people you don't think should be put on a platform. Trump was one.
- [59:37]
Sam Harris
Certain people I wouldn't talk to for specific reasons.
- [59:40]
Tom Bilyeu
Right. You're not talking. Fair enough. But are there people that you think should never be platformed?
- [59:45]
Sam Harris
Well, I think if you're going to platform. So what I said about RFK on my podcast is that if you're going to platform him, you have a journalistic responsibility to do your homework, not only in anticipation of the things he's going to say on your podcast, but you need to catalog the things he's already said, which are obviously bullshit that you should challenge him on. Right. So, you know, there is just a widespread scientific consensus at this point that there is no link between childhood vaccines and autism. Right now, autism is a problem. Autism rates have gone up. We don't understand autism, but people have gone deep studying the MMR Vaccine, but just vaccines in general and autism and found no linkage. Right. So and he is out there telling people, anyone who will listen, that there's every reason to believe that vaccines cause autism or we should be worried about it, or you know, or you know, I'm hearing from mothers who have seen the clear correlation. They had a normal kid on Tuesday and on Wednesday they got vaccinated and you know, the autism started. Right. So he is spreading that fear and as far as I can tell, it's on the basis of no valid scientific information. Now this is now linked up with everyone else's concerns about COVID vaccines and just the reliability of medicine in general and bad incentives and pharmaceutical companies and there's a lot of there there in stuff that's worth worrying about. I mean, I think a profit driven motive in medicine is something that we're always going to be in tension with because what we want the medical establishment to be recommending drugs because they're safe and truly safe and effective to people who truly need them. Right. We don't want people in the privacy of their own minds or in the privacy of their board meetings celebrating how they're going to make billions of dollars at this new opportunity because they can market this drug successfully to people who may not need it, may not benefit from it, maybe in fact be harmed by it. So it's that disalignment of incentives that is specific in the case of medicine, that is, I think people are understandably uncomfortable with. But so in the narrow case, when you're talking about having a podcast, first of all, the burden is not on you to platform everybody. You can just decide who you want to talk to. If you're going to talk to someone like RFK Jr. I think given his track record and given how much I think genuine misinformation he has spread and consequential misinformation, I think you have a responsibility not to just put a mic in front of him and let him rip. You actually need to debunk him and maybe bring on someone who can also debunk him. Now again, as I said, and you
- [62:53]
Tom Bilyeu
would have no problem with that. So if it was done in a debate format with another expert or superior expert, then it's we're good.
- [63:01]
Sam Harris
Yes, except the asymmetry I pointed out before still applies if he's going to just make stuff up. Right? So like, you know, he will. I mean, the example I mentioned on my podcast, he's been telling a story, I think in several venues that he had collaborated with the journalist Jake Tapper, 15 years ago on a documentary, they had just put in a ton of effort. They did a really deep dive on the link between vaccines and autism. And at the last minute, Jake Tapper called him and said, listen, we're going to pull this. In all my years as a journalist, I've never had this experience, but this just came down from corporate. They're just pulling the plug on this. I'm so sorry. So the punchline for him, and I'm not sure if he said this on Rogan, he definitely said this on some podcasts I listened to. Punchline for him is, okay, the pharmaceutical companies have such a pull with. I mean, they spend so much money with CNN and these other outlets that if they don't want something to air, it's not going to air, right? That's how corrupt journalism is now. Now, if I was on a podcast debating RFK Jr. And he trotted out that story, I would just have to eat it. I would say, all right, man, well, that's bad. I agree. That looks bad right now, Jake Tapper has published an article saying, this is just a lie, right? This is just like. This has, like a 2% relationship to what actually happened. There was nothing about it being. It's just. It's all upside down. And I keep debunking this. And he keeps telling this story, right? So unless you know that it doesn't matter that you're a vaccine expert or you could be an expert in a dozen relevant disciplines, if someone's just going to make up a story that is perfectly shaped to tickle the contrarian, they're all a bunch of fucking liars. Part of the brain. He still lands that blow in real time on a podcast. There's no way to debunk it in real time. You literally need Jake Tapper. You need to pull him out of the woodwork for that particular point.
- [65:26]
Tom Bilyeu
But isn't.
- [65:27]
Sam Harris
There are many things like that. That's the thing. So someone who has this style of reason, again, some of it's conscious lying, some of it's misremembering, some of it's. They're reading studies and they're not understanding them and they're pulling half truths out of studies that can be made to seem real. And so they're making such a mess that it is genuinely hard to be an expert in that, Riding shotgun on all of that and debunking in real time. But the only responsible way to do it would be to have an expert there to try to do that. I think it's worth stepping back and asking the question, well, why is anyone listening to RFK junior About vaccines at all? He's not an expert in the relevant domain, right? I mean he's not an expert in epidemiology, he's not an expert in immunology, he's not a vaccine guy. He's like, he's not. But he's a lawyer and an activist who got this particular bee in his bonnet 20 years ago and he's just made a lot of noise about this. And interestingly, he's also a climate science activist, right? And there you can see a very bizarre mismatch between how he deals with mainstream scientific consensus in climate and how he, he disavows mainstream scientific consensus on the topic of vaccines. And I mean everything is flipped. I mean he's just like, he's got all the this.
- [67:03]
Tom Bilyeu
With the American Express Platinum card, you can access over 3, $500 in annual value with benefits and eligible purchases across travel, entertainment and more. There's nothing like platinum. Learn more@americanexpress.com Explore Platinum Enrollment Requirements monthly and other limits. In terms of pie, this is the perfect example for me of the very thing that I'm worried about. So here you have a guy, he's either sinister and wants to help the climate, in which case I think most people have cognitive dissonance, or he's sinister and wants people to not take vaccines that are going to save their life, or he's maybe right about something that other people disagree with. Or maybe he's wrong but well intentioned.
- [67:43]
Sam Harris
So I think wrong but well intentioned covers for a lot. I mean, just think about the vaccine thing is really a unique case because what you have is an intervention on a healthy person, very often a child that is nevertheless risky to some degree. Some number of people are going to have a bad reaction, some number of people are going to die from. I mean this is just everyone's worst, certainly every parent's worst nightmare. I let them stick a needle in my child and he was never the same or he died. So you just have to hear one story like that. It doesn't even have to happen to you. It could be a friend of a friend of a friend. You hear this story and you think, man, it's not worth it. I don't. In the case of childhood illness, infectious disease, you can, as basically everyone who doesn't get their kids vax does. You can just be a free rider on this larger system of herd immunity. You can say, listen, most people are going to Be vaccinated for measles. I don't even have to get my kid vaccinated. I'm not going to run this risk. I'm just going to opt out. And so he's intersecting with totally understandable fears that get. Wherein specific anecdotes, specific stories get amplified to the. I mean, they're above data. They're more important than data. You can show me all the data in the world. I know what happened to my kid. Right? That's again, scientifically, that's all upside down, but it is so compelling.
- [69:30]
Tom Bilyeu
What should we do though, with people that are in that situation? Because for me, if a parent doesn't want to vaccinate their child, I do not think you should be able to force them. Even at the height of COVID where I was like when I really believed everybody just needs to go get vaccinated. And some people were like, I don't want to do it. I was like, word, then fine. Like I. That just feels so. It felt wrong to me. And this is where it feels like everybody needs to have a moral compass. Part of where I think the breakdown is happening. I've heard you refer to something as a great unraveling. Now, I don't know what you mean by that, but I started mapping out what I thought you meant by that. And one of the things that certainly I would mean as a great unraveling is we don't have these shared morals anymore. We don't have one religion to carry us through. And you know, because what I think ends up happening and the thing that you and I have been talking about without really talking about is this is a battle for the truth. If things were clear, they'd be clear. Like if we really knew, like vaccines don't cause autism. Like you, you. If, if vaccines caused autism, it'd be very clear. You just see it, boom, done, right? So it's in some sort of weird, like maybe it does like there's enough credibility there that people can still buy into it. There isn't enough just like unequivocal evidence in the other direction people go. I've looked at this because if it were true, I could just show you this and I could show you this and then people would go down the line. Nobody's arguing about whether what you eat impacts what you shit, right? Everybody just gets it not to tell anybody. I don't have to go convince people. It's just like your life is such proof that there is a one to one relationship between what you put in your mouth and what comes out the other end? So there is some weird gray area.
- [71:15]
Sam Harris
So the question becomes mostly gray area for most things.
- [71:19]
Tom Bilyeu
Right? So now if we know we're living in this area where everything is great, nobody knows who's going to be the expert. You started the conversation by saying, okay, we really do need experts. But no joke, like nine words into your sentence you were caveating. Experts have sort of thrown away their credibility. And so it's like that is the world that we live in. Like this stuff is so complex. So, so the, the thing that we have to take on in head on collision is how do we discover what is true?
- [71:50]
Sam Harris
Well, you do it the way RFK Jr is doing it for climate. Right. You notice that you can find anything.
- [71:59]
Tom Bilyeu
The preponderance of excellence.
- [72:01]
Sam Harris
Yeah, it's like it's not an accident that almost all climate scientists. There's a general principle you have to understand here, is that it's always possible to find a handful of PhDs or MDs who are crazy or conflicted or just for whatever reason disposed to stake out a genuinely disreputable and indefensible thesis. The cigarette companies could always find somebody with a seemingly relevant degree to say, I don't think smoking causes cancer, I don't think it's addictive. You could find that guy and then that guy would sell his wares to the chemical companies that are putting fire retardant in mattresses. And he could say, well, I don't think this is. If it gets into the bloodstream, it's not a problem. You can always find those people. I'm not saying we are always ruled by scientific consensus because there are genuine breakthroughs in science that overturn even a 99.9% consensus. But scientific consensus is still salient and still matters most of the time. And it's not arrived at by accident. And there's so much tension in science to disprove other scientists. Right. It is such a competitive atmosphere that again, there are studies that don't get replicated, there's false ideas that survive far longer than you think they would. But generally speaking, you are not going to go wrong most of the time by lining up with what 99% of specialist X thinks on this very specialized topic. So RFK Jr. Plays that very center of the fairway game on the topic of climate. And he does something completely different when he's talking about medicine. Now, I don't know, maybe he has a story that reconciles that difference. But yes, we need a healthy institutional and scientific conversation such that good Ideas generally survive and bad ideas are generally debunked and that we know that most of the time our experts are real experts. They got that they acquired their expertise by a process that was going to weed out the imbeciles and the delusional and deliver somebody who really. Is arriving at their opinions on the basis of a methodology that we generally can trust. Right. They're not obviously conflicted by, can we
- [75:11]
Tom Bilyeu
lay out that methodology?
- [75:13]
Sam Harris
Well, you're on guard for obvious cognitive bias and wishful thinking and, and certainly bad incentives. So it's understanding. It's like, yes, if RJ Reynolds is funding research into the toxicology of cigarettes, it's not to say that obviously conflicted money is always going to fund a study that is false. I mean, you could run, wouldn't be hard to run, a totally valid study where the money came from, a what would classically be considered the wrong source. But it's easy to see that at least the optics are bad enough that that's not how you want to fund that particular science. Right. And at minimum, scientists have to declare any economic interest they had in any part of this, you know, part of this picture. But the truth is science is deeply flawed, and yet it's better than any other part of culture with respect to how we play this game of just letting ideas collide against one another and seeing what survives.
- [76:24]
Tom Bilyeu
That I agree with. So the problem is, I don't feel like that's what's happening or what's being championed so broadly. And then we can get specific to you and I and exactly what we're saying. But the way that I think about this is you've got even. Even something like science. If you talk to Eric Weinstein, talks about the disk, the. I think it's the distributed information suppression complex. So he talks about how there is, for whatever reason, just inherent into the world of science, there's a certain bias or certain ideas they don't want getting out. Because people have built their entire careers on something, and if you're putting something for it that challenges it unnecessarily, that they're being evil. But it's. It's the same kind of idea of the cigarette guy is going to see what he wants to see and the guy whose entire career collapses if your new idea is right, well, magically, the peer review that you get is terrible. And he's got a laundry list of things like that. And so I'll back up. So in a business context, I created something called the physics of progress, and it was Me trying to teach to my students exactly how you solve novel problems. So I was like, hey, if you want to grow a business, I have no idea what the product is, how the audience is going to respond, what the market situation is going to be like. So you really have to understand how to think through new business, new product, new era, new market dynamics, whatever. And the way that you do that is physics of progress. And I lay this whole thing out and I'm super proud of it, and I'm pitching it to my team, and I'm like, okay, you're going to start with, where are you trying to get to? What's your goal? You're going to identify the obstacle between where you're at and your goal. And like, why won't I just automatically achieve my goal? Then you're going to come up with a experiment that you can run, a thing that you can do to try to overcome that obstacle. You're going to do that thing. You're going to look at the data, figure out whether you made meaningful progress. You're going to then reinform your hypothesis about how to overcome that obstacle, and you're going to start over. And one of the guys in my team goes, that's the scientific method. And I was like, is it? I actually don't know the scientific method. And he's like, yeah, that's the scientific method. And I was like, okay, that makes sense to me. That's it. The reason that I called it the Physics of progress, and again, just completely acknowledging it's the scientific method, but the reason that it occurred to me as a physics of progress is because it is the only way to make progress that you're not going to know. You're just taking your best guess. You know where you're trying to get to. You have a guess about what the thing is that's stopping you, you're going to try something. The problem is, and when I teach this, the big issue is when going back to what I was saying is truth. Truth is perception, interpretation, and reinforcement. And at the moment you look at the data. So I ran my test to see if I could overcome that obstacle. I get a result when I look at that data, I'm bringing my perception, my interpretation, and my reinforcement to that. And it's not that I'm evil, but I'm not necessarily going to see what's true. And this is where science then begins to break down. It is the right answer. Like, it is what we need to do. As far as I can tell, it's the only Way to make progress in anything. But what we're living through right now is that moment of the interpretation, the perception and the reinforcement causes you to see something that's not actually there. You're. You're looking at the world through a funhouse mirror. And so what?
- [79:54]
Sam Harris
So how.
- [79:55]
Tom Bilyeu
Sorry, one second. Let me bring this all together. The one thing that I live in perpetual fear of is that you have the guy, the doctor. You'll probably remember his name. I don't. Who was like, you know what I think? After you do an autopsy, you need to wash your hands before you give birth to somebody.
- [80:09]
Sam Harris
Yeah. Semmelweis. Yeah.
- [80:10]
Tom Bilyeu
What? Semmelweis.
- [80:11]
Sam Harris
Semmelweis.
- [80:12]
Tom Bilyeu
Semmelweis. So Semmelweis goes and tells people this, hey, I think this is causing the death of mothers.
- [80:18]
Sam Harris
We.
- [80:18]
Tom Bilyeu
We really have to start washing hands. People make fun of him, lambast him, drive him into an insane asylum where he dies before it's discovered. Oh, yeah, germ theory. He was right. And so that's how wrong this goes. I don't think that humans have changed. I think that we still have that reaction where it's like, it, it. They're not necessarily even trying to be mean. It just doesn't make sense. And it to them and it would cause like, all these changes. And, and we don't really know that this is a thing. And so to me, the people that want to make the decisions, they lack the, the humility to recognize the odds of me being wrong border on 100%. Not, not on everything. But when you take everything in totality, you're going to be wrong and you just don't know about which things. And so if I'm thinking, okay, you've put forth your idea. We need these. We need experts, we need institutional response that we can trust. My thing would be the closest thing I could imagine to that. You have to. Red team, blue team, you've got to get somebody like RFK Jr. Who really believes this is a problem, this is really causing autism. And then you debate it with data that you predict ahead of time. So it comes down to, okay, what was your prediction? What did you think was going to happen? Then you run the experiment. Did it actually happen? Yes or no. And then both sides. Because when you look at the data is the point at which you're most likely to make your errors, bring your biases, all that. You look at the data and then you try to go with a consensus. Now, I don't see any way. And climate is a great one to talk about. I don't see any way to stop all kinds of prolonged debate. But then you hope that when there really is evidence that it starts to be just one by one, all the detractors start falling away. It just becomes too self evident and then you really can get something approaching consensus in action.
- [82:22]
Sam Harris
Yeah, well, so let me see if I can just isolate what we're disagreeing about here because you seem to be imagining that we can have an information landscape, whether, let's say it's on a plateau platform like Twitter or YouTube where it's as flat as there's as much. No one's doing anything deliberate to tune the signal to noise ratio. Right. Because to do that would be to be biasing it based on that answer
- [82:53]
Tom Bilyeu
is I think people are hyper biased. So that is factored into. While I didn't talk about that, that is factored into how I think you have to let the ideas battle so that the wiser, more eloquent fighters, and I think this is probably a lot of some people's pushback on you stepping back somewhat exiting Twitter because they were like, you were the guy I counted on to be able to throw and dodge punches and bring humor and all of that. And so we've lost one of the great fighters of this and that, that gets hard because I don't see myself as talented enough in the idea of public opinion to do that. So you, you have to have people that can dismantle these ideas. Like I've seen you on stage do this particularly with religion, which is outside of where we're at right now in the conversation, but where you have been, you've been funny and it's shareable. The, the clips themselves are amazing because they, they hit and they shake you up, but they're easy to transm. And so when you find a, a great orator, Douglas Murray is another guy that can really do this. That's, that feels to me. And I know you've sort of, you keep saying I'm not the guy to think through Covid or whatever. And I'm like, actually so as long as it's people who are disagreeing respectfully who care about truth, you, you have to as the individual care about truth and you have to not pride yourself on being right. You have to yourself and identifying the right answer. But I, I have a feeling that experts almost need that external panel of people who are like, I'm not invested in this, but I know how to think through novel problems. Here's how I'm parsing this data. Let me ask you really pointed questions. Give me your feedback and then I'll triangulate on an answer that feels like in the reality of how ideas win at scale, that feels the closest to true. But it requires that people be able to say whatever the hell they want that they don't get booted, kicked off, silenced, whatever.
- [85:11]
Sam Harris
Well, but. So let's just take that last claim first. All of these platforms have to kick people off for specific violations of their terms of service. Right? You need some terms of service. As far as I know, even 4chan as a terms of service. Right. I think maybe 8chan doesn't. But like, if you want to be more extreme than 4chan, you have to go somewhere else.
- [85:36]
Tom Bilyeu
So I will give you. Barriers must be put up. Now where we put the barriers we are going to.
- [85:40]
Sam Harris
But the moment you concede that, right, Then you recognize that there's absolutely nothing novel about what Elon is doing on Twitter. He's just biasing it in a way that he likes better than the previous bias. Right? So he brought Kanye on, knowing he was an anti Semite, and then Kanye did something, kicked him off because he realized, okay, I can't really have this happening on my platform. And so it is what I mean, he's cozying up to sort of QAnon lunatics, and he may not even know who he's signal boosting. He's just like glad handing somebody who said something he thought was clever, sent him a meme he thought was clever, and he's actually signal boosting somebody who's just odious in their ideological commitments and in their lying about everything under the sun. Right. And I'm not saying Elon's actually, actually paying attention to all that, but he's doing something incredibly ad hoc and sloppy. And it's still not free speech absolutism. Right? Free speech absolutism just doesn't exist. It doesn't even exist on 4chan, as far as I know. I have this on just good faith because I'm never on. I don't think I've been on 4chan ever, but I think it has a terms of service, and that's why 8chan was spawned. It's like in protest over the puritanical control on 4chan. So what you seem to be recommending is the 4chanification or the a chanification of everything. And what that would be, in my view, if that were happening on YouTube and TikTok and Twitter and. And threads and everywhere else, it would be a maximally noisy, uncivil space. Right. So it would get hard. Insofar as you achieve that ideal of no libtard institutional bias. Right. We're just going to let it rip, right? Anyone with anything to say gets equal chance to say it.
- [87:45]
Tom Bilyeu
That
- [87:47]
Sam Harris
what you're going to have there is just pure cacophony and it's going to be harder and harder to find the signal and the noise. So the moment you admit that, you admit you're in the business of favoring certain voices over others, platforming and even de. Platforming people when they prove on the 10th infraction that they're truly beyond the pale and just committed to making a mess. Right. And what I experienced. And so my leaving Twitter, it was much more of a personal decision. It wasn't a decision that. It was just a decision about how I was going to spend my time and attention ultimately. But the reason why I didn't see a benefit to my staying there is that it's just the wrong space in which to try to have a conversation, like a conversation that converges on anything useful on these kinds of topics or really any polarizing topic. Because I tried. I mean, it was the only social media platform that I ever used personally. I mean, I'm on others, but those are just marketing channels and I never see them. But it was really me on Twitter. I was really trying to make sense to people. What I was getting back was just this tsunami of bad faith attacks and craziness. And what was actually exploding was not just, you know, headlines that were false, but like, you know, in the, in the final case, it was a clip of me on another podcast, which was genuinely misleading as to what I said in context on that podcast. But it simply didn't matter because the clip itself seemed to be. It seemed intelligible enough, it seemed clear enough what I was saying within the clip. Clip that people just, they didn't even want to hear that there was a context.
- [89:36]
Tom Bilyeu
It was the Hunter Biden thing.
- [89:38]
Sam Harris
Yeah, the Biden laptop. So they didn't like, literally, they didn't want to hear. And even like, no one has the bandwidth to go back and find the context for the thing that they just reacted to that just primed all their satisfied, all their salt and sugar and fat receptors. And so when you ask what my principles are, my general principle is to be very on guard for doing that sort of thing myself. So like, even when there's somebody who I know, I understand and revile appropriately, somebody like Trump, I'm still on guard for the clip of him that is actually misleading. And I will actually defend him as much as I find him indefensible. I've burned a fair amount of reputational capital over here on the left by defending him on specific points when I felt that the attack on him was just based on lies. So when he gave a press conference after Charlottesville and said that there were good people on both sides, and he seemed to be saying in that clip that the neo Nazis are good people, right? And that was spun politically from everyone from Biden on down. It was spun by the New York Times. I mean, literally, if I had to bet 95% of the commentariat left of Stentor still thinks he was praising neo Nazis in that press conference. And yet within the context of the press conference, it's. It's absolutely clear that he's not doing that right. He says, within 20 seconds of the clipped piece, he says, I'm not talking about the white supremacists and the neo Nazis. I'm talking about other people who were there who were just worried about monuments getting torn down. And so I think we have to acknowledge that we're in a. A media landscape now where people are being reliably misled by clips. So the underlying ethic here is that when people are arguing in a partisan way, they don't really care what their enemy has said or meant to say. What they want to do is they want to hold them to the worst possible interpretation of what they said and make that stick. Stick. And the game is just see if you can make it stick. See if you can. I've made this claim for years now, and this is more based on what happens to me from the left as opposed to the right. I mean, the example we're talking about now was sort of defamation coming from the right. But I've made this point before, and this is. It's an inconvenient point to make because even this can get clipped out to my disadvantage. But it's worth saying, because this shines as bright as possible, a light on what everyone is doing, and many good people are doing it kind of unthinkingly. So I'm living. I've long known, for at least eight years or so, I've known that I'm in an environment where if I say on my podcast, black people are apes, white people are apes, we're all apes. Racism doesn't make any sense, right? There are some considerable number of people who will clip out me saying, black people are apes, or make a meme, black people are apes. Sam Harris. Right. And they will export that to their channels, apparently with a clear conscience, saying, this is fair game. Right. And that's the kind of people I was dealing with on Twitter. And that's the kind of. The person who clipped that. That clip from that podcast is exactly that sort of person. And he was being signal boosted by lots of other people we could name. And so I just recognize that this is a. It's just the wrong occasion to try to have a conversation with people. It's built into the dynamics of the system where people are incentivized just to dunk on everybody, however dishonestly, and then move on. And part of the pathology I saw with Elon taking over the place was not so much what he was doing to the place as its owner, but just how he was behaving personally on the platform himself. I mean, he was doing the same thing. One of the first things he did after he took over Twitter was he spread this meme about Nancy Pelosi's husband after the hammer attack on him. It's like, it's not what it seems. This could have been a gay trip gone awry. And he linked to a website that had an article to that effect. This was a website which, during the 2016 election, claimed that Hillary Clinton was dead and that a body double was campaigning in her place. Right. So Elon links to that as a source right in front of, at that point, probably 110 million people amplifying a completely crazy conspiracy theory that is that getting spun up in QAnon circles. And then when that gets pointed out to him just how wrong all of that was and how irresponsible it was, he never corrects the record, he never apologizes, he never changes his appetite for doing that again. In that case, I think he just deleted the tweet and moved on. And so it's like even people who. Who reputationally have a tremendous amount to lose by behaving that way, you would think, are goaded into behaving that way because of the mechanics of the platform. For me personally, I simply don't understand how people have audiences that will still follow them after they prove that they don't care to make any of these distinctions. I mentioned Tucker Carlson, the fact that behind closed doors, he's saying that Trump is a demonic force, and then in front of the camera, he's basically messaging to Trumpistan 85% of the time in a very supportive way. I don't understand how, like, in front of my audience, if a similar thing were revealed about me, my audience would just completely disavow me. I mean, I was like, there'd just be no. It would be a complete breach of trust. Trust with my audience. And that's the way I think it should be. But Alex Jones, I mean, Alex Jones has an audience of some tens of millions of people in the aftermath of Sandy Hook, right? He has lied and lied and lied about Sandy Hook being a false flag, fake confection of the Obama administration. They're all crisis actors. The kids never died. Or it's like, I don't know how deep those claims went, but some version of that. None of this is as it seems. He created immense harm, demonstrable harm, with all the Sandy Hook families. I mean, these are families. In many cases, they've had to move home. Some have moved homes 10 times since he started spreading those lies about them. All of this gets kind of, you know, forensically documented at trial. He gets a billion dollar judgment against him. How does he still have an audience? Like, who are these people who are still listening to him?
- [97:40]
Tom Bilyeu
Is that legitimately confusing? Because that one to me is very clear. He's entertaining.
- [97:45]
Sam Harris
All these people are mentally ill or like, what?
- [97:47]
Tom Bilyeu
Like, because I don't. Look, I don't know Rogan well at all, but Rogan keeps having him on. I don't know if he has recently, but since then. But yeah, that I don't know. But certainly my take is that people find him amusing. He's funny, and he's gotten enough weird stuff, right, that people are like, all right, look, he missed. I don't. I know literally nothing about the Sandy Hook stuff. So I'm certainly not defending that. I'm just saying I understand the phenomenon. The phenomenon is that. That this is an age where the algorithm is a big part of the piece of information. And so the reason that certain people become the voice is that they also are able to speak in a way that people find really compelling, entertaining, engaging. And so that person is going to keep going. Alex has a way of delivering information that's zany, it's crazy. It's over the top. You can't believe it's real. He's funny, he's fun to make fun of. And there are enough things that people like. I mean, he gets memed, right? It's like another crazy thing that he said five years ago just, you know, came true. And so he's. He's a bit like the. The Simpsons in that people be like, Yo, Simpsons, 12 years ago predicted this thing. Like, that's insane. So same thing with Alex. But now that doesn't mean that he isn't a destructive force. It just means that it's very easy for me to see why he's entertaining enough that people are going to keep going back to him.
- [99:19]
Sam Harris
I'll grant you the entertainment component, especially in his case. But in his case, perhaps to a lesser degree, but certainly in Tucker's case, there's this pretense of I'm just giving you honest information. I'm just calling it as I see it. This is just what you see is what you get. There's nothing. This is just. There's a fundamental integrity to the message. That's what his audience seems to think they're getting. And then we know that he is a completely different person behind closed doors.