← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Understanding Power, Corruption, Politics, AI, Religion, Tribalism & Free Speech | Sam Harris PT 2
01:48:17
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- [00:01]
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- [00:31]
Tom Bilyeu
Get that MX Gold Card ready. I'm way too tired to cook tonight.
- [00:34]
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- [00:45]
Tom Bilyeu
Yes.
- [00:46]
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- [01:01]
Tom Bilyeu
Welcome back for part two with none other than Sam Harris, public intellectual, author, and creator of the Waking Up Mindfulness app. In Part one, Sam and I got into the breakdown of shared narratives, the manipulation of information, the death of freedom of speech, and the hard reality of deepfakes that is racing towards us as we speak. And now in Part two, we're talking about the Bible losing its position as the gravitational center of Western moral values and what that means for all of us. Elon's Twitter and who gets to determine what's true and should be boosted and what an AI fueled future looks like and its implications for truth and political discord. If you liked Part one, you're going to love Part two. And you're definitely going to love the hundreds of archived episodes and bonuses and that you'll get access to by subscribing to our ad free feed on Apple Podcasts. So head over now and subscribe. In the meantime, I'm Tom Bilyeu and I bring you Part two with Sam Harris. So you've got all right, we all know they I'm just giving you what a dyed in the wool red Republican is going to say. They shouldn't be looking at his private communications and it's a way of not
- [02:19]
Sam Harris
taking the the knowledge on board, correct?
- [02:22]
Tom Bilyeu
I'm not saying it's the right way. I'm just saying this is how he keeps his audience they shouldn't be looking at his private communications. This is exactly what Trump has been warning us about. People getting into your private life, governmental overreach, all of that. And then of course, like he's going to fight for Republican values, even if he thinks that the leadership isn't great and that he'd rather have somebody else. He knows that lying on behalf of a guy that he thinks is demonic, but at least he's Republican is better than. Than the. The outright dangerous. I don't know what words they use for othering the Joe Biden camp, but, like, that's how it's going to be that you would much rather. I mean, it was like when Trump said that, yes, I'm a bully, but I'm a bully for you. It was like, okay, sure, Tucker's not perfect. Sure, he lied to present things well, but I'm kind of glad he did because I need him to represent our side. We have to win against the other. There's this real escalating sense of like, we have to win. The stakes really matter. And in fact, going back to that idea of if. If I look at. So I watched the whole interview that you did where you were talking about the Hunter Biden laptop. And so I'm watching it with an open mind and just like, just a ton of respect for you, Sam. I cannot stress it enough before, after this minute, a year from now, I just can't fathom not really being blown away by how you think and the. All the meditation stuff. You seem sincerely to want to help people. So it was very easy for me to go, okay, I think I get where you're going with this, but for me to interpret that moment the way that you did. This is why I said this is about stopping evil. To me, your interpretation of Trump is that either because he's just a clown on the loose, a dangerous troll, or because he's actually nefarious, either one has the same outcome. So I doubt you split real hairs with that. But he cannot be in control of this company. It is. I don't know if you'd go all the way to existential. Thank you. This country. I don't know if you go all the way to existential or not, but it's like, it's so high risk, finger on the nukes. Asking questions like, why do I have less nukes than JFK back in the 60s? Like, this is as close to unhinged narcissism as you're going to get. It's too dangerous. We are now at a point where. Hey, everybody. Yeah, fine. I will step forward and say that there should be a small group of people that just keep us from this lunacy. And if that means that we have to not, not necessarily bury the laptop, but you cannot let it come out right in a moment where it could possibly sway the election and put that psychopath back in right now. That's where I say that is way more dangerous. And now we can at least talk about what we disagree on. To me, the authoritarian nature of, like, I and some small group of people have decided that Trump is that dangerous and have decided that this laptop revealing at this moment would be dangerous to the Democratic candidacy. So whatever it is that we have to suppress the. We have to suppress it now.
- [05:34]
Sam Harris
That's. Let me just be clear about what my position actually was at the time and what I was actually saying on that podcast. Not especially. Well, my position was it was always a hard judgment call at that point. We're talking about 10 days before the election. This thing comes. It's clearly an October surprise foisted on us, timed intentionally to be hard to parse right before the election. It's just like we're on Rudy Giuliani's timetable. It's like, this is. Like, here. This is when I'm going to show you the laptop. Right. You got 10 days to figure this out. It was meant to detonate politically at that point. And we already knew what happens in the 2016 election when 10 days before an election you say, hey, we got Anthony Weiner's laptop. And now we're reopening the email investigation to Hillary Clinton. We saw that that was her poll numbers by the hour went down, and whether that was decisive or not, who knows? She was unelectable for other reasons. So we had a. So my claim at the time was it was totally understandable for journalists to say, we're not going to be hostage to Rudy Giuliani's timetable here. We have an election in 10 days. First, do no harm. Let's just give this. Let's wait for three weeks to figure out what's true about this laptop. We can't figure out whether this is a Russian forgery. There's reasons to be concerned that it could be Russian disinformation. Who knows what's going on here? Should not be in a rush to create a disaster here politically. And so I viewed each of these platforms having different choices to make. So journalists could decide, do we want to focus on this now, or do we want to give this a little more breathing room? That was an editorial choice that I completely understood and still a genuine hard call. Then you have Twitter deciding not only to whether or not to amplify certain things, they decide to deplatform. The New York Post that had a journalist who decided to write about the story. Right. That was a very different decision, and I think almost certainly the wrong decision. Right. I mean, again, understandable, given the political bias of the people on Twitter. And given the genuine uncertainty as to the ground truth of the validity of the information and where that laptop came from. And I think even in that case, on the New York Post story, one of the reporters who reported it out didn't want to sign his name to the article. I mean, it was the wild west over there in terms of actually doing the journalism. So in my view, it was a coin toss as to what to do there. Now, if you raise the stakes more, you make Trump even more sinister, you make the election even more tenuous, you make the information even more dubious, then the dials change. And so many of these decisions are not decisions you can make categorically in principle. It really is this pragmatic balancing of just what is true and what are the stakes. I'll compare this to another case you spelled out earlier. So you felt that it was obviously wrong to force people to get the MRNA vaccine for Covid. Right? Now, I would grant you, certainly in retrospect, that seems true. But if we change a few of the variables, I think your ethical intuitions and certainly political intuitions would totally change. So you make it a much more obviously effective vaccine that really does block transmission. It's like a sterilizing vaccine. You make it a much more dangerous virus. You make it a virus that's actually preferentially killing kids rather than old people. Right. So now we're in an environment where, like, you're deciding not to get vaccinated is putting my kids at risk. Right. Do you get to make that choice? And you might say, oh, yes, I should be able to make that choice, it's my body. But dial up the deadliness of the pathogen. Give us something like airborne Ebola that incubates for a month, you don't know you have it, and you walk around spreading it and it's got a 75% fatality rate and it's mostly killing kids. No one gets to make that choice anymore. I mean, then literally the cops come in and vaccinate you. And I would say that all of us would agree to that. The moment again, that you turn up the lethality on the pathogen, you turn up the effectiveness of the vaccine, you turn down the risk of the vaccine. Give me a truly safe vaccine where there's not even one documented case of vaccine injury. Right? So then you just have to be completely crazy to be worried about being vaccinated in that kind of environment, then it's just a no brainer then. We just don't tolerate a diversity of opinion because the stakes are too high. It's a full on emergency bodies of kids are being stacked up in parks, right. There's so many of them, we don't know what to do with them. We've got these mobile morgues and we have a vaccine that actually works. And then we've got RFK Jr saying, maybe you don't want to get the jab on Rogan's podcast. Right? That's the world I've been worried about ever since COVID Like a world where the truth is really clear and yet our media environment is so crazy that we can't even talk about it. And we get this. I mean, again, the fact that something like QAnon is possible. Right? The fact that we could have a president who messages to QAnon favorably without disavowing any association. Right. When asked about QAnon, he says, well, they sure seem to like me. They seem like nice people. Right? This is a. I mean, some tens of millions of people, it seems. Let's say it's a hardcore of maybe 3 million people. Who knows? Millions of people who believe that the world is being run by child raping cannibals. Right. That's like if that is possible in the current system, you just have to imagine what that would do when the stakes are truly high. Right? Like when it's part of the machinery of some decision making.
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Tom Bilyeu
So I have a slightly different intuition on this. So I like to take the hardest possible look at this thing and then see what I would do. So, um, one, even if you dial it up, it's airborne. Ebola takes a month. You're walking around dead, kids are being stacked up. I would still let RFK go, say I don't think people should get the jab. But having said that, what do you mean?
- [13:06]
Sam Harris
Let, like, meaning you would decide to have that conversation or you just think
- [13:10]
Tom Bilyeu
there should be no law on my podcast, there should be no law against it.
- [13:13]
Sam Harris
Right. But, so I agree with you there. So, like that where I hold the line with the first amendment is, yes, you should be able to be as wrong as you want to be, but we don't have to algorithmically boost those errors. Right? Correct. And if I have a platform again, I'm creating a social media platform. I don't want the Nazis and I don't want the people who are spreading lies about the current pandemic that it's getting.
- [13:42]
Tom Bilyeu
Where you and I break down is I am so paranoid that people don't know what a lie is. And so the Very thing. And this is why I brought up the Founding Fathers before. The reason that I'm saying I want these people to be able to speak is because I don't know who knows the answer and who doesn't. And so I need the information now. Over time, certainly for myself, I'll begin to discern who I think is a good faith actor and is really thinking through this problem. And I get that there's going to be people that get caught up in just the speed of it. It's hard to parse who's right and who's just entertaining. And that will be very frustrating, especially if it's my kids that are being stacked up in the park. And I get all of that. But I would also say that if you need those sort of wartime powers, this is Ebola, it's spreading. The deaths are just absolutely outrageous. We have reason to believe that the vaccine is working. While I wouldn't say that people can't speak up, I would be like, you are getting vaccinated or you're getting quarantined in some way and that would be horrible and that's really God awful and it will have absolutely terrible consequences. But I don't want to say that I can't see a world in which I look at it and go, that's the right answer. What I want to talk about is what am I using to determine that that's the right answer. That's really the thing that I want to talk about is how we think through these very difficult, very novel problems. And so one of the things that I find interesting is you've got Founding Fathers and you've got religion. So the Founding Fathers to me represent a shared narrative about what people ought to be, what the US for sure ought to be in, in a moralistic sense. Like how do you structure a government to protect itself from tyranny? How do you recognize the individual people? What ought they be able to pursue without the government being able to interfere with them? Like what are those bright lines that makes us Americans riding on the back of freedom and freedom of speech and all of that. Now of course, crazy, they're doing all this while holding slaves, but they put an idea together that as you adhere to the idea, all that other bullshit start way. So that to me is, is, is a structure of a system that grows better over time. So that's one element that it, it's an orienting mechanism where live free or die, right? It's something people were literally willing to give their lives for. An idea that has Fallen apart in a way that I don't clearly understand that I would love you to talk to. The other part of this is religion. Same thing. It's how do you know what is true? In fact, my. I was thinking about this today. Tell me what you think. I think that religion is the thing that allows you to establish your behavior patterns when truth cannot be scientifically established. So you have religion for the millennia when you couldn't look under a microscope to know about germ theory. So you just said, don't put these fabrics together, don't eat pork, whatever. And ultimately it was like you knew you were doing the right thing because it was written down in a book or told in an oral story. And you either hewed close to what it said to do and you were doing the right thing, or you didn't and you weren't. And so what I think we're living through now is people realize religion doesn't hold that sort of gravitational center that it used to because we now do have microscopes and we can really see what the religions were trying to get at. But it did give us a shared narrative that works well for people that are headline readers that can't hold the nuance of the argument. And so they just need ten commandments, tell me what to do. And so I know that I'm either in line or not. So now when you're looking at a global pandemic and we don't really know what's going, we don't know the lethality, we don't know if you should get the shot or not. If I can point to religion and say, to be a good Christian, you would get the jab for this reason I would draw a parallel with one of the stories, then people do it. And now I get people to, of their own accord to. Out of a desire to adhere to this shared narrative, they do it. And so you see how religion can be this incredible boon, but in a modern era with idea velocity, with hyper fragmentation, driven by algorithms and social media and all of that, religion is, I need you to speak to this because I don't know the data well enough, losing its power, losing its efficacy. I don't know. It's lost something. It does not have the effect that it used to have.
- [18:09]
Sam Harris
Well, I would also say it just doesn't address many of these use cases. Right. So the religion doesn't have a position on vaccines. I mean, there are some religions that might. I mean, Christian scientists would probably not get vaccinated.
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Tom Bilyeu
Don't you agree that if I'M a preacher, I find the story that I want to draw the parallel.
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Sam Harris
Yeah, but I think you could probably do it either way. Like you could be against vaccines or pro vaccines. Correct.
- [18:34]
Tom Bilyeu
But I get you to adhere by, I don't have to use authoritarian rule. That's my point. I don't have to do something top down. What religion allowed you to do was keep the sovereignty of the individual. Especially if you're talking about a Christian religion. Keep the sovereignty of the individual and yet get them to fall in line. It's really pretty genius where whether you do it because you believe in America and so you keep your freedoms, but you adhere to the, the mores that allow this amazing thing to exist that you're proud to be a part of, religion serves the same function. But now as we get into weird, like cultish, new religion, wokeness, whatever you want to call it, something, something deranges.
- [19:18]
Sam Harris
So I think what you want are principles here. I mean, one principle is I think we should be very wary of being driven by tribalism right now. It's not that tribalism is always in every case pathological. I mean, I think there's tribalism we can play at for fun. I mean, it's entertaining and it's not very deep and yet it can take up a fair amount of bandwidth and it's fine. So you can be a fan of a sports team and we know what that looks like when you take it too seriously. I mean, when you're like, you're a South American soccer player and you lose the World cup or you commit an own goal or something and you literally have to worry about getting murdered by your former fans. Right. We know that it's gone too far. It's too much like religion in that case. But in the general case, you can play at tribalism or you can be loosely identified with some subculture and it can be fun and you can enjoy the diversity. And the diversity can be somewhat antagonistic even as it is, let's say, in sports. Right. But no one like it doesn't reach deep into a person's psychology and social network and political commitments such that they're making life and death decisions on the basis of how much more they like the Yankees than the, the Red Sox say. So tribalism, deeper tribalism is, I think, something we just need to outgrow. Right. I mean, because the truth is not tribal. The truth is universal. Even specific truths have some, there's some view from above where diversity of opinion is just a matter of our ignorance. And if we could really see those truths, clearly we would all converge on the same account of reality, regardless of our background, regardless of our language, regardless of. I mean, we just don't. We don't have the right to be to our provincialism anymore with respect to our basic epistemological commitments, whether those are scientific or ultimately ethical. Right. So I would say that it used to be the case that we could agree to disagree about how to treat women in a society. Right. Like so, yes. If you're in Afghanistan, you don't let them get. You don't let them get educated, you force them to live in cloth bags. You beat them if they try to get out. They can't be out in public without being accompanied by a male relative. There's a list of taboos, and most of them are killing offenses. And do we just agree to disagree there? Well, practically now, yes, because we lost that war. We're no longer there. We just don't have. We just. It's not worth sending our sons and daughters to die to defend those girls. But the ground truth is if you're born a girl in Afghanistan, you are profoundly unlucky. Right? That is just that. And that disparity in luck should be galling to all of us. Right. Like, it's just not a good status quo. Ultimately, if we got our shit together as a species, some subset of women and girls would not be forced to live in cloth bags as they are in Afghanistan at this very moment. Right? So ultimately we will converge. And tribalism is precisely the wrong algorithm to use if you want to converge on the deeper truths, whether they're scientific or ethical, or I would argue, even spiritual, that we should organize our beliefs about reality and how to live within it. Right? And that's what we're trying. We should recognize that that's what we're trying to do. We are trying to navigate in the space of all possible experience, individually and collectively, and we're trying to figure out what to do next. Right? So this is politics. What should we do Next? We've got $100 billion to spend this year in the state of California or whatever it is. I actually don't know what our budget is in California, but we've got this money to spend. What should we do with it? Right? And then we have diversity of opinion and in some cases radical diversity of opinion about what is important and what is even decent to focus on. But, and I agree with you that that basic. A basically free space of conversation is the way we will orient and. And resolve those disagreements. Right? So we need. I do agree that in most cases we need the conversation just to run long enough and to be uncoerced enough so that most people, most of the time can notice that the better ideas are surfacing and the bullshit is being moved to the sidelines. But there are still obvious cases where the topic is specialized enough or the, the knowledge you need to just have a valid seat at the table is deep enough that not everyone gets to air their opinion, not everyone gets to air their opinion in that particular conversation. Or if they do, we're all wise to just have very little patience for that particular opinion because it's obviously incredible, right? It's obviously the person doesn't have the right background, they're not playing the language game appropriately, they sound crazy, they're telegraphing their other ideological commitments that are distracting and not convergent with the actual truth at hand. So it's like sort of you bring Alex Jones to the physics conference, is not going to take him too many minutes to sort of disqualify himself as a expert, a relevant subject matter expert on physics or anything else. And so we live with that tension that, yes, it's in fact true that a Nobel laureate on any given topic can discredit himself with his very next sentence if the sentence is obviously wrong. And somebody who knows basically nothing can be right in a debate with this guy by just pointing that out. That doesn't make any sense, right? And it is true from a scientific point of view that we take authority, scientific authority, very lightly. It's not good enough that you're a Nobel laureate. That's not the thing that's going to make you write, right? And on some level, you're only as good as your last sentence, even if you have a Nobel Prize. And that's how we do. So a Nobel laureate is giving a lecture. Again, it could be on his narrow area of expertise, and at the end of the lecture, hands go up and it could just be a lowly undergraduate who embarrasses him or her, again, not even on an adjacent topic, on the very topic on which that person became an expert. And that's just because truth is in fact orthogonal to any given person's reputation or educational and career achievements. It doesn't matter who you've been, it matters what you're saying right now and why you're saying it, and whether it is connected enough to a chain of reasoning and a chain of evidence that anyone should take it seriously, right? So that's all true. And yet, as a time saving device, if we have to figure out whether a certain chemical is toxic. We don't want to hear from Alex Jones, we want to hear from the real chemists, right? Yes. We don't want to hear from the chemists who are working for Monsanto. If this is a compound that Monsanto is marketing that they stand to make a billion dollars on. And we know we don't have good regulations that would force them to do the relevant toxicology and really safeguard human health. Right. We know that a lot of the incentives are misaligned such that some of the time even someone with the right educational background is either lying or impressively self deceived and we're getting bad information. And again, this is what I come back to. What we need in every case here when things matter, are institutions and regulations and procedures and alignments of incentives that we can actually trust. Because they're trustworthy, Right? Because they are actually reliably keeping bad information out and surfacing good information. And I would admit that we have a highly imperfect system, but the system we have is way better than no system. Right? And just take a. This is very easy for people to see when you move it out of science and certainly out of medicine and put it into areas of like, just like straightforward engineering like on an airplane, right? So like there's not. People don't tend to be iconoclasts with respect to engineering. Like when you get on a plane, you don't want to be doing your own research. You don't want to, you didn't want to. You don't want your, you don't want to be doing Google searches about plane replacement parts. Right. You just want to know that the FAA has it. Right. You want to know that the regulations work. You want to know that the pilots for United don't want to die. Right? That they're not going to get on the plane if they think it's unsafe. You want to know that the mechanics are not getting bogus parts because they can shave a profit. They're incentivized. You don't want a system of incentives where we tell the mechanics at Boeing that if you can figure out how to get parts from Malaysia cheaper, we're going to let you keep pocket half of the difference. If you save us a million dollars, you get to keep 500,000. Right? So get us a landing gear that just came that somebody 3D printed in another country. If we found out that that was how we were incentivizing mechanics, we would go nuts, understandably. Right. But presumably we're not doing that,
- [30:56]
Tom Bilyeu
we
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Sam Harris
have to discover as a species all the ways in which we're doing dumb things at a systems level, right? In institutions and in the systems of incentives that connect institutions. We have to defrag all of that such that mere apes like ourselves can be reliably making better decisions than individuals can tend to make on their own because the systems are so good. And so again, we're not going to solve this in podcastistan, right? Or substackistan, right? Like, I'm not saying we don't want podcasts and substack newsletters, but I think
- [31:34]
Tom Bilyeu
what you can do is, is delineate how to think about the problem, because here's the, the last thing on this. And then I've got so many more things I want to talk to you about. But I think part of. Because I agree with you, as you break down what it should look like, I agree with you. The problem is that the example that you gave that I think really freaked people out was like, this thing isn't going well with the timing of the Trump thing, the Biden laptop, the Trump thing is so serious. I'm going to just real fast break the system to make sure that this doesn't go forward. And that sets everybody's alarm bells off.
- [32:10]
Sam Harris
But I wasn't, again, just to be clear, I was not advocating to break anything. I said that Twitter, Twitter was wrong to deplatform the New York Post.
- [32:20]
Tom Bilyeu
Right.
- [32:21]
Sam Harris
The New York Times, I think was probably, again, and I put it explicitly in these terms, it was a total coin toss for me journalistically, whether you decide to do a front page story on the Hunter Biden laptop with 10 days left when there was, there were valid concerns that this could be Russian, Russian disinformation. And you had the previous example of a, of an election seeming to get derailed by something similar.
- [32:48]
Tom Bilyeu
You say that like there, there might be reasons, but somebody is making a human, is making a judgment call. And certainly the way you present it is your take is, if it were my call to make, that's probably what I would. I think that's the thing. That's certainly the thing that, that made me uncomfortable of like, whoa, I. That feels like you're running a much higher risk scenario.
- [33:11]
Sam Harris
Let's make it even more realistic because. Because now, what am I doing now with respect to the laptop, right? Like, I have not done a podcast on the Hunter Biden laptop yet even yet, right? It's been, it's been now with us for years. It's conceivable that I could I mean, I still don't find the topic interesting enough, given the political environment, that I care all that much because for me, it was a very straightforward calculation. Here we have a sitting president who I knew to be unqualified in all kinds of ways. But the specific problem for me at that point was we have a sitting president who is not committing to a peaceful transfer of power. Right? That was a five alarm fire, politically. I mean, that was just, that was as bright a line as I needed to say. This is an emergency, right? This guy can. This, this is now, it's not an emergency such that we could do anything to stop him. Right. I'm not saying that the New York Times should have printed lies about him. Right. I'm not saying that it absolutely did not require lying or even a shading of the truth. It's just here's a guy who on multiple occasions has been asked point blank on television, will you commit to a peaceful transfer of power? And he basically, in so many words, he said, no. It's like, if I win, it will be a valid election. Right? That's basically what he said.
- [34:43]
Tom Bilyeu
So let me ask, what do you think about. People want him elected still like he still, theoretically, as we're recording, this is the prime contender for the Republican nomination.
- [34:53]
Sam Harris
And that's so that, just to close the loop on what I just said, that's why I'm not. Among other reasons, that's. Perhaps I haven't thought much about it, but that is why I'm not so motivated to spend a lot of bandwidth, or any bandwidth, trying to figure out what's so wrong with Biden and the Biden family right now. I have no doubt there are politically inconvenient, embarrassing, even shocking things to discover. I mean, certainly in Hunter Biden's life and his behavior, I mean, that's a, that's a. I'm sure there's no end to embarrassment there, but even some degree of implication with President Biden, is that possible? Is it conceivable, Is there something there that I just haven't freed up the bandwidth to pay attention to coming out of that laptop? I'm sure there are many people in Trumpistan who could speak for an hour about all the things they think we know based on that laptop. But I certainly doubt some of that. But why am I not motivated to pay more attention to that? Because just as you said, Trump could very well come back in 2024.
- [36:05]
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- [37:05]
Tom Bilyeu
Like I think that I really. Maybe I'm just not explaining it well. I don't think that's where people get the friction. Where they get the friction is the sense of. It's one of the earlier questions that I asked. I think you either believe that the people can sort through this themselves and figure things out and you put the trust in the hands of people or, and, and I think your position is clear and so tell me if I'm getting this wrong. So either the people en masse just give me information, they'll sort it out. Or we need experts which people are going to read elites, right? Which is not a charitable interpretation but that's how they hear it. Or we need a group of elites that are better than us plebs and. And go figure it out. I think that's what they hear when you say that. Now I get what you mean about experts, but I've so I know that even the most well intentioned expert has a propensity to be wrong that I just feel like the mistake I would rather make going back to my trifecta of evil. The thing I'm most afraid of is authoritarian rule. So in that moment I go, oh God, these are both terrible situations but I really feel like you have to put the hands in the people. You have to leave it with them if they let them see all the information. And yes, I know it's calculated but
- [38:16]
Sam Harris
there is no seeing all the information, right? There is no unmoderated, pure, just fire hose of information. I mean the information doesn't exist as a, as a unitary object that can be contemplated in its totality always in proportion to what it is in fact in reality.
- [38:42]
Tom Bilyeu
Makes me a little Nervous. You do have. It is so specific, a laptop. Maybe it's Russian disinformation. Turns out it wasn't. But.
- [38:51]
Sam Harris
Maybe.
- [38:51]
Tom Bilyeu
But you have this thing. It becomes so concrete and so tangible. I think that's why there's so much attention on that thing. But. So I just want to get to your principle versus my principle, because I don't. Again, I don't know.
- [39:06]
Sam Harris
My principle here is that again, I mean, I stand by everything I said on that original podcast. I just didn't say it especially well there. But. And so people are genuinely confused about what I was recommending.
- [39:17]
Tom Bilyeu
I say it so I know if I understand.
- [39:19]
Sam Harris
Yeah, yeah.
- [39:20]
Tom Bilyeu
That the. What was going on is it was a real emergency. You had a real emergency. You have a president who was not committing to the peaceful transfer of power. Our democracy was truly at risk. Our democracy is. Is the most important thing in this scenario, a laptop comes out. First of all, it could be Russian disinformation. We don't know yet. And so it would be. It would be foolish in the same way that if the Russian guy that sees the five nuclear weapons getting shot at him, for him not to pause and go, this just doesn't make sense. I'm not going to do it. In that moment, it was far wiser to not put this in front of the public, but instead to go, the risk reward ratio is off, hold off.
- [40:09]
Sam Harris
Also, because there was no rush. There's still no rush. Like, again, I still haven't done it,
- [40:14]
Tom Bilyeu
but I want to make sure. Did I accurately convey how you think through that problem?
- [40:19]
Sam Harris
But the crucial thing is people took from that podcast clip. People took away the impression that I was advocating that we lie about Trump. Right. Or that we say that we.
- [40:30]
Tom Bilyeu
It felt that way. So as somebody watching the whole thing. Not the clip, the whole thing, I walked away going, okay, I get where Sam is coming from. If you really believe that this is an emergency, that this will disrupt. Honestly, if all of that were true. Emergency. He's going to steal an election. It is going to jeopardize our democracy. And all I have to do is hide the laptop or buy time, create a smokescreen. If I really believed that all of that was true, man, I'd be very tempted. Now. It's just my obsession with this trifecta books.
- [41:03]
Sam Harris
There's a certain rule that makes sense. If it's a sufficient emergency, you should want the guy assassinated. Right? I mean, like, it goes all the way. Like, if this guy's Hitler, well, then we all. We all wish Hitler got assassinated. Right now, I don't think Trump is Hitler or anything like Hitler. So there's. There is.
- [41:20]
Tom Bilyeu
Can you pre cog him? That's. That's where I get nervous. Like, everybody's so quick to say that he really is Hitler, and it's like,
- [41:28]
Sam Harris
you know, no, he's. I know. Well, I don't know how much harm he could ultimately do, but he shows no sign of being ideological in any way, and it shows no sign of wanting to take on a kind of world building or dismantling project.
- [41:49]
Tom Bilyeu
And that makes my radar.
- [41:52]
Sam Harris
People want what?
- [41:53]
Tom Bilyeu
People want him. So this may illuminate the difference. So because some people want to elect him, I'm like, damn, is there something I'm missing? And so, because I know I could be flawed, I'm just like, then you have to let the people decide.
- [42:10]
Sam Harris
Well, no, you. You have to let the people decide. I would argue we still don't entirely know what's up with that laptop. Right. It's like, I know there are people who think they know, but, like, I don't actually know what sort of forensic analysis has been done of that laptop and how reliable that is and what the scope of fraud is there, really. And I'm still unaware of anything that has surfaced from that laptop that is clearly a smoking gun that implicates Biden in corruption in a way. Like, there's new information coming out in recent years, weeks. I don't know what the relationship that is to the laptop, but if there's a 20 megaton scandal in that laptop, it still hasn't reached me, and it's been over a year. Right. But again, I default back to my original position, which is the fact that Trump wouldn't commit to a peaceful transfer of power, and we didn't. And we, in fact, didn't have a peaceful transfer of power. And he's now running again. That, to me, is so disqualifying that I'm not inclined to do anything that could possibly increase his chances of getting elected. Right. So, again, he's not Hitler, but I think he's someone who is totally committed to subverting all the norms of our democracy for purely personal avarice and just his malignant narcissism. I mean, it's just he really is a pure case study in that. But again, not ideological, not especially ambitious in any of the ways that somebody like Hitler or Stalin was. But it's so corrupting of our politics and so destabilizing of our. The institutions we should care about in our democracy that I think Having him for a second term could well be a total disaster. And it's just such an awful precedent to have someone who didn't commit to a peaceful transfer of power basically saw to it that we didn't have one. Worse still, really did try to steal the election, all the while claiming it was being stolen from him. I mean, the stuff he was trying to do behind the scenes, the pressure he was putting on Mike Pence, all of that was a genuine effort to steal an election he knew he had lost. I mean, all of the people, his attorney general, people behind the scenes, got it through to him that he had actually lost, and he was still willing to just bluff his way back into the presidency. That's so disqualifying and should be so disqualified, from my point of view, is that, yeah, do I want to do three hours on just how awful Joe Biden is? No, right now, I don't think Joe Biden should be running for president. He's way too old. Right. He's obviously past his. Not just his prime. It's just like. It's a disaster. Right. And I think Kamala is. I mean, I can't see a scenario in which she's electable. So if he dies or if anything happens to his health that's so catastrophic that he's no longer the candidate and she is, I think that's just a red carpet rolled out for Trump or really anyone to become the Republican president. So I think it's totally irresponsible and dangerous that the Democrats have put us in this position that we're running Biden with Kamala Harris being his VP with no alternative, really. I mean, maybe there would be. Maybe if he died today, then maybe Gavin Newsom or somebody would step up and we would have a different race. But the fact that we seem to be running Biden by default, with Kamala Harris really set to. To some significant degree, half the country will be seeing her as the person who's running because they plausibly wouldn't expect him to survive his term. All of that's a disaster. All of that is well worth criticizing. I don't want to touch it, because what's the alternative? If I saw an alternative that I could advocate for, that could all be effective. If I saw an upside in criticizing Biden validly, then I would do it. But this is a pure pragmatic case where I'm deciding, first, do no harm. And it comes exactly back to the some fat people are healthy principle. Right? If you're at a moment where something really is going to turn on people getting their head straight around diet and health and exercise and body image. And the clock is ticking. We have got 10 days to get this right, and. And a lot hangs in the balance. Do you really want to do a podcast on. Here are all these fat people who. We've just tested them, and they're actually. They're as healthy as any Olympic athlete. Right? They got the right. Their lipids are perfect. Their VO2 Max is great. They look fat. But, you know, this is not what it seems, right? No. And what about. Let's do 100 podcasts on that topic, right? Which is what people have done around Covid and Ivermectin and mRNA vaccines, right? Like, you know, Bret Weinstein literally did 100 podcasts in a row on Ivermectin and mRNA vaccines, right? As though there was no other topic in the world worth paying attention to. That seemed.
- [48:24]
Tom Bilyeu
It made me feel like I was getting all the information. I didn't just assume he was right, but it really helped me feel. And I watched a lot of those podcasts. It really made me feel like, okay, at least somebody's talking about this. It felt like pirate radio. And as we're talking, I think I now understand one. I think it's very important that I love about you that you say what you believe, and it doesn't matter whether I or somebody else would love to nudge you in another direction. But truly, as somebody who thinks you're amazing, I will just say that I think now through this conversation, I realize what I want your particular mind to do, because you are so good at this. What I would rather have seen is the. Okay, I'm going to look at this laptop and. And whatever it says, it says, and I'm going to break it down and I'm going to explain all the stuff you just went through about Kamala. This is crazy. In no uncertain terms, I want them to win, but you can't hide from information. Let's just pull this out into light. Let's pull Trump out in the light. Look, guys, in the final analysis, the. The laptop is fucking crazy. It does seem to indicate that there's some connection to whatever you find. Right, I'm just. I'm riffing here, not saying this is actually what it says. And then. But look, the Trump thing is a thousand times worse. This one feels like a real emergency. And then I'm like, oh, that's the Sam that I know, who's just, like, coldly dispassionate about this. Is this. This Is this.
- [49:49]
Sam Harris
But I am being coldly dispassionate. I'm just. And, and I'm being completely transparent.
- [49:55]
Tom Bilyeu
You're being also strategic. And that's the part where I think it gives people that sense.
- [49:59]
Sam Harris
But it, but it's not. But it's not. It's not a hidden strategy. Right. Like, it's just very fast. I'm just telling you why I don't see an upside in talking about certain things. Because again, there are asymmetries here that are really strange, but they're incredibly powerful.
- [50:16]
Tom Bilyeu
Can I tell you what the upside about talking about it was?
- [50:18]
Sam Harris
But let me just add this one piece. There's almost nothing you can say about Trump that is true and awful that his supporters care about. That's crazy, right? And yet. So he functions by a completely different reputational physics, and I think many people in that ecosystem do, too. Again, I mentioned Tucker. It's like he's not paying a penalty with his audience the way I would pay a penalty with my audience if similar revelations came out about me. And over here, you have somebody like Barack Obama. Literally, it was a 48 hour scandal when he wore a tan suit. I mean, like, that was the level where he was getting dinged. Trump is a completely different situation. So it's someone. Again, coming back to the fad analogy. We know that there's an appetite to eat junk food. We know most people, certainly most people who have not already made it a habit to exercise, they're hard to motivate. They're hard to get into the gym. You know, most people join gyms and then they lapse. Not everyone gets addicted to working out. We know that there's a center of gravity to where people are stuck. We've got a problem with something like 40% of Americans are actually officially obese and like 60% are overweight. Something like that. Right. So it's like, we know that it's hard to get through to people. And even if you get through to them, it's really hard for them to change their behavior, even if they decide they want to change to make these changes. So then you have to ask yourself, okay, just how sexy do we want to make the message that some fat people are as healthy as anyone alive? I get it, man.
- [52:16]
Tom Bilyeu
But there's second and third order consequences. So my thing is, I'm not saying
- [52:20]
Sam Harris
you lie about it.
- [52:21]
Tom Bilyeu
I didn't hear you say.
- [52:22]
Sam Harris
I'm just saying, like, do you want it to make your next. Your next project is to get the message out on that topic. Of all the messages, you could, you could be dealing with child trafficking, you could be dealing with climate change, you could be dealing like, you could, like you could be dealing with, you could be helping people actually get whether you
- [52:40]
Tom Bilyeu
should do a podcast about it. So if that's what people have been pushing on you.
- [52:43]
Sam Harris
Not at all what I'm pushing on. They think I should talk to RFK Jr. They think I should have platformed all these, these Covid scams.
- [52:49]
Tom Bilyeu
I wish you would talk to RFK Jr. And I'll, I maybe give you insight into that. You probably already get it, but I want to outsource some of my thinking to you because I think you think through the world in a really interesting way. So rather than me have to go do the research in RFK Jr. I'd rather you do it. So it's a factor of trust. And just I, I look at other humans, people may fucking hate this, but I look at other humans as like a really specific AI. And I'm like, okay, I'm a specific AI to other people, right? But you're a specific AI that I use to think through certain problems. And so RFK just happens to be one of the problems I would love to see your AI go, think of. Now you have to go do all the research and all that shit and combat them and bring the expert, expert and all the things that you don't want to do. But that's why people would love to see you do that. And so that's where I'm like, the Sam Harris AI that I want to use just gives me all the facts about that laptop, gives me all the facts about Trump. And then just as more persuasive that Trump is going to be the bigger problem.
- [53:43]
Sam Harris
Well, again, because I, but I know that certain bells can't be unrung, right?
- [53:51]
Tom Bilyeu
And that's the part where speaking for myself, I'm like, and I know, but,
- [53:56]
Sam Harris
but I, but I know that there's, there are super stimulus stimuli, right? Like, I know that if I got on my podcast and said, my daughter has a vaccine injury, right? And I don't care what you think about me. I'm. She's never getting vaccinated again. And I'm done with all this, you know, vaccine. Like, that's not science. That's not like, like it doesn't matter if you get 10 people to 10 prominent podcasters to tell 10 different stories just like that. That's not. And that's not a sampling of the data space, right? And yet it is so powerful Right. It's, it's so and so you just have to, you, you have to, you have to be aware of the rhetorical effect of kind of shining the light of your attention on certain things. And you have to be aware that though you are going to make a best effort to keep this information in proportion or honestly convey the proportion that you think in fact exists in reality, if you frame it a certain way or even if you speak about two things in the same context, that project becomes impossible. You just know that people are going to come away thinking, I forgot the details of that podcast, but I do remember that that vaccine is just dangerous, like Sam Harris said, that it's just dangerous. I get it.
- [55:36]
Tom Bilyeu
You know, I get it. So my takeaway is just. I don't know what comes of it. I think it's always, it's always better to say what is true and there's true.
- [55:49]
Sam Harris
So I would filter. I totally agree with you. True and useful is the filter for me. I mean, that's, it's like the Ven. It's not. Truth is just too big. I mean, the Venn diagram, the, the, the, the circle for truth is so vast that we can't possibly.
- [56:07]
Tom Bilyeu
Useful to making sure Trump doesn't get elected is where you spin people out of control, which, fine, you're in, in this. You have been, I think, hyper consistent. I understand your position now completely.
- [56:17]
Sam Harris
Right.
- [56:17]
Tom Bilyeu
And now my only thing is I think you already understand it, so I can just rap. I think you know why it bothers some people.
- [56:25]
Sam Harris
Well, I think. Let's talk about those people. It certainly bothers the people who don't understand how shocking and untenable it was to have a sitting president not commit to a peaceful transfer of power.
- [56:42]
Tom Bilyeu
Yes.
- [56:43]
Sam Harris
There are people who just don't even know he did that or don't think it mattered. There are people who think that January 6th was a non event. There are people who think that the election was actually stolen from Trump. So there's lots of confusion around all this. Some percentage of those people are just frankly confused and if they had the right information, they would see it the way I do. Most of those people are essentially in a personality cult. Right. It's a pure expression of tribalism. It's not Republican, it's not establishment Republican tribalism, but it's, it's a populist awakening on the right, which is not the right we are used to, but it's. And it's not even conservative in many respects, but it's. So that's why I Refer to it as like Trumpistan, but it's like, is a, it is a kind of personality cult, which. Yeah, I can't reason with those people. I mean, I can't. Like, I've, I've said enough. Like, if they want to understand what I, you know, what I think is true, there's 20 hours on my podcast where I explain what I think is true about all that. And they're very likely not going to agree for reasons that impressively resemble sort of the birth of a new religion. This is like me talking to Muslims about how the Quran is probably not the direct word of the creator of the universe. We're not going to agree. I lost them in my first sentence. And so does the Christians and Jews and everybody else. So you mentioned AI one thing, AI in completely destabilizing everything else. It could somehow resolve this very much in my favor in that what it might do. I mean, let's forget about existential risk and the other deeper concerns, but just it could, in the near term could so fully pollute our information landscape with just fake information, right? So deep fakes and fake journal articles and fake sources to things that people will write seemingly totally compelling articles about everything, mRNA, vaccines and everything else, and they'll be sourced with stuff that none of it exists. Right. It's just a pure confection of AI gibberish that we might all have to default to just very straightforward old school gatekeepers of information. Otherwise we're going to recognize that the Internet is completely broken and we just don't know what's real. In a world of endless deep fakes, I'm really going to have to rely on the New York Times or Getty Images or Apple or somebody with just way more resources than I'm ever going to have on my own to tell me what's real. If I see video of Putin saying that he's just launched his tactical nukes, right? Or he's going to do it tomorrow at 4 o' clock and I have to worry about a world, and I think we do now. And if we don't now, it's four months from now, we're going to have to worry about this. A world where basically anyone who wants to can produce a perfectly compelling video of Putin that will be undetectable by me as a fake. What are we going to do with that? I think we're all basically going to declare something like epistemological bankruptcy and just say, like, I don't know what's true anymore. Like, I don't care Like, I'm not going to react to this video. The fact that Elon tweeted it, you know, and it's just raw video on Twitter, or it's got, you know, it came from, you know, like it aired on a Dallas, you know, news station, a local news station. And it's like, I just have to wait to see what the real gatekeepers say about this. I'm give this 24 hours before I even think I know anything. And how am I going to know anything? Is it going to be me with my, you know, blockchain algorithm that got democratized by that I read about on, you know, on some blog where I am now figuring out whether this video has the right watermark, you know, so it's got digital provenance, or I'm just going to very likely that there's going to be a few institutions that prove that they can figure out whether a video is real. Right now maybe this particular use case is going to be fully democratized and we're all going to just have a plug into our browser.
- [61:37]
Tom Bilyeu
So one, I think that the way that it will really play out is the platforms that show video and images will build into their infrastructure the ability to read the blockchain signature. And so you'll very quickly know, like, is this authentic from the source? And then the other part will be a community notes, like, function where people can say, yes, it's real, but here's the context that you need so that you're not manipulated. Now, both of those speak to the wisdom of the crowd and the right place for something to be.
- [62:05]
Sam Harris
The llmification of the crowd. I mean, the crowd's going to get so much larger and because you think
- [62:13]
Tom Bilyeu
there'll be a lot of bots.
- [62:14]
Sam Harris
Yeah, I mean, like, they could be. The crowd could be literally 99% AI at a certain point.
- [62:19]
Tom Bilyeu
It will be tough if you're spinning up what Elon has done and you charge whatever, eight or nine dollars. It's a bot farm.
- [62:28]
Sam Harris
Almost nobody's doing that. Right. Like, what it's like 500,000 people are paying for Twitter and. And out of 300 million. Yeah.
- [62:35]
Tom Bilyeu
But when you think about what defenses we have when things really start to break, right now they think he's just being dumb ass and he shouldn't have bought it. And so they're not going to pay it because just because they're stubborn.
- [62:44]
Sam Harris
Right.
- [62:45]
Tom Bilyeu
But if they realize, oh, he actually wasn't fucking around, the bots really are a problem. And by spending $7, I can verify that I'm a real human. And now we're back in business, then I think people are far more likely to do it. But the avalanche of fake things that are coming are going to come in so hot and so fast. And it's not just going to be people like me and you. Of thousands of hours of us out there. People have already cloned my voice. You can hear me speaking in Portuguese and I think Italian. I didn't do it. Somebody else did it. And it literally sounds like me. So that's going to happen, but it's also going to happen revenge porn where a disgruntled boyfriend makes porn from his ex girlfriend and it is indistinguishable. And so everybody, very fast is going to have a reason to care. Now, the moment I worry about the whatever six to 12 months it will take to embed the infrastructure in each of the things, to read the watermark and to say this is real, not real, and to filter out things that aren't real, but that will, barring that sort of naked year, you will very rapidly because it will be so detrimental to just each individual. People will adopt that technology, I think pretty fast. I just worry that this all happens right in time for the 2024 election.
- [64:04]
Sam Harris
Yeah, I'm worried about that too. Seems like the right time frame for it.
- [64:08]
Tom Bilyeu
It's crazy.
- [64:08]
Sam Harris
I mean, it makes me feel like I'm in a year of ChatGPT or GPT. Four, maybe five. And yeah, no, it's 2024. Could be all too interesting.
- [64:22]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. How do you think about preparing for that? Like how do we get ready?
- [64:30]
Sam Harris
Well, who's we and. And what is ready?
- [64:33]
Tom Bilyeu
Americans.
- [64:34]
Sam Harris
Yeah.
- [64:35]
Tom Bilyeu
So that we're thinking well through the problem.
- [64:39]
Sam Harris
Well, I hope that. I mean, I can imagine this is a major priority of people currently in government, that we're doing everything we can to ensure that the election is run in such a way that there's the least opportunity to worry about election fraud. Now, I don't think election fraud is. I think most concerns about election fraud are generally imaginary. But I think we need a system where there's just no scope to worry that the election was not run properly. The fact that we can't figure. The fact that we're finding that that's so hard to figure out to the degree that we are. I'm actually not close to current efforts to shore all that up, but I got to imagine, I mean, that has to be the number one priority. Whatever happens on election day, we should not have a significant number of Americans credibly alleging that this, this, the election was stolen. Right. That's just so sanity straining and shattering of Democratic norms that it's just, it's. We have to get over that hurdle and we have to, you know, we have to stay over it. You know, there can't be some new concern that surfaces that you can hack or are voting machines. I mean, we just. That has to be. The integrity of elections has to be the paramount concern. If we solve that, then at least we have. Okay, then we're at the mercy of whoever we ran and whoever won. Right. And there. I just think you have. Yeah. If Trump is in fact the candidate, I think we have to. I think it would be a terrible precedent to reward someone with who's behaved as recklessly as he's behaved and as dishonestly as he's behaved with a second term in the White House may just would be insane that we have if in fact we have a majority of Americans who would want to see that happen.
- [66:54]
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- [67:55]
Tom Bilyeu
Do you think long form podcasting could change the landscape of who gets nominated?
- [68:01]
Sam Harris
Yeah, because podcasts, I mean, many podcasts have audiences that are larger than any other form of media. I mean, certainly Rogan's does by a country mile. Yeah, but again. But I think Joe and everyone else in a similar position, even at whatever fraction thereof, anyone with a significant platform like that needs to be more responsible than most people are tending to be. Again, Joe may think he's just shooting the shit with friends, but he's actually not. He's educating or miseducating tens of millions of people with on every topic he touches. Right. So There's a responsibility that comes with that, and it's not. So I think it's. And I don't think Joe has been. I mean, I think he's been. Less careful than he should have been on specific topics. I mean, I think that's definitely was true during COVID and it's true. It's been true on certain political points. But I mean, generally speaking, I think his heart is in the right place and he's not. His format is such that the people who are going to be. I mean, people are given ample opportunity to discredit themselves in that context. Right. So there's just, you know, but I do think he's. If he were going to take seriously. The impact he's having and can have, I think he'd be more careful on specific topics than he has been, and I think it would be a good thing for him to be more careful. And then there are people who have similar platforms like Elon, who I think are being totally reckless. I just think his behavior on Twitter has been unconscionable in how he has amplified bad information, pseudo information, lies, and denigrated real information. And it's just. And again, I don't put this on him. It's not in a systematic way. It's just in a reckless way. He's not even paying attention to what he's breaking or what he's. What he's signal boosting. It's like he's not. Like an adolescent attitude toward the safeguarding of real things. It's like you're like, we have a world where the difference between our succeeding in this common project of building a civilization that works and are failing is. I mean, that gulf is so enormous. And given that basically all of our problems are the result of failures of human cooperation. I mean, like everything that's just not an asteroid that's going to cross the path of Earth. And even there, even with an asteroid, an Earth crossing asteroid, human cooperation is the answer to that problem. It's like there's almost no problem we could have that in the limit. We can't. I mean, if it's compatible with the laws of nature for that problem to be solved, I think our understanding the problem and collaborating in its solution is going to solve it now. It may not conveniently. It may not. We may not have the time we need to solve it. Right. Like, if we find out about an asteroid and it's, you know, 15 days away, we don't have enough time to get up there and divert it. Right. But if we had 15 years or, you know, 30 years. We, presumably we would have the time we needed to solve this problem.
- [72:13]
Tom Bilyeu
Have you read Ian Bremmer's book, the Power of Crisis?
- [72:18]
Sam Harris
No, but I may have spoken with Ian. I mean, I think I probably spoke with him before that book came out, but he's been on my podcast several times, so I have the gist of his thoughts on this topic.
- [72:29]
Tom Bilyeu
So he unnerves me a little bit. I had him on the show, and he was great, and I was very honored to do it. But it unnerves me a little, the idea that we need some sort of crisis, what he calls a Goldilocks crisis that's big enough to be really devastating, but not so big that we can't overcome it.
- [72:45]
Sam Harris
No, I hope that's wrong. Yeah, I mean, I don't think we need that. What I'm saying, though, is what we need are. Are we need adults in the room, and we need the most powerful. We need the luckiest, most powerful, most influential, the people who command the most resources and the people who command the most of our bandwidth. Right? The people who command most human attention at the moment to behave responsibly. Right. Elon is not doing that. And again, I'm not talking about the decisions he's made as CEO of Twitter. I'm talking about his behavior on Twitter. Right? It's just. It is very Trumpian, right? It's like, all for the lulz, right? He's just shitposting. He's just spreading memes. He's just fucking around. But he's touching real things. Like, you know, when he speculates that his former head of trust and safety is a pedophile, Right? And just kind of freewheels on Twitter about that. He completely deranges this guy's life. I mean, I think this. I think Yoel Roth had to move as a result of all the death threats he got. Right? That is completely predictable. I mean, the reason why I thought Trump should have been kicked off Twitter long before he was was not because of his politics or how I viewed his presidency or anything. He was doing this on Twitter. He was singling out specific citizens for abuse when it was absolutely predictable given his platform and given the nature of his fan base, it was absolutely predictable that those people would then have just excruciating security concerns possibly for the rest of their lives. It was just like death threats and people doxxing them and people showing up at their houses and at their kids, schools, and it was just gonn. It was such a Massive fuckover of every single person he mentioned by name. And he knew this, right? And you had to know this. Elon has to know that about anyone he puts on blast on Twitter. He's got whatever 130 million people following him and some percentage of those people are crazy, guaranteed to be crazy. One percent of any audience is crazy, right? So you got 1% of 130 million people you've got. And I would bet it skews worse than that in his audience, frankly. And it certainly would skew worse than that in Alex Jones's audience. Right? Alex Jones. If Alex Jones didn't know it initially, he knew it ultimately, that he spent, I think it was at least a year putting the Sandy Hook families on blast, knowing it was documented what was happening to them. Right? Given the craziness of his audience, given the craziness of the claims he was making about them. We can't have the most powerful connected people in our society. Certainly not someone like Elon who can decide whether or not to put satellites over Ukraine in the middle of a war, just fucking around the way he's fucking around on Twitter. I get that it's what he wants to do. My point is, if he had an ethical compass, he wouldn't want to do it.
- [76:10]
Tom Bilyeu
So how do we get that? That feels to me, honestly, like the thing that's missing. We don't have an anchor anymore. We don't have a national story, we don't have a religious story. We have hyper fragmentation algorithms pull us into these super narrow little niches. How do we get a unifying dogma? I just did an interview yesterday, in fact, where I wanted to compare and contrast Andrew Tate with Marcus Aurelius. And it's pretty interesting in terms of when you really look at their sort of mirror images of each other. You've got one guy, narcissistic, totally self obsessed, sees himself as the greatest to ever do it, whatever it might be. And then you have the other guy who's reminding himself, don't become purple dyed so that you think that your royalty has the guy walk around whispering, remember, one day you're going to die. Like just always looking at the ways that he could be fallible and not letting the power go to his head. And you've got right now kids really looking up to somebody like that. I'll let Andrew Tate be a stand in now that the potential allegations or the allegations hanging over his head. But he represents like the flashy, tough, fast cars, access to women. That's what I want. I want to have that kind of fast, easy fame. And then Marcus Aurelius is about being a good person. Being a decent man is extraordinarily difficult work that you have to focus on every day. You do it in the shadows, you do it when you're alone. And that just doesn't get the airtime. And so given that reality.
- [77:45]
Sam Harris
Yeah, but, so, but there you're making an argument which I totally agree with, for signal boosting Marcus Aurelius in whatever way you can. And when you meet some semblance of a Marcus Aurelius sort of person, that's the person you want to give a platform to. That's the style of argumentation. That's the obvious ethical compass. It would be way better for the world for Elon to be much more like Marcus Aurelius. Right? It would be better for Elon. It'd be better for his life personally. But that aside, it's like that would be to model. That would be so much better objectively, better for everyone involved. Those are the virtues you want to spread. And yes, it's the androtatification of everything that we're suffering under. And I think in large measure, the business model of the Internet has something to do with that. I mean, the fact that we anchored it all to ads and to the dynamics of viral spread. But it's also true that in any. Even if it was all subscription and so you get what you pay for, you need things still need to be entertaining. It's like, you can't just be an eat your vegetables culture, right? We need captivating stories and we need it to be fun. Right? So in Elon's defense, he would say, just get a sense of humor and just be, this should be more fun than it is. Right? If it's not fun, it's not worth it. The line between fun and real ethical transgression is. I mean, it's not always immediately findable in real time, but it's usually pretty clear, Right? And there's a kind of callousness, there's a kind of just not caring about the casualties that is so obvious in most of the cases, most of the examples I just gave. Right. I mean, frankly, obviously, I don't know, Tate. I don't know whether any of the allegations against him are real. And maybe he's going to grow up at some point. I mean, he's what, he's 35 years old, 20 years from now, he may be a very different sort of person, but right now he's obviously an asshole. His ethical center of gravity is just so displaced from what it should be to be a valid model of successful manhood that you would want 100 million teenagers in America to be following. It's just. Yes, he needs to read Marcus Aurelius. He needs. There's just. He's not messaging any. I mean, he's messaging some wisdom, like the wisdom of getting things done, the wisdom of getting out of your own way, the wisdom of realizing that the dynamics of competition between people and just. And protecting yourself, all of that. But it is so self directed, it's so selfish in principle. He is so selfish. He's so narcissistic. He's so turned inward. It's so. There's such an ambience of bullshit about him. It's all spin. There's no self reflection. The superficiality of what he cares about is. There's no awareness of the deeper project of living a durably happy life where you have real ethical engagement with the world, with important causes, with people. Where you care about other people really and even care about other people more than you care about yourself in many instances, right? Where your happiness is born of making others happy and reducing unnecessary suffering. Where it's like where compassion is really what animates you. It's like there's none of that. I mean, I haven't seen all his stuff or, or even much of his stuff, but I've seen enough to know that the kind of the center of the message is like, If you check these boxes, if you've got a Bugatti and you can fuck as many women as you want, you've basically solved the problem of being a man. There's no way you're doing much wrong if you've checked those two boxes, right? Like that's just bullshit. I mean, it's not only bullshit, it's completely backwards when you're talking about what's really worth caring about and prioritizing in this life. I'm not saying that wealth isn't important. I'm not saying that relationships aren't important. I'm not saying that status isn't important. I mean, there are very few people who can sort of get past the general concern about status, right? So status is very high leverage with respect to people's sense of their own well being and whether their lives are working. The story they tell themselves at four in the morning is very likely a reflection of how they feel. They're functioning in some kind of status hierarchy. I get all that, but my status hierarchy includes so much more than Bugattis and, and Hooking up with. With new women. And in fact, it doesn't. Like, if that's what I was doing, I would be convinced I had just gone off the rails, right? Like, so it's just, you know, nothing against Bugattis, but it's like, I don't want one, right? As if by magic, I don't want a Bugatti. You know, it's. So, yeah, I would agree with you. There's something. Something has gone wrong in our culture that we don't have a long list of people who are very much like Marcus Aurelius, each more captivating than the next, who are getting their own reality TV shows, who have figured out how to. I mean, or forget about just the media. I mean, look at the 2024 presidential campaign, right? Like, where are the shades of Marcus Aurelius to choose from? How is it that we. I'm not the only person to have marveled at this, but how is it that in a nation of 340 million people, these are our choices, where we've got this laptop from hell waiting to disgorge all of these completely unseemly relationships that the President's son has spun out in multiple countries, and we have to worry about some scandals wafting out of that and destroying his prospects. And his prospects are only important because he's the precarious object put in place of a former president who truly desecrated the office of the presidency. I mean, just, he literally shattered the most important norms we have in our democracy. I don't know what to put above a commitment to a peaceful transfer of power. I mean, it is the Ronald Reagan who people right of center used to care about, single that out as just the kind of the central miracle of our society that we had, that with all whatever else is happening and whatever the depth of our political differences, the fact that we could rely on a peaceful transfer of power every four years. Right. That was an absolute miracle. It's the thing about us that is most astounding to all these other societies that can't manage it right. In any generation. They either don't even have a system that even purports to manage it, or even having one, they can't keep that together. Right. We haven't had that problem historically, and yet we have it now. And we had it last time because of Trump.
- [86:31]
Tom Bilyeu
How do we begin to unwind this stuff? So if there's something, it seems something broken in culture to me, I think culture is downstream of the individual. That was why I wanted to contrast the two different people. What that got me thinking about is what is the animating philosophy of everybody's life? And I think for most people, they never take the time to define what their animating spirit is. They don't have a life philosophy. They're just engaged in the. The day to day river of algorithms that sort of pull them along and confront them with the things they need to do, the things they find funny, the things that they find outraging. But when I really stop and think about what people need to do, I come back to the thing that Jordan Peterson has been circling around. This has been really interesting for me. So Jordan goes on his dad arc. You know, when he really first burst onto public fame, I was completely blown away by how much he was helping people. He then gets sick and he comes back and he's super religious. And I don't know what to make of it. And for a long time I was very confused. And then I started thinking, you know, he might just be ahead of his time in that. What I think he has his finger on is that there is all of us have a God shaped hole inside of us. You have to fill it with something. And what I think, and I'm very much putting words in his mouth, but what I think Jordan is putting his finger on, is the Christian text is the way to anchor people to a set of beliefs and values so that we have something that we can point back to, so that in times like these, where people are going astray, you can point out, does your behavior make sense? Yes or no? You think yes, because you're getting a bunch of likes on Instagram. That's ridiculous. You should think yes, because you're hewing close to the words of the Bible, which are really deep mythological stories about the truth of the human condition. Now, again, I've not spoken to him about this. I don't know that he would agree with that assessment, but that's my gut instinct. Unless he really now is like, I am a believer. But he even publicly tweeted at Richard Dawkins and said basically he was, I think, saying something about atheism. And he was like, this is a mistake. I will debate you anytime about it. So even if he doesn't believe in the literal word of God, he is really convinced that it is a necessary thing to help people orient themselves to a life well lived.
- [89:00]
Sam Harris
Yeah. Yeah. So, as you know, Jordan and I have debated this topic of ad nauseam. I think we had four public debates, we did two or three podcasts, and then we had A bunch of live debates that were fun. And I don't know how much his thinking has changed since then. He got sick and then he's probably. I'll take your word for it. I haven't seen much of his stuff of late, but when was the last
- [89:28]
Tom Bilyeu
time you guys connected?
- [89:30]
Sam Harris
Well, I was on his podcast, certainly during COVID but it's probably been at least a year, I think, since I've connected with him. Anyway, maybe there was an email or so, but I don't think I would be surprised if his thinking has fundamentally changed. I mean, yes, as you say, he thinks that religious stories, and in particular a Judeo Christian story, is really indispensable for Western civilization and we should recognize how much we owe to that story. And it's in the absence of that recognition that you have this eruption of weird political commitments on the left that seem to have a kind of religious fervor. I think there's a bunch of half truths in there that I would sort of agree with, but. But generally speaking, I think that's just a mistaken diagnosis of our problem for a bunch of reasons. One is I break this into kind of two layers. The most important thing I think to recognize is that stories aren't good enough. We need more than stories. Well, what genuinely ails us is at a level psychologically that isn't remedied by just having a consoling string of thoughts to think again and again and again. A story to tell yourself, a story to tell your kids a story to have them pair it back to you. A culture of stories that just ramifies all of these ideas. That's not good enough. It's not the thing that allows you to recognize the real sacred depth of the present moment. It's not the thing that you encounter when you really know how to meditate or take the right psychedelic at the right moment, with the right guidance, with the right set and setting and have a real breakthrough into a landscape of mind that transcends your sense of egocentricity. Right? To really get over yourself, to really be available to self transcending love and connection and ethical commitments, is. A deeper move than any new set of thoughts is going to engineer for you. And it is, in fact, it requires an insight into the superficiality of thought itself. Right? So it's like you have to recognize what the mind is like prior to thought, prior to identification with thought, prior to being continually spellbound by the voice in your head that is telling you one thing or the others telling you you're great and everything's. Working perfectly or is telling you you're a failure and you know, nothing worked out. I mean like night there. Yes, on the relative level, on the level of being identified with thought, it matters what story you tell yourself. It's much better to feel like, you know, everything's going great, if in fact it is, than to feel, you know, morbidly, you know, and masochistically self critical and self doubting and depressed. So you can get a lot of leverage from stories, but you can't get the thing you really want to get at the end of the day spiritually and contemplatively and ethically by just telling yourself a new story. So that's the deepest claim I would want to make. So the baby in the bathwater of religion that we should want to save. You know, what it would take to really be like Jesus, what it would take to really be like Buddha. That's not a matter of endorsing any particular story, Right. It's just there's a deeper engagement with the reality of the present moment and just the mechanics of one's own attention that's required for that. But in addition to that, that even if we were just concerned about stories and having the best stories, the best stories are not in the Bible, right? The Christian story, the Judeo Christian story is not the best story. It's not the most life affirming story. It's not the clearest ethical compass we can engineer. In fact, it's a very, I mean, in moments it has its moments. I mean, if you have a kind of a Jeffersonian, a la carte attitude toward the Bible, yes, you can get some great wisdom there. But it is also chock full of modernity, annihilating bullshit. And you have to push all that away and you have to find some principle by which you would disavow that stuff. The very real hatred of homosexuality. Right? Like literally, homosexuality is a killing offense in the Bible and nowhere in the New Testament does it cease to be a killing offense. In fact, it pretty clearly is in Paul, in Paul's letters. So I mean even the most basic religious ethical test of sanity, slavery. Like what's our policy on slavery? You don't get a good one from the Bible. That is as pure a defeater of ethical omniscience as you could ask for. Right? Is this the best moral document we have? Well, let's check the index. What does it say about slavery? Oh, get slavery wrong. There's no way it's the wisest book we've ever Produced, Right. So it's just that's where we are with the Bible. That's quite inconvenient for Christians and Jews who really want to make that tradition the sole repository of wisdom for us. I think what should obviously be true to us is that every book we have, the Bible included, the Quran included, was at some point the product of merely human insight and intelligence. Right. It's like people wrote all of our books. We do not have a single book that was not written by a person, leaving ChatGPT aside. So all we have is a. The totality of human insights and human conversations to draw from. So what traditionally religious people seem to recommend is that we limit ourselves to the insights and conversations of a previous age. Now, whether you want to walk that all the way back to the 7th century or 1500 BC or 1st century AD or that depends on which religion you favor, or some people, we'll just want to go with L. Ron Hubbard. We'll go with the guy with bad teeth whose driver's license we can literally inspect, but he's compelling enough for us to just stop there. He got it right in Dianetics, and we need to look no further. What I think should be obvious is rather than feel like we're entitled to any kind of religious provincialism, we should just want the totality very much in the spirit of what you were recommending earlier. We want the totality of human insights and conversations available, and then we want to just see what survives contact with reality. We want to pressure test it in each present generation in the presence of new technology. I mean, what is going to give us guidance? What in our. Our prior conversations gives us real guidance when we decide to build more and more powerful AI? What should we believe about the totality of everything that's been said before, its provenance? What equips us to make a truly wise decision in the present with respect to this emerging technology? Now, I would argue that you get close to nothing in the Bible to equip you to actually navigate this appropriately. And so you just. Again, we have these challenges, some of which are quite foreseeable, but some of which aren't, some of which has come out of the blue. And we just have to recognize that all we have collectively is conversation by which to navigate. And again, I do think it's helpful to continually view all of this collectively and also just personally as a navigation problem. We're constantly faced with the question of what to do next, what to physically do next, what to do next with our resources, what to pay attention to Next, what to talk about next, what to think about next, what kind of laws to write next. We're constantly tacking in the wind. And all we have is human insight and human conversation by which to do that. And so persuasion is important. Understanding the dynamics of all that is important. But to default to some prior century and to say that these are the last words that are relevant on the deepest questions of human life, they can never be improved, they can never be superseded by anything. All of their internal contradictions are something that we have to pretend to have worked out. And in most cases we're better off just ignoring them. Because who can understand the mind of God, right? It's like, well, let's default to mystery there and the unknowability really of truth there. But no, there's very specific truths we can know. Like yes, homosexuality. No, that's forbidden, right? So we know that and it's just not, it's. I mean, view it in terms of software. It's like we know we have to keep improving it. Culture is software. Culture. Culture is an operating system. We know it is continually showing its bugs. We know it's continually failing us. We know it's throwing up new challenges that we, you know, kind of emergent behavior that we have to correct for. We can't just say this 2000 year old legacy code is perfect. It so clearly isn't perfect. It was not perfect at the time. You know, and you, it was possible at the time to know that slavery was wrong. It's not like 2000 years ago everyone thought slavery was okay. No, it's just the people who wrote the Bible thought slavery was okay. It was possible to be wise enough as a human being. You brought up Marcus Aurelius. There is so much more wisdom in his meditations. I'm not saying they're perfect. They're not everything. There is so much more wisdom in that book than in most of the Bible. And there's so much less wrong with his meditations than is wrong with most of the Bible. I mean, if you're going to take one book to guide your life, you could do a lot worse than Marcus Aurelius. And it's so modern in so many ways, right? It's like you don't have to go through this tortured translation like what he really meant, you know, he didn't mean keep slaves. He meant, you know, he's, it's a very modern set of insights into. And I don't know if he said anything about the ethics of slavery. Maybe there's something in There, that is inconvenient. But, I mean, the parts of Marcus Aurelius and Stoicism generally that are so serviceable and so modern is that there's this basic insight into your mind being basically all you have. I mean, whatever you have in the world, whatever you have in your life, whatever you're being confronted with, the layer of experience is mind. And what you do with your attention, what you choose to focus on, how you choose to frame the thing that seems to have happened in the world, that is the cash, the cash value of the world and of your life in it is what it convinces you to do with your mind. And if you can just seize those reins deliberately, you can be happy in objectively terrible situations. And conversely, if you fail to understand anything about those mechanics, you can be miserable in objectively wonderful and truly fortunate situations. Right? I mean, you can have all the luck in the world and not enjoy any of it.
- [103:55]
Tom Bilyeu
Do you ever worry that, given that all that we really have is our mind and attention, that AI ends up coming along and playing the role of God? It focuses your attention. It tells you what to look at. It makes sure that you feel XYZ way, but that it ends up being able to, either through culture or something far more individualistic, it ends up being able to shape your values.
- [104:23]
Sam Harris
Oh, yeah. I'm very worried about the deepest questions of AI alignment. I think that's a real problem. And I'm amazed that there are many people fairly close to this technology who either don't think it's a problem or just figured that out last week after working in the field for decades. I'm truly mystified by the people, people who don't think it's a problem, as you might have heard. I had Marc Andreessen on my podcast, and we debated this, and he's, you know, he's super smart and super close to the tech and just thinks that, you know, it's. This is pure science fiction to worry about AI alignment. I mean, it's just. There's just no reason to worry about it. He's not, you know, I spent whatever it was, two hours, you know, talking in his direction. He's totally unconvinced by anything I had to say. Everything I have to say on the topic is really. I don't think there's anything original from me on that. I mean, I've just been very informed by people like Stuart Russell, who is also very close to the tech. He's a computer scientist at Berkeley. But then people who more peripheral to the Field who just have made very compelling arguments about the problem of alignment, like Nick Bostrom or Eliezer Yukowsky or Max Tegmark. I mean, there's a. You know, a lot of smart people who are just. They're not actually doing the AI research. But then you have somebody like Geoffrey Hinton who's like the father of the most current, you know, tech, you know, of deep learning, and he wakes up three weeks ago and he's realizes we got a problem on our hands, right? So I don't understand why that took so long. But that aside, even in success or even not reaching anything like a catastrophe of misalignment, just our engagement with machines that are smarter than ourselves and the way in which that can be deranged. I mean, there's so many examples of the way it could derange us. But just the. I recently rewatched the film Her. I don't know if you saw that recently, but it's crazy. It lands differently now. I sort of forgot what I thought about it 10 years ago. I saw it when it came out, but now it just seems like, okay, this is pretty damn interesting. It's like it was not consciously a very dystopian film. I mean, it kind of split the difference between dystopia and something more benign. But you can see, just imagine all of us, even the model of success here. We all have a kind of a superhuman AI tutor who understands us better than anyone in our lives and understands us better than our friends or our spouses. It has literally noticed everything we've paid attention to for years, right? It's followed. It's like it's caught everything we've forgotten, you know? You know, oh, you said in that email that you were going to tell Sam X. You never told him. You want to tell him now, right? Like it's reading everything you wrote. It's reading everything you read, and it's doing that to a billion other people fairly similar to you, and drawing insights from them and then propagating that back into its understanding of you. So it's understanding you in ways that you can't even understand yourself. Right? And so now you're in dialogue with this thing. Now, I'm not saying there isn't some good that could come of this. I mean, it's just imagine just being in relationship to the smartest and wisest oracle you could ever have access to. That's what's not to love about that. But then you just imagine, as in the film her, that we all have a different version of this thing. And it's slightly different because we're different. Right. So it's a funhouse mirror. And our culture is fragmented. We don't have a shared reality because the AI is tuning itself differently. It's like, I think Jaron Lanier gave this example once, not so much for AI, but for just the disorienting capacity of social media. Like, imagine if Wikipedia was different. For every person who went and read an article there you would go, read the article on the American Revolution, and it's bespoke just for you, given the kinds of things you have signaled that you like in the past. Right.
- [109:06]
Tom Bilyeu
That's scary.
- [109:07]
Sam Harris
So no one has a common understanding of the world, really, because we're all sort of drifting off into this conversation with more and more compelling information tools. I mean, again, if this thing coughs up a cure for cancer next year, the pragmatics of the moment are going to be such. I'm going to say, all right, well, let's at least acknowledge that we really wanted that cure for cancer. Right. I'm really happy we got that. I'm not so worried about, but the misinformation problem today, given that I and everyone I know now know we're never going to die from cancer. Right. Like, so let's get our priorities straight. But it really is easy to see how it can bend us in ways that will not be functional. And, yeah, I mean, I hope we. We equip ourselves to realize that in time as these advances roll out.
- [110:15]
Tom Bilyeu
No kidding. All right, man. I think even at the end of this amazing conversation, we still all have a lot of work to do in terms of figuring out what our compass is, how to sift through all the information. There's no letting us off the hook. But now that you're no longer on Twitter, where can people engage with you?
- [110:32]
Sam Harris
Well, just wakingup.com it has all my stuff on meditation and really applied philosophy, and SamHarris.org is my website, so anything I do will be announced from there. So. Yeah. And if in the age of deepfakes, I mean, this is one thing I've thought about. It's like, at a certain point, if something hasn't come from one of my channels, I don't think you can be sure that I said that thing or if it's me saying it. And so it is with you or anyone else with the platform. I mean, it's just. It's really strange, but that's where I am.
- [111:09]
Tom Bilyeu
Awesome. All right, everybody, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace.