#468 — More From Sam: Gratitude, Bad Conversations, Conspiracy Addiction, Waffle House Teleportation, and More

In this latest episode of the More From Sam series, Sam and Jaron talk about current events. They discuss how to cultivate gratitude and navigate anxiety in uncertain times, the role of mindfulness in coping with AI-driven job displacement, the slowing of religious decline in America, a FEMA official's claim that he teleported to a Waffle House, the irresponsibility of conspiracy-fueled podcasting, Sam on which conversations are worth having, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe http://samharris.org/subscribe.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  You're listening to Making Sense with Sam Harris. This is the free version of the podcast, so you'll only hear the first part of today's conversation. If you want the full episode and every episode, you can subscribe at samharris.org. There are no ads on this show. It runs entirely on subscriber support. If you enjoy what we're doing here and find it valuable, please consider subscribing today.

• 0:24Speaker 01

  Welcome back to another episode of More from Sam. Once again, we are taping this live in front of subscribers, where anything goes. We've had them submit questions in advance of the show, and I will try to get to as many of those as possible. And then we've asked them to provide any follow-ups using the chat feature so that Sam can address their feedback in real time. This worked really well last week, or last episode, I should say, and it's very helpful to have a bunch of smart people feeding me lines. So please keep those comments coming. All right. Before we get to our first topic, I just want to give a quick rundown of the guests you'll be recording with on the podcast over the next few weeks. We have Tristan Harris, Lloyd Blankfein, Rahm Emanuel, Francis Bukuyama, Ben Shapiro, Michael Pollan, and Siddhartha Mukherjee, and that's just April.

• 1:05Sam Harris?

  Yeah, a lot coming up, yeah.

• 1:07Speaker 01

  Yes, if anyone wanted more content from you, we've got a lot coming up. So, and I'm hopeful that you'll have another essay for us soon. Nobody does them quite like you do, and I'm certain the audience agrees with me. All right, let's get to our first topic. We're going to get your updated thoughts on Iran, AI, and other concerns. But first, a lot of people feel overwhelmed by many things these days, including the pace of change and the fear of being left behind in an increasingly AI-driven world. Yet, even with some legitimate fears, there's still so much to be grateful for, but it feels like no matter how much better things get, things feel worse. Maybe you could remind us what we still have to be grateful for and how to best navigate this moment.

• 1:45Sam Harris?

  Hmm. Well, I think it's just useful to ask yourself the question, even if your job in some sense is to pay attention to risk or the downside of things or to criticize bad. I mean, I'm just thinking, you know, personally, how I navigate this. I spend a lot of time thinking about what's wrong and sort of the needless own goals we score on ourselves as a society. All of that can be depressing, but the filter I use to do that is to ask myself, is it, how unhappy do I have to be in the meantime, right? Is it, is, is my being unhappy contributing anything useful, you know, on the side of my own motivation to do any of this work? Or my ability to communicate well about it? Or, I mean, just is it useful?

• 2:27Sam Harris?

  And almost always the answer is no, right? So like, there really is a, potentially a radical disjunction between even paying attention to scary and depressing things and being scared and depressed in one's life, moment to moment. I mean, I just, I just think that that second piece isn't actually necessary. I'm not, I'm not saying there's, there's never bleed through, but it's, um, there can be surprisingly little when you reflect on just how lucky you are moment to moment, even with all the things you might be concerned about. So, and, and obviously there are many people whose jobs are nothing like mine and they, they can withdraw their attention from current events and from, you know, things like existential risk.

• 3:10Sam Harris?

  And they can do it knowing that for the most part, they can't do anything about those things, right? They're not, they don't have a job that requires them to be up to the minute on whatever it is, you know, pandemic risk, or, you know, or nuclear proliferation, or any other sort of Damocles that's hanging over our heads. There is no good reason to, um, simply become morbid in the way you pay attention to the world, right? I mean, it's just not, it's not useful, right? And so I really think only mindfulness gives you the capacity to make these choices moment to moment. I mean, if you really, and if you don't know what I mean by mindfulness, then there's really nothing, there's no, um, there's no foothold to grab there. I mean, you really just have to learn something about it.

• 3:50Sam Harris?

  But if you can notice the moment to moment consequences of paying attention to things and, and how you use your attention being consequential, it allows you to decide, you know, to kind of wisely curate the contents of your own consciousness and withdraw your attention from things when that, when your, your attention on them serves no good purpose. And I don't know, just kind of break the addiction of being unhappy in the usual ways, right? I mean, many of us get sort of stuck in the rut of conforming to. Various patterns of attention and you can just decide to break, break those habits. So yeah, obviously you can think in the stoical vein of all the people in the world whose prayers would be answered if they could simply be in your exact situation right now.

• 4:33Sam Harris?

  I mean, think of all the bad things that haven't happened to you that if they had, what you'd pay just to get back to where you are right now. I mean, those are useful reflections, but you know, it is just in fact true that life is very, very good for so many of us and it's, it's very easy not to, to be aware of that moment to moment.

• 4:49Speaker 01

  So how do you help people navigate the anxiety around their jobs if they think that their job's going to be going away? I mean, so many people are talking about right now, is it going to be months? Is it going to be weeks, maybe a little bit longer before I lose my job? And if you're looking, out there looking for a job right now, if you're a young kid out of college, it's great if you have expertise and good taste because AI sort of plays like this infinite boardroom for you of, of experts. But if you don't have the experience and the, you know, the higher skilled people aren't going to hire you, the anxiety is, is real. I mean, how does mindfulness help those people who are looking to?

• 5:23Sam Harris?

  Well, so specifically on that point, I mean, I think, I don't think you can, you can boycott AI at this point. I mean, I just, I think the right thing to do is figure out how to use it in beneficial ways, you know, for your career and for your personal life. I just think it's, I mean, some people can, you know, ignore it, but for the most part, certainly if you're in any kind of job or hoping to be in a job that focuses on information. And I mean, if it's a job you can do sitting behind a desk, I think AI needs to become your friend, leaving aside all of the other issues we might have about it and the other concerns about alignment and all of that. I think in a limit, when we start to see real, the real evaporation of jobs because of how good AI is getting, we as a society are going to have to figure out how to navigate that.

• 6:08Sam Harris?

  And that's, that I think is probably coming sooner than many people expect. I think it is definitely coming. Many people expect that it's not coming. It's just going to make, you know, AI is just going to create a bunch of new jobs that we don't have names for yet. And really there will, there will be no radical displacement. I think that's just happy talk, but there are people who, there are smart people who believe that by analogy to previous breakthroughs in technology. But I do think, I think we as a society are going to have to figure out how to absorb productivity gains that don't ultimately entail people becoming more productive. Right? I mean, so that the AI starts doing work that people are doing now and there's job cancellation. I think that's coming. People can't solve that by themselves, though, really. I mean, once it comes to any kind of scale, society has to solve it.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  Oh, I get that, but I'm talking about the delta between where the shit gets bad and before it gets better. And so for people like you, you say, make AI your friend. That's great because you have good taste and expertise, so you can tell AI what you want. But if you're somebody on the other, other end of that, and you're somebody whose job it is to do admin or coordination or some of the other tasks, if you're a paralegal or even a junior lawyer or any of the other examples, again, the anxiety is real. How does mindfulness help here? How do people navigate it? Because, I mean, again, I understand what you're saying is so much of it, it's in our heads. But there is a reality that this is different.

• 7:30Sam Harris?

  Mindfulness helps with everything because in each moment, there's either something for you to do or there isn't, right? So if there is something for you to do, well, then you just do that thing, right? I mean, again, this, this applies even in emergencies, right? The house is on fire and you now need to get your kids out to safety. And so you have to escape, right? So, so action's required and you don't need to suffer over performing that action. You just have to do the thing, right? Now, if there's nothing you can do to change your situation or to change the, the risk you're confronting, well, then your misery is adding nothing to that occasion either. Now, in either case, your misery is extra, right? Now, this is, can be a high bar to clear for people who don't have a mindfulness practice.

• 8:14Sam Harris?

  But once you do, you can, you can actually differentiate these components to your, your engagement, you're, you know, with, with your life, moment to moment. I mean, you, you can have a highly energized, you know, motivated, even adrenalized experience that isn't a miserable one, right? You can be responding to an emergency and not be miserable. You can be making decisions over a longer time horizon that entail a lot, that are, you know, kind of scary decisions, right? So you could say, okay, now I need a surgery and it's, you know, in two weeks, I'm going to have a surgery, which I'm, you know, anxious about, right? But, you know, all things considered, it is just the right decision. And now I've got, now the surgery's on the calendar and now I got this thing looming. And so, okay, so now, but now the question is, over the next 14 days,

• 8:57Sam Harris?

  how much time are you going to spend being miserable because you're anxious about the surgery? All of those moments are discretionary, once you know how to be mindful. Once you've decided what you have to do, there really is no more to think about, really, right? Now, you will helplessly be knocked around by your thoughts, but that's where mindfulness comes in. And again, if you don't have a mindfulness practice, you are going to be the mere hostage of those thoughts, right? So you'll be as anxious and as fearful and as worried and as sleepless as you'll be because your mind is completely out of control for the next two weeks. But there simply is no alternative to mental training once you get into a situation like that. I mean, the time to develop a mindfulness

• 9:41Sam Harris?

  practice is before you really need it, not when you're in the middle of that maelstrom. So, but it really, I mean, it is there, that this is a capacity you can develop, and it really, it really does provide relief. I mean, every time you find yourself suffering, you can recognize that you're thinking without noticing that you're thinking, and then wake up from that dream. And it doesn't change the fact that you still might have to have a surgery in two weeks, right? But again, all of the suffering that precedes it is unnecessary, and the same will be true afterwards, right? Again, you're just going to be in the company of your thoughts 99% of the time.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  Well, speaking of relief, the New York Times reports that after decades of religious decline, people have stopped leaving churches. Now, it doesn't point to a revival necessarily, but maybe people like the feeling of something familiar in uncertain times. How does that sit with you?

• 10:32Sam Harris?

  That might be, yeah. I just don't know how durable that change is. I mean, the larger trend is of kind of a massively secularizing change in our culture over the last quarter century. But no, I could well imagine people want community and they want real world experiences, and it's comforting to be inside a church. And I love churches, right? You know, I love sitting in churches. So I get it. But yeah, I don't know, I don't know what to draw from that headline.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  Well, I want to play a video for you and get your thoughts on this. Can we play the Rubio clip, speaking of religion here?

• 11:19Speaker 01

  Did you see this?

• 11:20Sam Harris?

  No.

• 11:24Sam Harris?

  God, this is Rubio.

• 11:26Speaker 01

  The atheists don't make content anywhere near this inspiring.

• 11:31Sam Harris?

  Came down and lived among us. I don't find this inspiring. This is.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  Oh, that music.

• 11:37Sam Harris?

  This is very depressing. Yeah, okay. Yeah, I I mean, I haven't really tracked Rubio's level of religious fanaticism. I mean, you know, I want to, I think of someone like Pete Hegseth, I get quite worried because he clearly is someone who's making decisions based on his Bible thumping, but.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  Well, I was gonna ask you that because I thought like if you had to pick one Republican to take over in 2028, if you had to do that, I would have assumed it would have been someone like a Rubio. And then seeing this video, I thought, wait a second, where did this come from? But even even with this video, I'd still think.

• 12:09Sam Harris?

  I mean, who knows what this guy believes, right? This is very few people have shown themselves to be this malleable in the face of, you know, political imperatives. You know, he is someone who rightly identified Trump as a con man who was destroying conservatism. And now he's Secretary of State and a just a odious lickspittle. I mean, so I think the only reason why I view him differently as someone from someone like Pete Hegseth is that he was a sort of normal politician with a a normal degree of qualifications for his role, right? So he's, you know, he's not, he's not egregiously unqualified to be Secretary of State or or

• 12:51Sam Harris?

  President or in any other, I mean, he's just, he's a normal, normal candidate for these kinds of roles. Whereas, you know, Pete Hegseth is mostly a Fox News personality, though he can bench press 300 plus pounds, which is genuinely impressive, and just a proper religious maniac by all appearances. So he seems quite a bit scarier to me. But, yeah, maybe this is sincere from Rubio. I don't know. I mean, he's just, he's just a shape shifting opportunist, as far as I can tell.

• 13:20Speaker 01

  Speaking of people who sound like religious maniacs, did you see that video? I want to play this for you of Greg Phillips from FEMA, who claimed that he had time traveled to a Waffle House.

• 13:30Sam Harris?

  I forgot who it was. Yeah, I know the story. Yeah.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  Can we play that clip real fast?

• 13:34Speaker 03

  We had a teleport incident, two of them, which which transported me about 40 miles from from where I was and and near Albany, Georgia, to the to the ditch of a to the ditch of a. Of a church, I end up at a Waffle House like 50 miles away from where I was. It was an incredibly frightening moment to experience yourself in your car, flying through the air. It was possible. It was real.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  I want to be hanging out with her after that interview ended.

• 14:17Sam Harris?

  Jesus. He's at FEMA?

• 14:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:20Sam Harris?

  We can all sleep peacefully at night, knowing that that our emergencies will be responded to by a man who's convinced of the physics of teleportation. Who among us hasn't teleported at some point to a Waffle House? Jesus.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  I think 50 miles is reasonable.

• 14:35Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  He would have claimed 500. I would have thought he was full of shit.

• 14:39Sam Harris?

  Yes. To be unconscious while driving 50 miles? That seems normal.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  I think you've had ambient experiences like that. It's been that far.

• 14:47Sam Harris?

  Unbelievable.

• 14:49Speaker 01

  The last time we went to the moon, you were a kid. How do you feel about this latest mission to the moon?

• 14:54Sam Harris?

  I'm amazed at how little bandwidth it's taken up for anybody. I mean, I haven't seen, I mean, in a different time, we would see a lot of press coverage of this. I haven't seen nearly as much as, you know, it's sort of at this level of this guy teleporting to a Waffle House in my algorithm. I mean, I think it's great. You know, I think it's amazing that we do this this sort of thing, but it's amazing how little bandwidth we have for nice news stories like that.

• 15:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, we had a very uniting, if short-lived moment when the US hockey team won the gold medal earlier this year. Do you think this mission will do anything for us on that level? Maybe when they have a parade when they get home, or no one's going to care?

• 15:36Sam Harris?

  No, I think we're pretty jaded at this moment and distracted for obvious reasons. I'd be surprised if the if the ticker tape parade got much coverage, you know, there'll be 100,000 old people on CNN watching it, but.

• 15:48Speaker 01

  Right, like the Rose Parade?

• 15:49Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 15:49Speaker 01

  What do you think we could do as a society to bring us closer together? Is there anything we could do right now?

• 15:54Sam Harris?

  Get off social media. I think that would be to uncouple us from all the maniacs, from the, you know, the 10% of us that are trolls and lunatics and bots and grifters and just dial down some of that noise so that we can get a little more signal. I think that would that would be good. If all the social media people pulled the plug on social media, I think they would all deserve, I told Jack Dorsey this, you know, when he was running Twitter, if he just pulled the plug on Twitter, saying, sorry, this just, this didn't work out, guys, he would deserve the Nobel Peace Prize. And, and I think that's still true. It's probably even more true now.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  I'm going to shift topics here. It's a great question from a Substack subscriber. You said conversations with people you strongly disagree with can be unproductive, hard to fact check in real time, prone to confusion. But you've also argued that conversation is our only alternative to violence. And your early debates on religion showed you engaging calmly and rigorously across deep disagreement. In recent years, many of your guests seem to largely share your views with differences mostly in emphasis. There's a real value in surfacing expertise reinforcing important ideas, but do you worry it comes at the cost of one of your genuine strengths, modeling how to engage thoughtfully with opposition? Most real world disagreements are messy and emotionally charged. Isn't there still

• 17:09Speaker 01

  value in demonstrating how to navigate those well, even if the conversation isn't perfectly clean?

• 17:15Sam Harris?

  Yeah, up to a point. I mean, I think some of those conversations are useful. I keep looking for the ones that I think will be useful. I mean, I think there's generally greater utility in when there's something to learn about an issue or something to figure out, bringing on someone who really knows their stuff and just, you know, helping me learn more in real time in front of my audience. So I'm thinking about, you know, the consequences of Trumpism and having Trump for a second term, you know, and just the way the rest of the world perceives us and, you know, the loss of American leadership and et cetera, all of that. You know, if I bring on someone who I know I'm going to agree with, but who just knows much more about certain details than I do, I bring on someone like Anne Applebaum,

• 17:57Sam Harris?

  right, who can just give me the view from the other side of the world with much more historical context and who's just deep in the weeds on, on the way propaganda works and the way democracies unravel and all the relevant historical analogies, right? So we're, I'm not going to disagree with Anne about much. If anything, but that's not the point. The point is to hear what she has to say and to learn a little bit more each time I do that. I think that's usually more useful than me getting some person on who stridently disagrees with a position I already have, and I just know going into it that it's just going to be an exercise in my attempting to showcase their errors, which I already understand to be errors, right? So someone who doesn't

• 18:42Sam Harris?

  really understand jihadism at all and doesn't believe in it and thinks it's all economics and politics and bluffing. Okay, I can get that person on for another two-hour round of, you know, brain damage, but it really is just brain damage, right? Now, it's not to say that it's not going to be useful for some people in the audience to see me hit those pitches again and again, but I've done it so many times, I'm not sure about the value of continuing to do it. And it also runs the risk of being confusing to some people anyway, because certain moves are reliably confusing, right?

• 19:18Speaker 01

  Well, I think people like the conversations you're having. I think it's just, it feels as though you've been just avoiding the chance at having a bad conversation, and they feel that many of them can learn from a bad conversation.

• 19:29Sam Harris?

  Well, I just don't see, like, who are we talking about? I mean, I'm going to talk to someone like Hassan Piker. Would that be fun? No, not really. I mean, I don't think anyone should be listening to this guy, right? So it's like, it just seems like...

• 19:43Speaker 01

  Well, that's a different point. I think what they're saying is there are bad conversations that they're constantly having, and they can still learn how to have a good conversation in a bad conversation, or how to navigate a bad conversation. And with you lately just saying, "Fuck it, I'm not going to have bad conversations anymore because this is not the best use of my time, or I'm not going to spend two hours on this," I think that a lot of people are saying, "Well, even from those bad conversations," I don't think they mean the Omar Aziz conversation examples.

• 20:09Sam Harris?

  Well, I mean, so I'm going to talk to Ben Shapiro. I anticipate that being a potentially bad conversation, at least for half of it. I mean, half of it will agree about certain things, but... Part of it will be exposing a fair amount of daylight between us around Trump and current American politics. So I'm gonna go into that thinking we both might get somewhat uptight in this conversation, at least for part of it. And I'm not avoiding it. I think it's useful because Ben, Ben is a serious enough person with a big enough audience that it's useful to try to kind of make some sense in his direction. Would I talk to Candace Owens? I don't, don't think so. I mean, she's got an even larger audience, but she's a total

• 20:51Sam Harris?

  lunatic. And I'm not sure, I mean, apart from, I mean, I, you know, I could approach it the way I approached the conversation with Doug Wilson, the pastor who I knew just how far out he was as a fundamentalist. But I approached that differently than I might have. I mean, I was not looking for conflict. I was looking, I trust, in that case, I trusted my audience to understand what's wrong with a pastor who will sign off on maybe one day bringing chattel slavery back because it's in the Bible, right? So like, that's obvious enough that I can, like, I don't have to dunk on that point. I don't have to say, oh, well, like, I just hope it's clear that I'm against chattel slavery. So it's just, you can just be more of an anthropologist there, rather than a, you know, somebody who's gonna dig

• 21:36Sam Harris?

  in and really have a debate. You know, my conversation with Ross Douthat, right? Like, we did not agree. That was, had the quality of a debate about religion. I think he's more of a religious extremist than people appreciate. And I feel some of that came out in our conversation. I mean, he's surprisingly extreme in his claims to, you know, in his faith claims, given that he's also trying to function as a normal journalist at the New York Times. So those are not totally, I mean, those are somewhat adversarial conversations, but they're not, to talk to someone like I don't know, again, I just brought up Hasan Piker at random. Someone like him, I mean, he's just kind of a performance artist.

• 22:17Sam Harris?

  I mean, he's a deeply confused, I think, fairly amoral, fairly juvenile person in his ethics. Right. He's just a, and he's just a bit of a nutcase and dishonest. And so it's such a mess, I mean, there's so much bad faith that you have to anticipate going into a conversation like that. My first question is, why do it? Because it can stand the chance of being genuinely confusing, certainly to anyone who's sort of in his audience. Right. Because there's just so much, it's asymmetric warfare. It's so much easier to make a mess than to clean it up. Right. That's why I wouldn't talk to someone like RFK Jr. I mean, RFK Jr. is basically a nutcase, right? I mean, there's something wrong with the guy.

• 22:58Sam Harris?

  He's, he's a liar, absolutely a liar, but he's also a kind of a confabulator. He's a bullshit artist and also I just think a little crazy, right? So he's, you're dealing with all of that. It's very hard to do in real time. Again, for the kinds of things he's crazy about, what you want is someone who's deep in the weeds on the science of vaccines and immunology and just, you know, virology and all of it. Right. So I'm the wrong guy to have that conversation. I've always said that. It's not to say I couldn't take a month of my life and get up to speed on some of that, but it's just not worth a month of my life to do that. So all of it is just, at this point, you have to have a, a life is too short module in your brain and consult it occasionally.

• 23:42Sam Harris?

  And for many of these conversations that people seem to want me to have, I have to say, life is too short for many of them. And it's not to say, I mean, given the right candidate, you know, I might, I might jump at the chance. Again, I mean, you know, the monk debates, I think, they asked me to debate Tucker Carlson and I was surprised to find myself saying yes, without any reservation, really, because Tucker has become such a fixture in our politics, but that seems to have evaporated. So I don't, I don't know what happened there. I'm sure he said no, but so I would do that. I would do something like that, but again, it really has to be worth it. Well, Rogan has said he doesn't want to talk to you publicly until you've debated Brett Weinstein. Is that something you consider doing?

• 24:25Sam Harris?

  Oh, well, no. I mean, for the same reasons I wouldn't debate RFK Jr. I mean, it's just, it's very disconcerting not to know whether someone has lost their mind, right? Like, because when you look at someone like Brett speak, he just seems to be the picture of reasonableness, right? He's not getting blown around by his emotional life, certainly not in any obvious way when he's certainly not on a podcast with Rogan. So he's not, he's not an Alex Jones-like character where he's, you look at the way he's delivering the lines and you think, okay, this is kind of a case study in, in, you know, chemical imbalance or something, right? Like, what we need is a psychopharmacologist before anything else happens here so that we can,

• 25:09Sam Harris?

  we can try to get this guy back to some physiological baseline. That's not happening with Brett at all, and yet the things he says are equivalently crazy. And the certitude with which he says them, it's totally indefensible, right? So you take his recent appearance on Rogan and you stick what his claims into any LLM and what you get is just a litany of obvious errors. And I did that for Joe. I sent him a link to my chat GPT session, like, Joe, just here's a sanity check. Listen to what the robots say about what Brett was giving you on this most recent podcast. And he didn't seem to want to do that. So he's still convinced that Brett was right about everything, though Brett thinks that 17 million people were killed outright by the vaccines and that ivermectin is still worth taking.

• 25:53Sam Harris?

  I don't know how to interact with that, but what it requires is if it were going to be done at all. I mean, Brett is just the right, you know, Brett is not someone to take seriously on this topic. But, you know, if you were forced to take him seriously because he's made so much noise about it, what you want is someone who's deeper in the weeds on the relevant science than either of us are and let that guy or gal have the debate. And that's what I urged Joe to do. I mean, Joe was wrong there. I wasn't urging that I do a postmortem on COVID about, you know, RFK Junior or Brett or anyone else, any other lunatic he's had on his podcast. I was urging that he have the relevant experts do it. I mean, it's not my wheelhouse, right? It shouldn't, you know, I'm not going to, unlike many of these

• 26:37Sam Harris?

  guys, I'm not going to pretend it's my wheelhouse, knowing that I can be a quick study and sound like I know what I'm talking about. I'm not an immunologist. I'm not a virologist. It's just, these are, I'm not an epidemiologist. You want to be all three of those things.

• 26:52Speaker 01

  Like everyone else on the internet?

• 26:54Sam Harris?

  Yeah, yeah, to have this conversation responsibly. But I know enough of what mainstream science thinks about what happened during COVID to know that Brett doesn't make any sense on this topic.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. Another question while we're on Rogan. You've been critical of Rogan's irresponsibility in the spread of misinformation, but he's taken basically the same approach since he was bullshitting Stone in his living room with an audience of a few thousand. Not his fault, his audience has become huge. Isn't the real problem that the epistemic institutions have trashed their credibility and the audience is lacking discernment?

• 27:24Sam Harris?

  Well, it's both, but I think I sent you this clip of, that the algorithm served me of Joe talking to Theo Von. And Theo was, you know, just kind of melting down around his anxiety about everything. It seemed super worried about the war in Iran and worried about Israel, I guess. I mean, I forget about some of the specifics of the clip, but they went on for like 10 minutes, kind of casting doubt on everything. And then they had, seemed to have a lot of time for some, I think it was CIA conspiracy theory, which was, was getting delivered to them on, looked like a, you know, a short YouTube clip or a TikTok video by someone they liked. And, you know, it was probably a rehash of MKUltra or some, you know, old story about the CIA putting LSD in the, in the water, something they

• 28:07Sam Harris?

  did in the 1950s or something. But, you know, it was, it was a-

• 28:10Speaker 01

  Which they need to do again now.

• 28:11Sam Harris?

  Yeah, but it was a completely paranoid story about the CIA trying to make us all dumb. So we will be more bovine and compliant. And I mean, the image I got is just two kind of pyromaniacs just lighting matches on a landscape that they had spent years soaking in gasoline, right? It's like there's, and I mean, and this really is, it's relevant how large the audience is for this. It's relevant at just how much cultural damage is being done every time these guys basically play the just asking questions routine on socially combustible topics with tens of millions of people listening, right? It's just, it's completely irresponsible. It is genuinely dangerous.

• 28:56Sam Harris?

  It's genuinely corrosive of our culture. It's genuinely misleading of their audience. And they, because they're not journalists, they have, they feel no responsibility to get their facts straight. They certainly don't correct their errors. And I mean, they don't have, they don't have the mechanism by which to correct their errors. It's just not. They'll even admit, they'll even admit that they'll, you know, this might be some tin, tinfoil. I think Theo said that in, in the middle of this clip. Yeah, like this might be tinfoil hat time, but, but still it's just, they're still just flicking matches at everything, right? And the worst thing about all of this is their addiction to a conspiratorial framing of everything. That is, if you can extract any lesson from what's happened to our politics in the last

• 29:38Sam Harris?

  decade and the role that people like Rogan have played in the unraveling of everything and, and you know, and the way, the way in which social media has weaponized all this and, and the, the rise of people like Tucker and Candace and Nick Fuentes and, and the fact that we've got Trump a second time around. Central to all of it is this addiction to conspiracy thinking and contrarianism and you know, what I've called the pornography of doubt, right? And Joe has been as addicted as anyone and has brought it to scale perhaps more than anyone. And it's totally unprincipled. It is genuinely confusing to millions of people. I mean, you got, you got young people getting raised on a diet of this bullshit. It's divisive.

• 30:23Sam Harris?

  It amplifies the worst in us. And it's undermining of, you know, yes, our institutions have done something to lose credibility, right? They have become politicized in ways that they shouldn't have become politicized. Yes, all of that's true. The remedy for that is not a torrent of bullshit from podcasts and the platforming of proper lunatics and people who think they were denied the Nobel Prize when they have almost no scientific reputations to protect. No, the remedy is more good science and good journalism and real intellectual integrity and holding institutions to account in serious ways, not spreading lies and half-truths and, you know, cockamamie

• 31:05Sam Harris?

  conspiracy theories. And I mean, really, like you look at that clip of Joe and Theo, who are both good guys. I mean, the paradox here for me ethically is that this, what I'm talking about is a species of evil, right? Given its consequences, it's a species of evil, right? It's, it is like at the top of the list of what ails us in our society. It is the thing that is preventing us from solving real problems in this world. There's no question it is getting people killed and will continue to get people killed. It is absolutely toxic. And yet, many of the people participating in this are just good guys who are just having fun and who are just entertaining. You just, they think there's no stakes, right? They're just, they're just like athletes, right? They're just having

• 31:48Sam Harris?

  fun. They're just playing a game. Joe's just playing a game. But it has real, it's a game with real consequences, right? It's just, it's like, you know, how would you play tennis if you knew that every time you, you know, lost a point, people would die, right? I mean, like that, that's, that's the kind of game that's being played with information now. And so people like Joe and Elon and, you know, people who have audiences in the tens and even hundreds of millions have a real responsibility to get their heads out of their asses. And they're not showing any aptitude for doing that.

• 32:19Speaker 01

  All right, I'll move to another question. I don't like that you seem to use the term woke in the same pejorative way that those on the right do.