#392 — Technology & Culture

Sam Harris speaks with Christine Rosen about how technology is changing our culture. They discuss the courage of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, lost practices like handwriting, tradeoffs in our use of technology, social media, conspiracy thinking, X as a platform for breaking news, the future of journalism, the importance of local news, the asymmetry right and left politically, the strange case of Tucker Carlson, the antisemitic hallucinations of Dan Bilzerian, expectations for a second Trump presidency, antisemitism in America, 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. Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That's why Sam Harris created the Waking Up https://www.wakingup.com/makingsense app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life's most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

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

• 0:06Sam Harris?

  Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll also find our scholarship program, where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't afford one. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.

• 0:45Sam Harris?

  Well, Trump is off to a running start with his appointments, or desired appointments. Some have been comparatively normal, and some have been not. I guess the ones that have provoked the most alarm are Pete Hegseth at Defense, Tulsi Gabbard for the Director of National Intelligence, Matt Gaetz for Attorney General, and Robert Kennedy Jr. for Health and Human Services. I guess I'm going to abide by my policy, which is to not react until something actually happens. There's some debate about whether all of these are legitimate appointments, or trolls of some kind.

• 1:30Sam Harris?

  On its face, it looks like affirmative action for kooks and ghouls, but let's see what happens. We'll see if these survive confirmation, or get appointed during a recess. Let's wait and see. Today, I'm speaking with Christine Rosen. Christine is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a columnist for Commentary Magazine. She's also a senior editor at The New Atlantis, and a fellow at the University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. And she's the author of a new book, The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World. Christine and I spoke just as these cabinet appointments were getting started.

• 2:14Sam Harris?

  Marco Rubio had just been mentioned for Secretary of State. That is comparatively normal, but the rest hadn't come in yet. We talk generally about how technology is changing our culture and politics and society. We praise the courage of our friend, Ayaan Hirsi Ali. We talk about lost cultural practices like handwriting, trade offs in our use of technology, social media, conspiracy thinking, X as a platform for breaking news, the future of journalism, the importance of local news, the asymmetry between the right and left politically with respect to information, the strange case of Tucker Carlson, the anti-Semitic

• 2:57Sam Harris?

  hallucinations of Dan Bilzerian, our expectations for a second Trump presidency, anti-Semitism in America, and other topics. And now I bring you Christine Rosen. I am here with Christine Rosen. Christine, thanks for joining me.

• 3:19Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 3:21Sam Harris?

  So I'm a, I'm a big fan of yours from the commentary podcast that you do with John Puthoritz and others. And also you have a new book, which I really enjoyed, the title of which is The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World. I want to, I want to start with the book because it's interesting and I think it touches on many larger issues that are worth thinking about, but I think we will, in short order, feel the tractor beam pull toward American politics, given that we're just about 10 days out from the presidential election and given your political experience and your perspective on history and, and American culture.

• 4:03Sam Harris?

  Maybe we can start with you just giving a potted bio here. How, how do you describe your background politically and intellectually?

• 4:10Speaker 01

  Well, I was trained as a historian. I went to graduate school in history, studied American intellectual history, but realized I didn't want to go into academia, that I wanted to do something else. And like many young naive Americans, I found my way to Washington DC and stumbled into Into the think tank world, first at the American Enterprise Institute briefly, and then to some other institutions, Ethics and Public Policy Center, which is right of center, and then I moved to New America, which is left of center. I found myself, again, like a lot of people, politically somewhere in the middle on some issues, social and cultural mainly, but on things like foreign policy, strong national defense, I was always more conservative.

• 4:55Speaker 01

  So it became very clear when you come to Washington that you're supposed to choose sides, particularly if you go to work on the Hill. The beauty of many of the think tanks in this town is that you can then, you can actually find a very comfortable home where people like to argue about the issues and the ideas, and they don't really care if you're, if you have a D or an R after your name or how you vote. So I eventually landed at the American Enterprise Institute, which is where I am now, and it's, I've always found it to be an ideologically diverse place in the sense that we have people who started out on the far left and people who started out further right. Some of us meet in the middle, others don't. We have libertarians who argue with social conservatives. I would place myself kind of where I started.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  I've probably become a bit more hawkish on national defense issues. But on cultural issues, I've remained largely more centrist, and having raised children has probably made me a little more culturally conservative. So I do define myself as a conservative, but I think nowadays, a lot of these labels are shifting, and even in the last week, for a lot of people, I think their understanding of those labels has shifted considerably.

• 6:03Sam Harris?

  Were you among the never-Trump conservatives? Or never-Trump, never-Trump Republicans?

• 6:09Speaker 01

  I never was. I was not a never-Trump Republican. I think because, and this is actually where reading history books is very useful. It gives, I think it gives some humility about the ability of our system to stand up to almost anything that challenges it. I was not a fan of Trump. I did not vote for Trump. And, but I didn't think he was quite as evil a force as he was often portrayed to be. I have a fairly healthy skepticism about mainstream media, which, which I Which comes out of having grown up not in the class of people who go into mainstream media work and from Florida and just a sort of healthy skepticism about what we're often told to believe. And I felt like a lot of the reaction to Trump initially came from

• 6:52Speaker 01

  that very elite sense of he's not one of us. We don't understand where he's coming from. He's brash. He's crude. And I didn't like him for many of those reasons as well. But I had a really strong faith in our political system and our system of government and our founders' vision of the upheaval that over the course of hundreds of years, we've been able to weather. So he, January 6th, tested that for me significantly. I actually do believe he should have been impeached and removed and not have been allowed to run for reelection. But that's not what happened. And the history books will judge accordingly. And we shall see with the, you know, beginning inauguration in January, how he governs. And I think some of his choices for cabinet, a few have been fine. Others have been slightly

• 7:37Speaker 01

  alarming. And I think our system is stronger than any one individual who might test its limits.

• 7:47Sam Harris?

  Okay, well, needless to say, we're already feeling the tractor beam pull toward politics.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  I blame you.

• 7:53Sam Harris?

  And the presidency. I'm going to resist, however ineffectually, for a few more minutes here. First, let me say that I've never had any real connection to AEI or really any direct connection to any of the think tanks, right or left. But I always felt that AEI probably was distant from me politically, but I have undying gratitude for the organization, given that this was the only think tank that would take in my friend Diane Hirsi Ali when she really needed a perch in the West, in America in particular. But just to see her in flight from theocrats and to see her shunned from liberal think tanks and embraced

• 8:36Sam Harris?

  by a right of center think tank that had to assume some considerable security costs for her. I will never forget that.

• 8:44Speaker 01

  We were very, very lucky to have her here in Washington for the time that she was here. Wonderful, wonderful person who I think taught a lot of us who study, write about, think about virtues like courage, what it actually looks like when you have to behave in courageous fashion. And she has done that again and again for decades at risk to her own life. And I too was very proud of AEI for never hesitating to say, yes, you're someone whose ideas matter, whose freedom matters and will protect you and give you a place where you can work. And they did that for many, many years.

• 9:20Sam Harris?

  The story is not yet fully written on Ayon's place in the world, but the fact that she has not been recognized as a feminist icon globally, and you have the Nick Kristoffs of the world still perpetually confused about which way is up here morally and politically. It's really, this is one of my hobby horses, which we need not get on, but it's, I just find it infuriating.

• 9:49Speaker 01

  Well, her foundation has done, yeah, her foundation has done wonderful work in this arena. And I find your description of Kristoff quite diplomatic, actually. So I'll just leave it at that.

• 9:59Sam Harris?

  Okay. Well, so, so your book is really focused on the impact of technology on culture. And you argue that essentially that we need a new approach to humanism, right? So what, maybe you can just jump into your thesis here. What has worried you about our engagement with technology of late?

• 10:19Speaker 01

  Well, I think the way I would put it is that we are now in a time and place where we have to actively defend the human. And by that, I mean, it is much easier now going through our days in our personal relationships, in our work lives, in our leisure time, to mediate all of our experiences through technology, whether that's our smartphone, our computer screen, wearable sensor-based technology that more and more people are adopting. It means that we measure the quality of our experiences based on the data that's

• 10:54Speaker 01

  Created when we have them and we compare and contrast ourselves to others in ways that weren't possible before. And some of these tools are incredible. It allows us to do a great many things to connect to lots of people. But after several decades of of living this way, I feel we're we're going through life with a worldview that has started to devalue what it means to be an embodied human being. And by that, I mean, we are all attached to physical bodies, but our world in a daily basis doesn't remind us of that often enough. And so we lose some deeply human skills when we mediate everything, whether that's the ability to read those around us,

• 11:34Speaker 01

  their emotions, their responses, whether that leads to less patience when we have to deal with things that we can't have on demand or or immediately swipe swipe right and get. So in all of these ways, some of them that we can quantify, but many, many more that are qualitative, intuitive, we have changed the way we live as human beings. And our technologists would very much like us to continue swiftly going in that direction. So my book is an argument to say, maybe we need to pause and reconsider some of the ways we're mediating our relationships and our lives, because it doesn't always make us happier, healthier, or even able to get along

• 12:16Speaker 01

  as human beings in the way that I think these technologists promised us when they created these incredible tools.

• 12:22Sam Harris?

  Yeah, well, there's there's so many examples of this kind of thing. The one that on its face seems somewhat trivial that you you focus on early in the book, I think might not be trivial. I mean, and and you don't think it is. You go into the neurological reasons why it may not be. But the fact that we no longer teach our kids to write cursive. And I just discovered to my horror that one of my daughters can't even read cursive writing. It never occurred to me that in not being taught to produce handwriting, she would have not been taught to read it. And so I showed her, I think it was, it might have been a note written to her by her grandmother or I

• 13:05Sam Harris?

  mean, something, you know, that she should have been able to read. And she looked at it like it was the Rosetta Stone. What, if anything, does one do about this? I mean, clearly, there's only so much bandwidth in a human day and a human life, and there are new things to learn. And these, just by sheer logic, will have to replace some old things that we no longer learn. Take handwriting as an example. What are your thoughts about the fact that we now have? I mean, the truth is, I don't, I can't comfortably handwrite. I've never, I always printed. I mean, this might have just been a neurological fact about me rather than a cultural fact about our cohort in school.

• 13:47Sam Harris?

  But I'd actually never, I never was somebody who wrote cursively, although I've done a fair amount of printing. But, you know, as you discuss in your book, there's actually some research that suggests that the difference between typing words on a screen and writing by hand is, it runs pretty deep cognitively.

• 14:07Speaker 01

  Yes, handwriting became a source of fascination for me. I happen to be left-handed, so the world is sort of against us. If you're left-handed, you understand what that means. Scissors don't work. It's much more difficult to learn to write because you drag your hand across the page. And there are all kinds of challenges. And I remember as a child, they had the Palmer cursive letters above the chalkboard, and we all had to painstakingly learn to write them. And I didn't enjoy that experience at all. Like many kids, I was impatient to do something, do something else, but we all had to do it. So when my own children were younger, I have two boys, and one is left-handed, one is right-handed, I was shocked by how little concern educators had for any sort of proficiency in handwriting.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  And when I asked, you know, why is this the policy? I was told, you know, a version of what I think a lot of people assume, which is, you know, this is a society where we need keyboarding skills. So we're going to teach them that earlier. They use touchscreens, so they don't really need to handwrite that often. And this, of course, because I'm sort of wired as a contrarian, I thought, well, hmm, I wonder if there's anything that's bad about that. Maybe, are we going to lose anything? And as I started researching the embodied cognition, you know, how the mind and the body working together teach you things that, without that really focused effort, and handwriting is a perfect example of this. There are later skills that will be implicated, skills related not just to how well you hold a pen and write,

• 15:35Speaker 01

  but to memory, memory formation, recall, all kinds of interesting ways in which our very mysterious brains operate by using our bodies. And then there's a kind of habits of mind and learning that we teach ourselves through practice with a skill like handwriting. But there was this other part of it, too, and you hit on it perfectly in describing showing that letter to your daughter. And this is something a little less quantitative, it's qualitative. And that's that we will lose something important about human history if we cease to write by hand, because we'll lose the ability to, say, read our founding documents, which were written in script. We will lose an ability, you know, from a historian's perspective,

• 16:18Speaker 01

  to read the letters of the dead. There's a lot of personality in handwriting. I spent a lot of time in archives as a grad student, and I got to know these long-dead sources because you could tell by how hard they were pressing on the paper with the pen or if they scribbled something out. And there is something deeply human about that ability. And it turns out that we do lose something technically important in terms of memory, in terms of patience as well, I should say. When you're a writer, I also, when I'm writing a shorter piece, I almost always do it on the computer now. But I do find if I get stuck, if I take out a notepad and try to jot down ideas by hand, it doesn't, I mean, my handwriting's not great, but it does make me slow down my thinking

• 17:03Speaker 01

  in a way that can sometimes be really revelatory. So there are all kinds of ineffable things. When something disappears, and handwriting is disappearing at scale, where we haven't stopped. And for me, this was an example that throughout the book, I tried to surface these examples. We didn't stop to think about it. There was no conspiracy against handwriting. I think there's a real focus on efficiency, particularly in education. And the thinking was, well, we have to do all these tests. We have to teach them computer skills. And this is obsolete. But I would argue some of those things are not obsolete. We need to make sure if we set them aside that we do it thoughtfully and knowing what we're giving up in return.

• 17:44Sam Harris?

  Yeah, well, one of the things that changes when you move from writing by hand to typing is that obviously you can type much faster and that seems to be intrinsically good, but we embrace that change without realizing that it actually changes the cognitive act of writing. I mean, if you're writing creatively, if you're writing your own thoughts, because you can get them down faster when typing, you forego a stage of editing that's happening naturally when you're reconsidering the words as you're writing them more slowly by hand. And if you're taking notes on, you know, if I'm trying to take notes on a lecture, say, as a student, because you can type so fast, you can, you can almost get to the place where

• 18:29Sam Harris?

  you basically just write down everything you're hearing. It's you're, you're, you've become a stenographer. Whereas if you're, there's a point you make in the book, whereas if you're writing by hand, you can't do that. And so you're, you're summarizing in the act of writing it down and that leads to a different kind of memory encoding, just in the very act of taking notes. And so it's, there's something lost. I mean, it's true, there's something gained. I mean, obviously we, we value the speed too and the ease of doing it. And so I'm not tempted to go back to handwriting or printing when, you know, when writing myself, but it is interesting to realize that there is, just cognitively, the, the act is, has been transformed by the motor skills you're using to just get the words down.

• 19:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think that that's absolutely right. And it would probably be less of a concern if we spent more of our day, every day, doing other things with our hands besides typing or besides swiping on a screen. And I, I think the opportunity cost here is, is another concern because I, I agree with you. I mean, I, I do, I write, I'm a list maker, so I do write my lists by hand. And, you know, I do have some friends with whom I exchange handwritten letters, not, not very many, and very rarely tend to send email or text messages. But there is something about the disappearance of these experiences, not just when it comes to writing, but to any way we use our physical bodies to interact with the world.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  This is especially true, obviously, of the knowledge class folks. Less so if you have a job where you work with your hands or you're an artist or musician and you spend your time, really spend most of your day in a form of embodied cognition because you're using your mind and your body. But most people, a lot of people, mediate even their daily work now at a level that I think they end up lacking those experiences. And so, taking away handwriting on top of that, and particularly for children whose childhoods are now absolutely saturated with technology. It's just one example among many where I think we haven't made a thoughtful trade-off and really discussed and thought through the choices we've made.

• 20:35Sam Harris?

  Yeah, well, so that phrase or that term "trade-off" is, I think, important here because there are trade-offs with any technology. And the one that comes to mind was the very act of reading or consuming your book in anticipation of this conversation. I have the hardcover and I read some of it there, but I also listened to many hours of audio while hiking. So, and there are two, this is somewhat ironic, given the contents of your book, because from one point of view, I'm degrading the experience of hiking in nature by imposing the mediated layer of an audiobook on it, right?

• 21:18Sam Harris?

  But in reality, I was given a forced choice on that given day, which happened to be the most beautiful day of the year over here, which I could be stuck at my desk, reading your book, or I could be listening to it and gleaning nearly as much from it while hiking in the hills. And that really is a form of multitasking that is, it seems to be the right side of the trade-off here, because nothing much was lost in terms of my comprehending your thoughts, and I'm good enough with my attention so that I can really enjoy nature while also listening to your book. And it's not a pure experience of either, but it really does seem like the sort of sweet spot of this encroachment.

• 22:04Sam Harris?

  Of technology into our lives that at the moment I wouldn't want to give up. I wouldn't want to be the purist who says, no, no, I'm going to, I'm going to be stuck on the couch for three hours now, reading, and I'll hike tomorrow. Right. I feel like I, this was a kind of have your cake and eat it too experience. Do you see that differently? Or do you, how do you view the push and pull here between technology and having a 20th century or a 19th century experience of the world?

• 22:31Speaker 01

  I love how you described that because I think the difference between what you just described doing and how a lot of people mediate their daily lives is that you were aware of making a choice for yourself and of making a trade off. And I certainly, I would be a hypocrite if I argued that everyone should just read the hardcover book and be sitting there, you know, stationary and not have, not use any of these tools because I use them every day as well. And then there's the, the separate issue of people who might struggle with reading, but can, can absorb information by listening to it. I mean, there are all kinds of reasons to embrace these, this choice that we have. But you made a choice knowing that you were going to potentially slightly dilute that

• 23:12Speaker 01

  experience of just being outside on a beautiful day, hiking with no, nothing else to distract you. And that worked for you. And that's the way I think we largely as a culture have not made those choices. I think we, we rush to mediate experiences. Now, if you had told me that while listening to the book, you were also live streaming on Tik Tok, all of your, all of your observations about your hike, I would scold you profusely. But, but I do think that that, for example, is particularly for younger generations, far more likely to be the way they go on a hike. It has to be documented, it has to be shared. And in the documenting and sharing, they aren't even aware they are giving something up.

• 23:53Speaker 01

  So you understood, and, and this is, this is one of these interesting generational things where those of us who grew up without this stuff, take a lot for granted in terms of being, our awareness of the trade offs and our awareness of the choices we're making. And that's no longer true. And, you know, our children and, and all, all of the younger generations don't have that option unless they willingly stop and think about it and choose it. And I am, the older I get, the more grateful I am to have been, you know, it's sort of Gen Xer who was sent out into the neighborhood with a beat up bicycle and told to come home when the streetlights came on and no way to track us. And I think some of those experiences now are disappearing,

• 24:36Speaker 01

  particularly for children. And again, they lose something in the offing of that experience. So I would not scold you, but I would applaud you for being aware you were making a tradeoff in a choice.

• 24:47Sam Harris?

  So what about the rest of our engagement with digital technology at this point? I'm thinking in particular, and this is now bending us back to the chaos of the present moment, I'm thinking of social media and what it's doing to our politics, to our culture, to our sense of ourselves, just the sense that you exist not merely in the real world or in the face-to-face interactions you can have with friends and colleagues and even strangers, but you exist as a digital persona too, and you have a digital reputation to be concerned about. And it's really, in terms of what's truly indelible and what truly scales,

• 25:31Sam Harris?

  the digital version of you has grown beyond what any terrestrial impact is likely to be in any given life, right? I mean, it's just, we're all trailing, I mean, some of us more than others, but we're all trailing just whatever a Google search says we were. I mean, that's more and more the impact we've had on human culture. How do you think about this? How would you describe your engagement with social media at this point?

• 26:02Speaker 01

  So I, and now I will come off as a Luddite, although my reasons for doing this, I will explain. I've never used social media. I'm not on any social media, in part because some friends and I started a journal 20 years ago called The New Atlantis. And my focus when I started writing essays for the journal was on new technology, new personal technology. And so I started studying MySpace, really, it was old. And then Facebook, when it first appeared on the scene, and all of the new social media platforms. And I talked to people who were working, early Facebook employees, people who were devising these platforms, many of whom were really, I Sort of idealistic about what what the possibilities for these tools were.

• 26:46Speaker 01

  And I don't know if it's because I I'm pretty certain that there is something called human nature and it doesn't always it's not always amenable to transformation. I worried about these places bringing out our worst impulses, the anonymity. There weren't very few barriers to entry. There was no way of assuring people that what you said was true or who they even claimed to be was true. And this was the early internet, right? So there used to be this contrast between I R L in real life and the internet. But now even that is not an appropriate way to to think about how we live. Everything is online. And even if you're not online, someone else is or commenting on you or their your profile is somehow out there in the world.

• 27:29Speaker 01

  And we consume more information about other people's experiences than we have unmediated experiences of our own day in and day out for most people. And what that means is that we, even though we're doing that, we we somehow lack a shared reality. And I think this is where in politics in particular, it has become toxic, not because the internet lets people scream and yell at each other and social media rewards that kind of anger and hostility and anxiety, although it does because that that brings greater engagement than happiness, looking at unicorns and puppies and kittens. But it's that we can't even agree on what reality looks like because we're so that the power we have now to carefully curate our reality

• 28:13Speaker 01

  and to not listen to what other what someone else says or to do our own research, as people like to say when they when they are going down a conspiracy theorist rabbit hole and and prove that what the other person's saying not reality is not reality. And you do see this play out. I I read a lot of books about conspiracy theories, both the history of them and people who the the sort of personality types that are drawn to them. And what worried me was realizing that we are, we have created a world in which one day, pretty soon, we're all going to be conspiracy theorists of a type, right? Because we cannot agree on truth and fiction. We cannot agree on, sometimes even on with AI-generated images now, if what we're seeing is real. So, all of these things are very

• 28:58Speaker 01

  destabilizing to our individual sense of identity, to our sense of community. But in politics at scale, what it means is that we don't trust anything and we are at risk of becoming not cynics, but almost nihilistic about our ability to do that and to rebuild our trust. And that's what worries me in our current moment with regard to how social media has sort of dominated and become a kind of public square, but without any of the virtues of the old-style public square.

• 29:26Sam Harris?

  Yeah, well, this really is at the center of my concerns at this point. So, when you say you don't use social media, you don't have any profile yourself on it?

• 29:36Speaker 01

  I don't. I don't even have a LinkedIn. I've been scolded for that, so.

• 29:39Sam Harris?

  But do you ever go on X or any other platform to see breaking news as a, just a lurker?

• 29:44Speaker 01

  Yes, so I lurk. I lurk on, the only one I lurk on is X, to be honest, because that's generally where breaking news happens. So, because I yammer every day about politics with my colleagues at Commentary, I do check that when something's happening.

• 30:01Sam Harris?

  Right.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  But what I find is that everyone I know is on social media and they always send me stuff. I'm on many, the most active thing I do is all my various text chains with friends and colleagues. And they curate the most important stuff for me and then I'll double-check, obviously, if what they sent me was a true story or not. But I don't miss it. But that is a luxury that I know I have, because many, many people have jobs where they have to be on social media, whether it's because they're a small business and they have to be on Facebook to advertise, whether they're in any sort of knowledge job that requires them to have that social media presence. So, I understand that my choice is a luxury because many people don't have that choice.

• 30:42Sam Harris?

  Yeah, well, I question that. I mean, I do think that, I said in my last podcast, I really think serious people need to leave X at this point. I mean, that we just need to boycott what has become a digital sewer and increasingly radicalized one politically. I mean, the level of antisemitism and racism and just frank insanity, I mean, it is the epicenter of so many crazy conspiracies at this point. And the reason why it's not like the other platforms, apart from the way it's architected, is just that the man who owns it has become an amplifier of all of its worst tendencies, just by the way he uses it, not even policies

• 31:23Sam Harris?

  aside, and algorithmic tuning aside. It has become the digital playpen of a digital maniac. And I say this as someone who used to be his friend, but I guess I'm wondering what you think about that. I mean, I get the fact that it is a way for certain kinds of news stories to break, right? So I think antisemitism is something I know you're focused on over at Commentary, and I think we should talk about as well. But so I know, for instance, that it's conceivable, I don't know if this is strictly true in this case, but you take the recent pogrom-like eruption of violence in the Netherlands around the soccer teams, and I don't know if it's still ongoing or not as we speak. But so that's the kind of

• 32:07Sam Harris?

  thing that you could see breaking on X as a platform. Maybe it was just as prevalent on other platforms, too. I don't know. But and then you could reasonably worry, well, but for the fact that there was so much noise on X, maybe the New York Times wouldn't have covered it, right? And I don't know if we live in that world or not. I'd love to get your opinion. But even if we just stipulate that that's true, and that certain stories that we really do want to hear about would effectively go dark if a sufficient number of people walked away from X, I still think it would be a good trade at this point, given the level of conspiracy thinking and the way it gets amplified on X in particular,

• 32:52Sam Harris?

  given just the sea change in attitudes toward truth and error correction that has occurred over there.

• 32:59Speaker 01

  No, I think, I hope this is right, but we won't know for some time.

• 33:06Speaker 01

  I feel like we're in a real period of churn with some of these platforms, X most predominantly. Two things X does now, not always well, but that are necessary in the current media environment. The first is the one you mentioned. It can surface stories that otherwise, and often realtime images of things that are happening, that we should know about. And that I think sometimes our mainstream media outlets have an incentive not to show us and not to talk about and not to really want to discuss at all. And I don't mean conspiracy theories. I just mean stories that would be difficult, whether because the ideological tendencies of the newsroom or the editorial voices in those publications were against it, or simply

• 33:49Speaker 01

  because it would be difficult to verify. And if we look at the media environment now, there are foreign bureaus in particular have shrunk. There's a lot of looming layoffs once again in media. So there are obviously bottom line concerns, too. But it does surface those stories and then prompts debate. And when old school reporters then chase down some of those stories, they sometimes find them to be true, they sometimes find them to be false, but it does at least start a conversation. On that, I think it can occasionally be useful. And honestly, I will make a defense of community notes. I kind of like them in part. They're not always correct, but they're closer to correct than some of the mainstream fact checking that goes on these days.

• 34:29Speaker 01

  And in that sense, it's an example of crowdsourcing that can, in realtime, say, actually, there's this you should look at or consider this. So those are two attempts to do something useful on a platform that I completely agree with you is very chaotic and is actually designed to bring out everyone's worst impulses and doesn't really moderate much content. I know if you know people who are on the right, they have a healthy suspicion of moderation of content, particularly on X when it was Twitter. There were a lot of claims of censorship.

• 35:01Sam Harris?

  Twitter files, the biggest story of the decade. In case you missed it, it's right next to Hunter Biden's laptop as the most important thing that has been surfaced right of center in our politics.

• 35:11Speaker 01

  Yes. Well, and I think if you look at rates of trust in the media. Media now, it's not just people who are right of center, who are mistrustful. It's spreading.

• 35:20Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 35:20Speaker 01

  And that, I think, is where we, I hope we are in a period of transition because what I would like to see are more reliable, independent, often small and focused on a particular set of issues outlets doing that work, not leaving it to social media and crowdsourced opinions of these things, but actually back, back it up with facts and reporting. And that's what's missing because if you're, if you're a young journalist these days, it's, it's, you do have to ally yourself. Either you become, you know, an ex-personality and, and you have to really amp up the rhetoric and, and perhaps not do the due diligence of the reporting in the same way. Or you have to go find a legacy media institution that will hire you for nothing and you'll churn out, you know, six stories a day for their website.

• 36:03Speaker 01

  Neither of these are great options for, for surfacing truth and, and honest debate. But I do see a brighter future because of platforms like Substack and others that give people a place where they, they can do this less expensively, with less ideological baggage and just try, you know, very entrepreneurial opportunities in, in the land of ideas and of journalism. And so I hope that this particular moment is going to be looked back upon in, in a decade as, as a transitional moment, but we'll see.

• 36:35Sam Harris?

  Don't you think we need to build back these journalistic institutions? And if, if the market can't actually support the bureau in Beijing and a hundred other cities, that we need philanthropy to step in. I mean, you have someone like Jeff Bezos who owns the Washington Post. If he were convinced, he could obviously decide, well, this doesn't actually have to pencil out as a business. I can just take several billion dollars and make this a bulletproof institution with all the resources it needs. I mean, that's, I think that's only a conversation away from happening potentially if, if one had the right argument for it. Why isn't that the direction of progress?

• 37:19Speaker 01

  Well, I would say two things about that. The first is that if you really want to invest, if, look, if you're a billionaire and you want to throw your money at a good cause, one of the best things you could do is to try to revive local news. Because most of the grift and corruption and, and really awful things that impact people in the day to day happens at the local level. And we do not have those newspapers anymore. We don't have the person covering the city council meeting, going to the, to the school board meetings. Only when some huge scandal erupts that becomes nationalized, do people go to school board meetings and cover them anymore. And what that means is that that's where the trust deficit begins for people. Because if your city's supposed to come fix a pothole on your road, and you've complained

• 38:02Speaker 01

  about it, and you think that someone's getting a kickback from a contractor, and that's why they're not fixing the pothole, how do you prove that if you're just the average citizen? That's the role of journalism. And that would do another thing that I think is important. And that's cultivate a new generation of journalists who don't come out of only the elite institutions. Because journalism, national journalism now, is drawing from a very small pool of talent. And it's, you know, Ivy and Ivy League plus universities, there's, there's a lot of insularity to their worldview there, a lot of expectation of what people, what the right people think. And that's always been the case at places like the New York Times and elsewhere. But I think that's spread, and you do not have a contrast with like, the guy who went

• 38:46Speaker 01

  to the state university and got his first job covering, you know, city council meetings at a Midwest newspaper, and then worked his way up, and then became a political reporter in his 40s at the New York Times. That used to be the trajectory. That's not how it works anymore. And I think we lose both the skill and training and discipline of, of requiring people to cover those, those local issues, and report on them honestly, and cultivate sources, learn what it means to be a journalist. And we also lose a diversity of worldviews and experiences and, and class-based differences that are extremely obvious now, when you look at places like the New York Times, places like the Washington Post. When they talk about people who aren't from their class, it's glaringly obvious, because they don't know anybody who didn't come through those institutions and shares their views.

• 39:31Speaker 01

  So they seem very out of touch, because they are. So I do think that those two things, over the course of a generation or two, could give us a revival of, of the kind of journalism and, and reporting that this country really needs.

• 39:44Sam Harris?

  What can we do about conspiracy thinking? And I mean, there are many people who won't even like that phrase because they it has been used to stigmatize their cherished conspiracy theory that they're quite sure is true. But I mean, I just, you know, this is something that is, this is one of those moments where you you hope social media isn't real life, but then you discover that it is. I mean, I just feel like we're becoming a pizza gate culture politically. I mean, it's like, most of us, much of the time, are showing up to rescue nonexistent children in a nonexistent basement, right?

• 40:25Sam Harris?

  And that and that has just completely distorted the nature of our our politics. I mean, the most egregious case or cases happens right of center, I think. I mean, obviously, the left is not immune to this, but there's something, there's some fundamental asymmetry in the dynamics when you look at the penalty paid for error left and right politically. I mean, like, if the New York Times gets it wrong, you know, it's embarrassing, they'll be criticized, people will break trust with the the organization, and many people, certainly right of center, will say, look, you can never trust that they they made this one mistake about Black Lives Matter, or pick your topic, and you can't trust these guys ever again.

• 41:06Sam Harris?

  Whereas, right of center, you have organs like, you know, Fox News, or Breitbart, or OWN, or people like Tucker Carlson, or Trump himself, and there's absolutely no reputational damage done by obvious lies, right? You can lie with a velocity never seen on planet Earth before, and and no one cares. It's just, you're creating a mood, a partisan mood, that your fans admire. And I mean, to take the an egregious case around this election, you had, in the run up to Election Day, and even on the day itself, you had people like Elon Musk and Donald Trump

• 41:46Sam Harris?

  clearly lying about voter fraud and, you know, irregularities in Philadelphia and elsewhere in Pennsylvania, and This was all going to be enormously problematic should Trump have lost, right? Because they were clearly preparing the ground not to accept the results of the election. But when he won, you know, all of that, all of the concern around election fraud evaporated. And it seems like all the machines that Elon assured us could not be trusted, could now be trusted, et cetera. I mean, there's no penalty paid for this kind of behavior right of center. This is just the new normal. And again, this is a normal where you have someone like Elon promoting literally the

• 42:28Sam Harris?

  people who engineered Pizzagate and that lunacy right there in the conversation with Elon and Tucker and Don Jr. and Trump himself. And there's no, there is no reputational penalty for having gotten something that wrong right of center. And I don't, I mean, as much as I criticize the left, there are some journalistic and scientific and academic standards that people are anchored to. They're still capable of embarrassment.

• 42:59Speaker 01

  I think I would agree with you until COVID coverage, I would say. Although you're right, the one thing I would say, there is a price to be paid for the right of center conspiracy theorizing and lying, but it's paid by us, the American people, and it's paid for in our trust. And, and there is the erosion of trust, I think, particularly on the right and particularly not, not even their erosion of trust in media, but the erosion of trust in all of our institutions of government is very worrisome because it's that over time, as that builds, that erodes stability because people feel like not just that their government isn't working for them, but that it might be actively working against them.

• 43:40Speaker 01

  And that's where conspiracy theories can become quite dangerous for, for people who've been marinating in that mindset. What was one of the things I'm very, I'm fascinated by conspiracy theories and I spent some time reading police reports and transcripts, a few of, I cited one or two of them in the book of some of the people who've been arrested, you know, who, who, you know, the Pizzagate situation and this is a guy who came to a bookstore here in Washington DC and started, well, near a bookstore, started shooting at this restaurant because he thought Hillary Clinton was part of a pedophile ring and keeping people in the basement. The restaurant didn't even have a basement. Does have excellent pizza, so you should try it if you're in town. But what was fascinating to me is that he really became radicalized because he was lonely, isolated, and got an internet connection

• 44:24Speaker 01

  and started just digging around. And he needed a sense of purpose in his life. And this gave him a sense of purpose. When he was shown that everything he believed was a lie, he's like, wow, I just, I really didn't have good intel on this. I mean, he recognized that he'd been had, but it was too late at that point. He could have killed someone. He certainly, you know, he was then sent to prison, as well he should have been. But I, I think that sometimes we get to, I think there are some underlying problems here in our society, having to do with isolation and trust and loneliness. And particularly among young men, they are far more receptive to that kind of conversation, not because there's a, you know, deeply rooted toxic masculinity or anything like that, but because

• 45:07Speaker 01

  they have spent a lot of their life being told that being a, being a male is, is dangerous and bad, or being told their country is not a place that stands for important ideals that the rest of the world admires and people are desperate to come here because of those ideals. They're being raised on a diet of really cynical ways of looking at the world, and particularly when it comes to politics. So I agree with you that the, there should be some penalty. I think our system, and because our system is now playing out politically and in the information ecosystem, with people getting most of their information on social media, even about politics, those platforms really reward the most extreme views. And that's true on the right and the left. And until we can en masse, step away from those

• 45:51Speaker 01

  platforms as a place where we have political discourse, the problem will continue. And, and it's a very difficult thing to remove oneself from because you get a lot of positive feedback. You can be sitting alone in your house and watch on Instagram or on X or any platform, all of the people who are telling you, yes, exactly. I totally believe that. And it, the emotional experience you have, and again, embodied. Like you, you actually will feel good because you feel that's a real feeling. But it's an unreal environment on which we're happy, you know, which is, which is rewarding things that really are not good for us and certainly not good for our political culture. So I do think, I mean, we'll see again, this is where more independent outlets fact checking Elon Musk.

• 46:33Speaker 01

  I mean, Tucker, I think is a lost cause. That's, that's really someone should, it's, it's almost, it's a tragedy, but also farce, what, what has become of him. I knew him back in the Weekly Standard days. He was actually a very good writer and journalist when he was young. That's a really difficult story there.

• 46:49Sam Harris?

  Well, what do you think? Let's drill down on that because I really do think Tucker's character arc is the whole problem in microcosm because it's not, I mean, I, I take your point about young men not finding purpose and being demonized by the culture and all that. But you, you take someone like Tucker, there are many other examples I could give you, but I mean, he's the perfect one. Obviously he's self-actualized in, in some ways, right? He's a, he has a successful career. He's wealthy. He can do what he wants with his time and attention. He's talented. He's a very talented performer. Uh, he's a very talented actor, I would say. Though I don't think I ever read his writing. He's rumored to have been a very talented writer,

• 47:31Sam Harris?

  which you can confirm, but there's something quite deranged about his priorities at this point. I mean, his ethical compass is in a perpetual spin and it's, it's not tracking anything like real integrity or compassion or wisdom, though he would profess to be a deep student of those virtues, above all humility and self doubt and circumspection. I mean, he's, he's a master at framing the next crazy and divisive and invidious thing he says with this false humility of, listen, I've gotten so many things wrong and you wouldn't believe how ashamed I am to have been so wrong on so many important things. And so now I'm, here's the pivot right now toward this next

• 48:15Sam Harris?

  odious thing I'm about to foist on all of humanity, but I'm doing it from a place of real humility and self criticism and intellectual honesty. And here it is, some awful piece of papulum that you maniacs right of center are going to lap up. And now I'm ready for the Fourth Reich to be born for all the anti-Semitic nonsense. I just replatformed somehow. Don't get me started on Tucker. Uh, tell me what the hell happened with Tucker Carlson.

• 48:43Speaker 01

  You know, I don't, I don't know. And

• 48:45Sam Harris?

  What does John think? Can you, can you, can you play, play act like John Puthoritz?

• 48:50Speaker 01

  Well, I, I think John feels deep regret that he gave him his first job. And I know people who remain, you know, friendly with him. I, I was never his friend. I just kind of interacted in DC, especially in Weekly Standard, may it rest in peace, circles. Here's the thing about Tucker. I think he did believe he was humble and he did want to reach directly, especially once he left Fox News, reach directly an audience of, of sort of disaffected people. And he's a very intelligent guy. And what he quickly realized is that that was not going to keep him front of mind, as people like to say today. And that's where he needed to be. And you can see this progression over the course of those YouTube videos he started

• 49:32Speaker 01

  doing from his cabin in Maine with its sort of Unabomber-esque decorating style, where he, he became more and more hyperbolic, angry, really, a lot of the time. And I thought, well, surely this, people don't really want to consume this, do they? And it turns out they do. And I think now he's pivoted, both in his online presence and at these, you know, rallies he's been having all over the country, which in the lead up to the election, he's the guy who's going to tell you what's behind the curtain, right? It's very conspiratorial in tone. It's, you know, they're trying to do this to you. I know, I know. And because, as you say, he's, he's a very good actor. He has a, he has a way of connecting. That's why he was very good on television.

• 50:14Speaker 01

  It's believable to people who have already lost faith in the institutions. And so in a weird way, they're now in a feedback loop where he's confirming their priors, but doing it with a lot of performative zeal and with a lot of, you know, sort of in the know winks and nods. And where that ends up is, as you say, him platforming a guy who claims to be a historian but is not, who writes anti-Semitic, you know, fanciful rewritings of the history of World War II. And now that what that means because of the reach of his platform is that people now are, are starting to think, oh, you know, Oh Hitler, let's give him a reputational rethink. And that is really bad. That is just bad.

• 50:58Speaker 01

  And that comes on the heels of an educational system that actually has encouraged students for several generations to think counterintuitively, thinking that would make them more critical. You know, let's look at the things that, you know, the narrative history never taught us, but in fact, might have primed them, some of them, for this sort of way of viewing the world and particularly viewing the past.

• 51:19Sam Harris?

  But on this point of the double standard reputationally and epistemologically that I think I detect as you move right of center, maybe in Tucker's case, we know, or I think we have good reason to know, that he was quite duplicitous at Fox News and on the one hand, shilling for Trump for years, but on the other, in his private communications, saying that he thought he was, literally as a quote, that he was a demonic force and he couldn't wait to be rid of him. After January 6th, he couldn't wait to see this guy disappear from our politics. We, you know, we have those texts based on the Dominion lawsuit.

• 52:00Sam Harris?

  How is it that his audience doesn't care about that level of hypocrisy?

• 52:07Speaker 01

  That's a very good question. I think a lot of them probably didn't follow in detail some of those stories, or those were the things that were reported in media outlets that they don't consume, for one. And for another, I think they're...

• 52:21Sam Harris?

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