The Border, DEI, Trump, Islam, BLM & the Misinterpretation of Data | Sam Harris

welcome back to impact Theory as we dive into part two Sam Harris and I confront the Urgent matters of systemic racism Trump the problem with the right and rehash and old beef he had with me and Constantine kiss's position let's get back into it um so the Border I think is something that we can end up over focusing on I think the border is a symptom of something larger for me uh it is a few different ideas that are um people are in the grips of so so thing number one is that for call it the last 50ish years there's been a March through the institutions with a radical Marxist just uh directionalize it uh Viewpoint that has come out to Dei and I think what Dei is designed to do is break institutions by hijacking uh people's uh compassion circuitry and that the real thing that makes that stick is that also everybody wants to do something incredibly meaningful for the world and so you have people that have a pretty cynical um desire they're driven by Will To Power and so their cynical desire is oh I can break this institution I can tear it down I can do my good thing in the world uh by convincing people to um do make their contribution to the World by just absolutely obliterating power dynamics and that ultimately this is a game of power being played but the the sort of ground troops I think oftentimes really do have wonderful motives are motivated by compassion they really want to help um does that feel accurate or do you think I'm oversimplifying or missing something yeah I agree with that I think um certainly most people most of the time have uh reasonably good intentions I mean incentives are a lot I mean people can be relied upon to get pushed around by what's in their self-interest right so if you if you're going to make windfall profits going down One path uh even if that path seems uh ethically suspect it's going to take a um a very high integrity person to resist those incentives um so what so the larger solve here is we want systems of incentives that make it easier and easier for even selfish people to behave more and more ethically and more even more and more like Saints right if you have the right system of incentives you can even have sociopaths effectively behaving like Saints because they're just incent they're appropriately incentivized to do that whereas if you have the wrong incentives you can have people who are nearly Saints behaving like sociopaths because it's just that the incentives are just overwhelmingly aimed in the wrong direction um but I I agree with you that um compassion has been misdirected and um just just informed by by bad information I mean most people who think to take something like defund the police for instance that the worst um political slogan ever patched um the people who were in favor of defunding the police uh I'm sure 100% of them genuinely thought and probably still think that there is an epidemic of of you know racist police violence aimed at at uh the black community and that the way to address that compassionately is to have fewer cops on the streets right like this this the real risk to young black men is that they're going to get killed by cops right that's just not true the real risk to young black men or other young black men this is just established Beyond any possibility of Doubt by the actual statistics on crime and violence in in American society um and what you have in the black community is is bad policing failures of policing you know murders don't get solved right petty crime you have a history of a war the war drugs which was targeted to to um disproportionately to to minorities and that has been terrible and has created a cycle of incarceration that that has has been a genuine source of misery and unfairness in our society and so the War on Drugs is its own problem and and what it did to our justice system is is is certainly worth analyzing and and not making those mistakes again but when you actually look at the reality of murder in America it is overwhelmingly a story of black men young black men killing other young black men in the black community and ineffective policing of those crimes right and but even on that and this is this is one of the areas where I feel like people aren't having the right they're not arguing at the right level so I don't think anything you said is untrue though people will certainly debate that but compassion is going to follow you here as well so when you say uh why cops just really aren't the problem the stats bear that out immediately they're going to have an emotional reaction they're they being um activists that are trying to make life better for young black men and so they look at that and say okay well to to it sounds Sam like you're trying to say that there isn't a problem and even if Sam well I I am literally saying there isn't the that the problem they think exists simply does not exist to the best of our knowledge it it it exist I'm not saying there's no racist cops out there I mean yes but that is a rounding error on the problem of lethal violence against let me land the plan about what happens to this part of the audience when they hear you what they're thinking in their minds is sure but the reason that black-on-black violence is the real concern even if I concede that point is that they've grown up in a racist system so of course uh that's going to be a problem and what I'm saying is uh you said earlier it's very hard to convince people to change their mind and I think the reason for that is what I call frame of reference when somebody has a frame of reference they're wearing What I Call Whole Life beer goggles it just distorts wildly everything that you see but you're actually seeing it so you're looking at it you actually see that this is a problem of systemic racism that's why my neighborhood is terrible that's why black onblack violence is there and so anybody that denies that is just part of the systemic racist problem which is why I don't even necessarily think they're being manipulative when they say anybody that denies this is just racist plain and simple whether there's the whole concept of um I don't need another black face I need another black voice right so that even if somebody um who is Black is saying this just isn't true the stats don't bear it out they're going to get attacked as well because what they're not addressing is the worldview that says uh this isn't their fault and that anybody that's being oppressed anybody that's starting certainly poverty is just such an easy way to see somebody being crushed by some unseen hand right you just go anybody being crushed it is isn't their fault and therefore I'm looking for an external problem I am not saying hey even though this isn't your fault that you're growing up in poverty clearly it's not your fault you were just born into it bad luck uh but only you can do something about it that's where the Collision has to happen where it's like I get it this isn't their fault poverty is a cycle that people are just born into but the only way out is for that individual to do a thing well they may need help I mean I I I I think it's we we simply don't know what the perfect social policy is to eradicate inequality in our society I think we should I think I think we should be I mean to two things are true simultaneously it's I think it's it's foolish to imagine that there will be no inequality and it's I think it's even foolish to imagine that we want a society with zero inequality there there's something about inequality that is probably useful in a variety of ways but you've already moved on and but but no but but just let me just on the point the the a certain degree of inequality should be in it's right to play on our compassion circuits it should be intolerable to us if we have people starving to death in America that's just you know a level of dysfunction we have to figure out somehow to some way to to correct we don't have people starving to death in America and that's that's a that's one measure of how much better life is in a society like ours than it is elsewhere in in the world but we want the floor to keep as as we produce more and more wealth we want some of that wealth to to continue to raise the floor beneath which no one is going to fall in our society so even the poorest person in our society is much less poor than they are in in subsaharan Africa and much less poor than anyone was a 100 years ago and that's good that's progress and we want I I think we we do not want to live in a society where you have a Genny Co coefficient like in Brazil where that it becomes just rational for rich people to live with you know in gated compounds with razor wire across the top because there's just so much crime out on the sidewalk for obvious reasons because people are desperately poor and they're not figuring out anything else creative to do with their lives but to rob people richer than than themselves well so this this gets to the thing that I'm really trying to drag people to and and there's something about the way that I approach this I am not able to get people um in my Lane here the reason the Jenny coefficient matters is is a true thing about human psychology which is poverty isn't a problem poverty next to wealth is a problem because it triggers the I know you know the capucha monkey thing give a capucha monkey a cucumber for doing a thing and is perfectly happy to take it but it prefers grapes so if you give its neighbor a grape for the same task the kapo monkey getting the Cucumber goes [ __ ] ballistic yanking on their cage throwing the Cucumber back at the person I mean it's absolutely just funny if I'm honest just watching it happen because you recognize the truth of that in yourself as a human and so what where I'm trying to get people to go is because it's all started with uh is the West committing suicide and if it is committing suicide how do we defend the West if if it is worth defending I think you've already made a good case that the West is worth defending but the line that people need to draw is it's worth defending because it yielded better outcomes so now that our current system is beginning to yield a Genny coefficient that is bad we can say okay something is starting to break down and so now we need only address that it is currently yielding an ever increasing Genny coefficient and if we know that leads to violence and our norstar is human flourishing and humans don't flourish in violence we now have a system that is no longer outputting the thing it needs to Output so to me the West is predicated on one simple fact some ideas yield better outcomes than others you must put those ideas out into a market place and let them compete so we let people have free speech we let people have private property we let people generate wealth by creating things that other people want and hey even though it's a trade-off it is definitely not a perfect system that you can then just track based on results now what I see breaking down is an assault on results-based systems full stop because they yield inequality and going back to you have cynical actors driven by built of power hijacking The Compassion of people to get them to stop looking at outcomes and so now you have Thomas Soul's quote the last 30 years have been marked by exchanging what works meaning it yields an outcome with what sounds good so I'm I from what I can see the only way to defend the West is to get people to buy into some ideas yield better outcomes and that we must judge every social program every potential way that we solve a problem through the outcome that it generates yeah I I just I mean there there's a couping is there's intentions you have to have the right intentions I mean if you have bad intentions then you're you're going to seek bad outcomes so we don't want to Discount the role of intention but yeah we we want to know whether the the goods we're attempting to achieve in the world are actually achievable and if we're not if we're producing Harms that that we don't want we should be aware of that and we should error correct and in so far as we don't have systems that are responsive to that or or or incentives that are responsive to that that's that's clearly a problem um we but we should recognize that there are there consequences to just failing to coordinate like if you take the American society as a whole if you have let's let's say I mean I'm not saying we have good remedies for homelessness in California but let's say we did let's say we just had the most compassionate and well-intended and in fact wise policies with respect to homelessness in in uh and what to do about it in California and they didn't have any of that in neighboring states right in neighboring states they just had a Draconian get off my lawn policy right well then California is going to attract all of the nation's homeless or all of the homeless from the surrounding states even with a good policy and and be overrun and to some degree I I think that's probably happened in California uh because our doesn't that in to you automatically mean it isn't a good policy well no but I'm saying idiot compassion can have bad consequences that way where you just if you're just essenti essentially subsidizing fentanyl Addiction on your sidewalks right that's obviously stupid even locally but it's going to have this Global consequence of of drawing more of the the drug addicted and and and homeless to you but I'm saying that even if we had a good policy right which is better than just funding drug addiction on our sidewalks um if no if no other neighboring states have good policies well then we're still going to be pulling more than our fair share and it could break our system too so like we we need we have a coordination problem that we have to solve as a nation and arguably as a as a global civilization I think there there are problems that we can't solve as a nation right I mean you know climate change is not something any one nation can address and uh a global pandemic is not something that any one nation can address right so we need coordinated efforts even at a global scale um and we should recognize this even from a position I mean you don't have to be a saint or even to be especially motivated by compassion to want these Goods to to be shared broadly you just have to be wisely selfish I mean you just have to recogn no matter how selfish you are as a a billionaire in Silicon Valley no matter how much you are taken in by the illusion that you are completely self-made and that nobody gave you you know nobody gave you any help at all even though that you even though you can't account for any of the abilities and contexts that allowed you to do the work you did right um but be as be as resolutely selfish as you want then ask yourself the question just how many homeless people do you want to have to step over on the sidewalk leaving your compound right do you want to be a do you want to feel unsafe at a restaurant because there's so many people panhandling you know at the tables you know in the cafe do you want to be able to sit outside in a restaurant or is that going to be Unthinkable now because there there's there so much chaos on the street just what sort of society do you want to be in do you want to be surrounded by desperate envious people or do you want to be surrounded by creative self-actualized happy people who can be your customers and who are who are going to who are going to celebrate your success when you do when you do something visibly successful or are you going to or do you want to be surrounded by people who are thinking maybe it's time to get the pitchforks and murder you right it's like even just just just a psychopathic commitment to self should bear at least some some modum of of of um altruism with for for self preservation alone you should want life to be minimally good for everyone around you and uh so I'm so we we don't need widespread sainthood to get to to agree on on policies that would would make life better for more and more people and and solve a problem like homelessness what do you need then I mean we well we need to cancel dumb ideas right I mean they're they obvious they're so for instance our default is in America that in a in public space we've got you know we've got freedom of assembly right you should be able to you're you are free to be on the sidewalk right it's a public space it's not you're not trespassing it's not a private space and our default sense is that someone should be free to live out the chaos of their mental illness or their drug addiction or their violence on in front of us and even die in front of us on the sidewalk and that compassion the better part of compassion is allowing that to happen allowing the autonomy to of just living your disregulation out in front of others and it somehow is unseemly or bigoted or otherwise selfish to point point to the obvious social cost of having to live with this dysfunction in our midst right so so like that that to have to cross the street with your children so as to avoid the obviously insane or obviously you know drug addicted uh person on this side of the street that's a social CA right that's a that is that is there are businesses that aren't open opening or that will soon be closing because of all this chaos here there are parts of town that you're not going to want you as as a parent are not going to want to go go to or have your kids go to those restaurants will close right like I this is this all of the spirals and we all have an interest in figuring out how to help that person and figuring out how that help is best delivered in a way that doesn't make this particular part of the city and in some cases that some of the nicest parts of the most valuable parts of of a city uninhabitable and um so we we we need policies that so in in this specific case we we need a policy that allows you to take someone off the sidewalk and we and and and I recognition that the really compassionate thing to do is to intrude into their lives and get them the help they need at a place where it can be delivered not not on the sidewalk in front of a of a you know a department store um and yes these there are people who need to be taken out of society and and institutionalized in some sense whether it's it's just deliver uh Rehabilitation with respect to drug addiction or it's or it's mental health treatment or getting them on appropriate medication um there's there are better and worse ways to do this there's no there's no perfect way to do any of this but why don't we get these policies well because so so at the first cut you have uh people who have a very confused notion of compassion which is uh it is to intrude upon this person to not to move them off the sidewalk to move them out of your nice neighborhood to be concerned in the first place about your nice neighborhood for you rich guy to care about crossing the street with your kids right all of that is white privilege and gentrification and and completely um uninteresting from an ethical perspective like that is that is some species of selfish evil does that like a trick that has been played on people or is that just accidental did that come from a good place how did that narrative get started well it's it's it's easy to see how if you have a very class-based view of of everything and you you resent certain parts of you you resent areas of town becoming gentrified and and rents going up and it becoming harder to live in those areas because rents have gotten higher like like if all that if that whole process seems dystopian to you in principle well then you're going to have then then you're going to say all of this is a consequence of of you the rich people getting what they want and extracting it from this part of society right we wouldn't have this homelessness problem in the first place if housing was just more affordable that may be true in a few cases some cases some percentage of cases it's not true across the board I mean so so much of of the homeless problem is a problem of Substance Abuse and Mental Illness right it's not just that rents are too high um but in so far as in so far as building more housing and affordable housing is the remedy we should do that but we have to recognize it's not the remedy across the board and we can't we in California can't become a sanctuary for the entire country's homeless problem um so it's again it's requires a coordinated effort across States but but you you have to dissect that each moment of moral confusion that is a block a blocker to a a an actually comp passionate and effective policy and the first one here is people have a right that person who's who's lying in his own vomit in front of a the J crew store on the mall has just as much a right to be there as you do to go shopping there right and if you own J crew well you're just a you're you know you're just some rich guy who who um is worried about your you know your retail business and that's a completely superficial concern compared to the real human emergency of this person's life you know on the sidewalk um and it stops there right you you're you're some species of bigot to not want to have to step over that person in order to go into a store and you're some species of bigot if you're a store owner noticing your business being destroyed by the dis by the chaos and dysfunction on on on the sidewalk and all of that class-based resentment toward the rich people who are trying to figure out how their this this what used to be a nice neighborhood got so ugly um that has to be dissected and and realigned with a really compassionate policy which is you are not doing this person any favors letting them bake in the sun you know on fenel on a sidewalk right like that is not the freedom you should want them to be exercising right you should you have to figure out a a a a uh a policy by which you can intrude upon their lives and and move them to a place where they can actually get help if you're a smart business owner you're looking for ways to cut costs so you can stay competitive and one solution that's helped over 37,000 companies do just that is netw Suite by Oracle net Suite is the number one Cloud Financial system bringing accounting financial management inventory and HR into one platform and one source of Truth it reduces it costs and cuts the cost of M maintaining multiple systems you improve efficiency by bringing all your major business processes into one platform slashing manual tasks and errors and giving you an edge over your competitors by popular demand netsuite has extended its one-of-a-kind flexible financing program for a few more weeks head to netsuite.com Theory right now nets.com Theory that's nets.com Theory do you think simply um explaining to people what the moral math ought to be will actually make this happen or do things have to get so bad that pain and suffering plus having heard somewhere a podcast at one time Sam Harris walks me through the moral math swings us back in the opposite direction well I I I don't think there are that many Minds that have to be changed I think you know the people in charge the people who are on our city councils and in the mayor's offices and the governor Etc those are the minds that have to be changed and then we get we can get new policies um I mean so far as you people have to vote for initiatives all of that I mean there there's there's a war of ideas that has to be won but I don't think it's it's hard to win it and certainly there's a lot of lwh hanging fruit here I I think the again to come back to where we started with this conversation there there's a distortion uh that that social media has has created for us where you have a very small percentage of activists who are seriously confused about right and wrong and good and evil who are so loud on social media that they cow everyone into silence I mean it's just it's just so painful to become the target of people who have way too much time on their hands uh uh on social media that that people step away from it and it's but it is a minority I mean we we just have a very distorted sense of just how many people are I mean to take to take an issue we haven't touched here but around which there's a ton of activism like just just just what percentage of people in the trans Community are actually trans activists who are making people's life hell online right it's probably a small percentage of even the trans community and the trans Community is the tiniest percentage of of any society and so you have you have not a lot of people just just going scorched Earth you know online and and it's such that you I mean it becomes a a a national political priority if you're a Democrat to to figure out just what's your policy on the whole trans thing as though it's like it's right up there with like you know a civilizational collision with China and Russia and Iran it's like we got that here and then pretty much at the same level we've got you know trans athletes and trans baths and and and uh you know I maybe have to give equal time to those things right and even if you're if you're Biden you know I mean like I mean it's insane what he has done to his own political prospects just on that issue I'm not saying that that you know that we shouldn't be compassionate around the trans issue and that we shouldn't have political equality for Trans people all of that's real and worth talking about but the idea that that that you know Biden has used the amount of political Capital that he you know barely had on that issue the way he has um I mean it's just it's it's it's a a pure Distortion based I think largely upon what what activists have managed to do on social media there's a concept in finance about debt cycles and that there's no escaping the debt cycle and they don't take the exact amount of time but there's six stages uh that people move through you start by reshuffling all the debt usually through just blood death turmoil uh you start building from the ground up in this really great society that uh has not tripped into uh over accumulating debt yet has not had the inflationary practice of printing money and you just basically March your way towards the sixth phase which is total collapse because you've overprinted the money you get hyperinflation uh your debt is just unimaginably High and the only way to discharge that is Through Blood letting and so people war and fight and they just say okay Jesus we're just just going to let go of the old debt and start a new and that's your cycle you go over and over I um I don't want the following statement to be true but I worry that it might be that the um Good Men hard times like that whole cycle is just a cycle and we have to go through it and that my earlier statement about there just has to be enough pain where uh your daughter gets attacked by a crackhead uh on your doorstep and now enough people have that kind of experience that they just don't care whether they sound PC or not they're just like nope this isn't going to happen anymore to your earlier point about if uh the Democrats don't protect the Border then fascists will like at some point people have just had enough and they're going to stand up and they're going to take this back and you get this violent swinging of the pendulum um I would much prefer that people can be persuaded with ideas but when I look at the world um I just in the face of you saying there's only a few people that have to have their minds changed and I'm like you've been out here for 20 years yelling into the wind uh and I have certainly been influenced by your ideas but it doesn't seem like the right people are it seems instead that people are breaking off into different states and people are leaving California going to Texas going to Florida if they don't want to put up with this kind of thing which is not in my estimation the ideal scenario so do you think that it just um there's a better way to present these ideas and we really will win at that level um or not well I do worry about that that kind of pendulum swing and and um us just losing our patience and losing our cool and and suddenly becoming way more callous than we are just because we are swinging back we're swinging away from some um you know s some very silly policies um and their bad consequences I I think I mean again I I've mentioned this a couple times but it's just worth keeping in mind um there is this massive problem of preference falsification where you where we it it is is seeming like many more people agree with the the fringes than do and the silence so the Silence of the majority is being misread as as agreement or at least just or or certainly not disagreement and whereas it really is just silence and in many cases I I know this firsthand I there are many people who agree with me on my EDG as opinions and just would never say anything in public I mean they're so grateful that I'm out here saying the things I'm saying so that they don't have to but they don't see the consequence of their silence in their Lane whatever that that lane is um because it seems like in most cases it seems like mere acquiescence to the crazy opinions that they're happy I'm criticizing right so um so like I me what you said about Dei right um I mean until yesterday to be against Dei in any in any way really I mean to to to do anything other than celebrate it as you know finally we've arrived is to be racist and and to be called racist in in America certainly is the wor it's it's the worst thing you can be called probably you know next to a pedophile um and to merely be called it is to be tainted with I mean to to be called it with no justification is is in many cases enough to to perform a kind of reputational murder and um and and that's just we have to grow out of that you know we have to so if you want to if you really want equality if you really want to embrace M MLK's vision of of valuing people based on the content of their character and get past the superficial differences of between people like skin color you have to you have to hold to that right and you can't overcorrect into this ebex Kandi anti-racist uh re you know I.E reversed racist uh uh attitude which is white people are bad and it's completely legitimate to harm their interests prefer preferentially because as a way of correcting for all the history of inequality in our society I'm not I mean I I think it's totally valid to to look at the consequences of past racism and worry that there's something more we should be doing to correct for the what what is what is currently a status quo that when you look at the details you should still make people uncomfortable I mean the fact that on average white families have eight times the wealth of black families in America right to whatever degree past racism is the reason why that's the case that is a legacy that nobody should be happy about and it's completely understandable that there are people who look at that and say okay well we should pay reparations right that's the way to solve this problem now I happen to think it's the wrong way to solve the problem there's and you if you if you want to hear someone withstanding on this topic talk about it you can listen to John McWater and Glenn Lowry you know they've kind of dissected why they think this this would be a disaster but um but the impulse to just based we know what our history was with respect to race in America and to look at present inequality with respect to wealth and health outcomes and levels of crime it's completely natural to say okay wait a minute we've got something to atone for here and what can we do to to to help um I'm totally sympathetic with that Dei at the level of who gets into medical school is the wrong way to help right to lower the standards so that when you walk into an office and your doctor's black and you have to think oh my God I know that for the last 15 years standards have been lowered at every stage along the way to promote more black black cardiologists and black neurologists and now I have to now I'm left thinking does this guy or gal have lesser qualifications than the Asian doctor that I could go to or the Jewish doctor I could go to and to know that in many cases the answer is probably yes given the system we've built that's awful right it's it's ra it's racist to have to think that way but the fact that you're you could be justified in thinking that way based on the on bad policies that is that's serving no one's interest certainly not the black community's interest so if we're going to put a a thumb on the scale we have to figure out ways of doing it that don't actually destroy what is good about meritocracy right where you know that the person who's flying the plane is actually qualified to fly the plane and you did you they you didn't great on a curve based on skin color so as to get more black or brown Pilots I mean that's just no one wants that at 30,000 ft Everyone's an elitist everyone wants a qualified pilot right everyone when it when when it's brain surgery for your kid you're an elitist you want a qualified brain surgeon you don't want the Dei version of brain surgery um and when we find out that Asians had to score 400 points higher on the SAT to get into Harvard because of their Dei policy um and then you you know Harvard was correcting for it on the admissions committee by saying that Asians had lacked personality right this is was was their euphamism for how they were going to implement their Reverse Racism um it's an embarrassment in the and rightly so for the whole institution so we there's a t there there there's no question that there are inequalities that we want to respond to compassionately there's no question that there'll still be some amount of inequality left that we ultimately have to convince ourselves we don't care about right because there's no way to make everything equal all the time um there's no question we want to figure out how to spread the wealth around but we want to incentivize creative self P people to make as much wealth as possible these are all there are going to be tradeoffs at the margins but at the in the current environment it's very easy to recognize bad policies yeah um I want to paint a vision for how I think uh we get out of this let me know if you see any holes in this because you've done a good job of M mapping the problem space um I come at it as a business guy which I think is the right training for looking at something like this because you're getting punched in the face by the market all day and you realize to pay your staff their salaries and make sure they they can take care of their family you better solve these problems real fast uh you you have to understand what a good outcome is it has to be very well defined and you have to be thinking kind of like a pool player uh it's not enough to get the ball in the pocket you want it to go in you have to set up the the Q ball for the next one that you're going to knock in so think of it as second and third order consequences so I think I'll I'll just grant that that um doing some of the admissions saying that Harvard was doing was really coming from a wonderful place they were just only thinking first order consequences they were just thinking I'm going to give more African-Americans a chance at this but they may not have even looked at the die already being cast by if Jeffrey kenada is right and it really comes down to the number of words that a child Hears by the age of three and the ratio of positive to negative words because of what it does to the language centers of your brain um that uh by the time they get to a college admissions board that's really not the place to to try to help them again now I'm looking at as a business guy and I'm willing to say and quite frankly I changed the whole direction of my business when I realized that this was true that in some ways you have to give up on adults and that's just you're going to work so hard to try to overcome those problems uh whereas Jeffrey Canada has started schools and he'll put the school in the same building as a school that's failing I mean just bad test grades everywhere you look and he chooses children randomly from the population of kids that would go to that school so they're not hand selected and they just absolutely crush the test scores that they get so same kids same school building but different teachers different techniques and they just absolutely Smash and it's really really incredible and so I'd be very curious to know again I need to know what outcome I consider desirable if those kids with which have better reading learning mathematics scores more of them go to and graduate from college uh I'm going to guess now I am guessing this part that they have um higher lifetime earnings but I'm also going to guess that they're higher in verbal fluency they are higher in mathematical fluency all of things which just as a selfish person in society I just want to um through human freedoms and ensuring that they are armed with the best education and thusly best brain development humanly possible I get to extract the value that they'll add to the world right so Road are going to get better maybe cars get better uh education gets better just medicine gets better everything gets better better better y but that is again it's an out focusing on the outcome and understanding not just the getting the first ball in the pocket but how do I set myself up well for the next shot uh but the thing that I think freaks everybody out so much that I I just cannot get this idea to to be um repeated by anybody is that I say you have to give up on adults like I it's just the reward of time and energy is just not there they can make change adults can make change please understand like I have a a university that I teach only adults at um but they're what I call the 2% and so I started all of this trying to teach adults when I was running my previous company Quest Nutrition and I just had so many kids that grew up in the inner cities 2% of them changed their life forever 98% though did nothing with the ideas was crazy because they were blinded by their frame of reference uh and potentially just not having encountered enough of these ideas early enough in their brain development that that it just made it harder for them later in life again that's a poverty thing it doesn't have anything to do with skin color right um so anyway that to me seems the way out you just have to be relentlessly focused on nipping the problem in the bud which as far as I can tell is poverty uh that you need education that is going to dramatically impact brain development and then you have metrics all along the way for for um early indicators of future success verbal fluency reading comprehension mathematics problem solving how to be creative and address novel problems so on and so forth um do you think maybe that's impossible but do you think if it were possible that that would work or am I missing something well so I don't know I can't speak to Canada's results in um Jeffrey Canada's results in in education but you know assuming there they are as you say um yeah obviously there's there's there's a consequence to having the right techniques and at the the earliest possible level in education versus the wrong ones um and we so we want we want good teachers and we want good methodologies and in so far as we know how to implement all that we should do it and we and I think it's we should prioritize it at a level that's far beyond what we do I mean it's amazing that I mean being a a a primary school teacher is a very low status job compared to all the other jobs on offer and it it it pays badly it attracts people who couldn't I mean you know you're not you're not choosing between going into aerospace engineering or you know teaching kindergarten right I mean like that it's it's the educational track that would get you there is different it's just it it should be a much higher value job what how we educate our kids and um we may we it's quite possible we haven't figured out how you we certainly haven't figured out how to use technology so is to make that a better process than you know I mean if Co taught us anything you know just getting more iPads into the system is not not improving things um and I'm amazed at how mediocre education can seem even when it's the best seemingly the best education you know on offer you know like a private school education um so much of it seems seems to be just warehousing kids you know it's like the the real problem that's being solved is the parents have to go to work every day we have to get these kids up earlier in the day than they can physio phys physiologically they can even begin to pay attention because the parents have to leave the house at that hour you know to go to get to work and so we have these blurry-eyed kids getting warehoused in in you know with nice laptops in you know PR private schools that cost $50,000 a year um and it's much worth obviously in in bad Public Schools uh and yet even bad Public Schools cost whatever it is $177,000 a year per student in in California I think something like that um there's an insane you know level of bureaucracy around it so there's a just a a reaming out of the system we have to do and a lot of change we need to make to to do it but I agree with you that we want to prioritize the changes we can effectively make I'm not I don't think we can give up on on adults but we you know in terms of how we weight the our resources yeah I mean we you know if you can radically change a person's life at age six in a way that you absolutely can't at age 16 well then yeah we need to be driving toward the the earlier interventions um and then we have to do whatever we can do for for older kids and adults uh because again self-interest alone should make you want to not have to confront the Stark chaos and violence of of a totally disregulated life right outside your office or or you know the restaurant you've you know gone to with your kids or you know your home I I I just don't think it works because the The Compassion circuit is too easy to hijack when you were talking earlier I took a note that said they just have better bumper stickers so compassion people on the left like it's it's just way easier to say that we need to take care of these people and that you know think about how much of the things that you have if you grew up in a good family middle class that yeah that really is privilege and did you really do anything to earn it and by the way neither of us believe in Free Will so it's like really really did I earn any of this no because this is essentially Billard billiard balls bouncing around uh however the reason that I stay trying to push these ideas out is that regardless of whether Free Will exists or not we do respond to encountering ideas I we're systems that can be influenced at every stage exactly all right on that note I actually owe you a public apology so uh you had come on my show so I had seen the uh the trigonometry clip that you did that went crazy viral and I watched it and I was like okay hold on Sam is somebody I respect tremendously I you're one of of the most important parts of the sensemaking apparatus I think literally for the world certainly for me uh and I'm seeing people again use memes to just be like oh we don't have to pay attention to Sam now to your point about selfishly selfishly that's just from where I'm standing that's a terrible thing for the world uh so I wanted to go in and really understand it and so I came up with a breakdown of what I thought you were saying and you and I discussed it uh and then Constantine and I discussed it and then uh much to my dismay you uh name Che both Constantin and I in a later podcast where you like I'm no longer going to try to uh explain myself to people because people just cannot understand me and you said look I think Tom and Constantin are good guys I'm in the Communication business full-time but I've I've admitted that I can't I can't uh correct someone's misperception of my of what whatever they thought I said and I'm no longer going to try yeah it's it's a pretty uh forlorn position to have arrived at but understand obviously one I can't totally hold to but but yeah I that was a moment of just I mean it was It was kind of comic despair because I realized that like I had spoke spoken to both of you independently for something like three hours on that topic and still you were you both seem to be converging on a what I viewed as a misunderstanding of my actual position I will not speak for Constantin but I will speak for myself I was a gast when I heard it because I thought you were so wrong and I felt that I had so come to your Aid giv like the only plausible explanation that there was for what had happened uh and then I went in researching for this episode uh rewatched all of it including what I said and I I really was wrong uh so I it's one of those when I went into the research I was like there's no Universe in which I don't understand this uh so to be confronted with the fact that I did get it wrong is utterly fascinating so I want to um present now what I think you were saying in that and again it's not necessarily that I agree and I touched on some of this earlier in our interview about where I don't agree uh in that I think it has a second order consequence you may not notice or may not care about I don't know but so anyway here's the take from that clip where a lot of people were just like Trump derangement syndrome you can't be trusted so for people that don't know it was about the hunter Biden laptop and you said more or less obviously a paraphrase uh there's no corruption you're going to find on that laptop that is going to be more troubling than the corruption that I already know that Trump has right and given that the laptop was a political game that was being delivered uh one needs to acknowledge that and be willing to play an equally effective you didn't say political game but that felt like the undercurrent like you you just have to meet that with um and it was a coin tossup you're very clear on that you're not sure what the way to go was so you just thought better to go slow now because there was a few things you you started to say there's nothing that could have been on and then you stopped yourself but me and others put that together with oh you were about to say there's nothing that could have been on that laptop combined with an ear well in your defense I said that Biden could have the corpses of children in his basement exactly but it was clear a joke and so but those things end up getting conflated and then uh through it all what I thought you were saying as I sort of pars through it and thought okay how could knowing that Sam is a well-intentioned person what could he have meant the first erone conclusion I came to was you believed Trump was an existential threat to the world now in rewatching the clip you're very careful you said Trump is an existential threat to democracy not to the world so I missed that right uh so that was part of my thing and I was like okay Sam is saying if he's an existential and again I I was not speaking especially well on on that podcast so I I said a few things that were genuinely misleading so I use like an asteroid hurdling toward Earth analogy and that immediately puts people in mind of okay I think Trump is an existential threat to the life on this planet right but I wasn't using that analogy to make that point I was using it to make the other point that we were talking about cons conspiracies and whether conspiracies are ever legitimate and my point is if there's a asteroid come hurling toward Earth yeah if you people are going to conspire behind closed doors to figure out what to do about that that's we don't care about cons not nothing intrinsically bad about about people coordinating their efforts in private to figure out how to solve an emergency and so but again there was a lot that was easily it that podcast was so easil easy to clip to my disadvantage but the truth is any podcast is this podcast is I mean there there's no question that someone can take out a snippet of of something I've said in the last you know two plus hours and make me look like a racist who doesn't care about inequality in our society and and you know thinks whatever that you know um I mean just there's so there's so many bad intentions adjacent to an honest diagnosis of any specific problem in our society I it's like it's so easy to to look like you're getting tipped over into someone who just doesn't care about suffering in this world I mean so anything said about Islam or Gaza or or um race in America or I mean it all is easily uh caricatured or misunderstood and so it is it's always a tight rope walk and I you know I need I can be I can only be as careful as I can be in talking about it but in that case it sounded like to to the the naive ear and that this clip was engineered to produce that effect it sounded like I was saying you can throw all of your commitment to honesty and and and and integrity out the window because this was a this was such an emergency it's is you're justified in lying bearing evidence you know throwing all your journalistic Scruples out the window ignoring real stories just to get the the political outcome that I want I Sam Harris want which is Trump not having a second term right if you love coffee and a little bit of caffeine but hate the Jitters and that afternoon crash that comes with it there is finally a coffee replacement you've got to try it's from Peak and it's called Nanda Nanda is made from the highest quality ingredients and claims to activate your metabolism promote healthy levels of testosterone production and provide sustained energy without the Jitters or crash with slow release caffeine that comes from fermented probiotic teas Nanda delivers an energy boost that lasts throughout the day so you can stay focused and productive Peak has well over 15,000 five star reviews and for a limited time you can get up to 15% off plus a free rechargeable frother and cup with my link Peak life.com impact click the link in the description or go directly to Peak life.com impact to get up to 15% off plus two free gifts now I think the harder part of all this is that even I didn't respond to the clip I had responded to the full interview and even I took that away doing what I consider pretty careful analysis my my presentation first to the world and then to you is my presentation to the world is I think it is incredibly important to steal man somebody's argument when you don't agree with them in a way that they would recognize and so I steal man your argument really believing I had found a path forward where I could understand you because it was you've been so useful in my life thinking through difficult things that I was very reticent to to say Trump trump really broke your brain or whatever right because then I'm I'm I start going ooh like there's some major discounting there uh and so I found it ended up being wrong and I found that I was wrong because I steal manned the argument in a way you did not recognize and you gave me I mean this is podcast sort of back and forth we weren't doing it directly but you gave me feedback that you did not recognize my steel Manning of your argum and so then I went back and was like let me see who's right and that has it's really been a really positive Loop now part of just my innate thing is I don't trust myself to get things right very skeptical of myself that just in the way that people ought to be quote unquote skeptical of the science uh I think it just makes sense to always be looking for is there really something here just assume for now that it is my fault and so in seeing that uh I would encourage the world to always do that don't think somebody your enemy think instead okay can I say what they're saying in a way that they would recognize and actually get them to confirm that where you can okay so that did me very well in this argument now my request to you is ironically all the stuff that I've been belaboring in this um Talk is actually more or less about Israel Palestine and the reason is I feel completely ill equipped to think think through the problem other than through first principles which will get me some of the way uh but I feel equipped to Think Through the problem of Israel Palestine and I see people using a memed version of things you've said to just be like uh you're racist basically like anything that they're conflating you saying um that a tenant of radical Islam leads to the holy war of jihad that's a problem uh and so we'll get into that in a second but because they're like I'll watch people like I'll listen to your podcast be like whoo these are incredibly useful points and then I'll see people do commentary on the same podcast and they just loop around this is racist racist racist I'm like whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa and so because they'll often bring up the that sequence of people misunderstanding I'm putting together you saying I'm no longer going to care if people understand I'm just going to put my ideas out and then what comes comes unfortunately what comes is that um because it's impossible to detect all the ways that somebody can misunderstand something MH uh that your ideas will get distorted more and more over time and more and more people will just reject somebody who's good at thinking through these problems okay so um ultimately my request there is hopefully you see by pointing out that somebody well-intentioned really didn't understand you that they went and did the work and now can represent your thinking in a way that you recognize yeah uh and yeah well I appreciate that thank for sure and then now we can talk about why I think that and I don't we don't necessarily need to go into this super deep we can just say we we agree to disagree but I um it what what I hope you take away from this is merely that some people can be reached so here is where I disagree with the statement that you're making uh now we're back to Hunter Bren laptop or or Hunter bid laptop which which I will um thumbnail sketch and please tell me if this does not sound right I will thumbnail sketch to what I said a moment ago which is um you there wasn't going to be anything on that laptop that proves corruption beyond what you already know Trump has Trump is an existential threat to democracy Joe Biden is not uh when somebody is using political gamesmanship and I think this is what you're referring to when you talk about an out in the open conspiracy you're not trying to hide that you believe that Biden is the right person to get elected and so you would never lie that crosses a line for you you were clear on that you said that um but that given that this was time to cause maximal dis disruption the response should be in that context and so the response should be either to slow roll it or maybe someone like the New York Times if they can really get their facts together quickly enough coin toss maybe they should debunk it they definitely should not have silenced The Washington Post New York Post whatever it was um so Twitter yeah when you go back and look at all those you really do lay those out so now though even though I understand all of that and it's a very nuanced position and does not strike me as crazy at all however it strikes me as not advantageous in a world where the second and third order consequences are it's very hard to put all of that together to parse it and because of that then people meme it and they just go see this is just evidence that there's nothing on that laptop Sam doesn't even care Sam's just a shill for the left uh and he's broken on Trump and I think that you could actually debate the points of is Trump an existential threat to democracy uh what would have needed to be on that laptop where you're like oh [ __ ] Biden is actually more corrupt than Trump and then you can lay out why you think Trump is corrupt where the line is for you where if this thing had been like if Joe Biden is taking bribes from this country and this amount whatever I don't know but if you give people that then they can be like okay cool I get it because the initial thesis of this episode is we are falling into conspir land people's desire for conspiracy their appetite that's a better way to say it their appetite and openness to conspiracy is [ __ ] skyrocketing and if they don't have the institutions and experts that they can turn to I think all hell breaks loose for the reasons that I outlined at the beginning well so we we're in a vicious Loop here because we're a wash in in in misinformation and lies and I so our information landscape is is just polluted with with toxic waste and the problem is any effort to clean that up certainly any effort that the government exerts you know whether it's through laws or just just through encouragement right just talking from the government talking to social media companies like really be nice if you stopped this particular you know bot Army that is lying about you know election fraud say um please would you do that um anything like that and anything that the technocrats do the people who own the platforms to to to dampen down to to bias the algorithm against what they consider to be misinformation all of that looks like the orwellian confirmation of the worst fears of conspiracy theorists right we our own institutions look like the bad guys we're being gamed in Moment by Moment by by China and Russia and Iran and who knows who who else were being you know our our our youth is is just being just being preferentially misinformed by Tik Tock and uh they think to take the the one case that that the IDF is guilty of genocide in Gaza right um and that Meme spreads to the ends of the Earth you've got billions of people for the first time recognizing how awful war is but this is this is a moment for which they they they blame the Jews for everything so you have you got anti-Semitism skyrocketing any attempt to to modify that algorithmically boosted catastrophy is perceived as a conspiracy and maybe a Jewish inspired conspiracy if you're on this on this particular topic and it's it just gets framed as this is the real enemy or authoritarian control of our you know freedom of speech this is censor censorship now we have to figure out how to break that spell because we have a misinformation problem we have a cyber War problem we have you you know we we are being gamed by by uh outside actors that don't wish us well and it's not all coming from Russia and China but they what they are they're Fanning the Flames of our own ambient partisanship and and and noise and they don't they don't have to do much work to do it right I mean we're so at at each other's throats politically that they just have to keep touching us you know just keep keep black lives mannering us over here and keep you know you know Libs of Tik Tock over here and we're you know we can't recognize one another right and [Music] um so we have to figure we have to acknowledge that problem and we have to get the people this is why I think there's something especially culpable about alternative media the space in which you you and I Live Now the appetite in in alternative media most most of the time is for the contrarian anti-establishment take on everything right it's the you know in the worst case it's the Alex Jones ification of everything th this is this is where Brett Weinstein I think has been part of the problem he's he's been captured by this you know conspiratorial take on on on more or less everything and um you know whether the fault is him or the fault is his audience or whether it's a Folly ad do there it's it's it's a it's part it's part of this problem and so we have to figure out how to reboot from there somehow [Music] um and then yeah I mean so I mean to come back to the hunter Biden laptop story for a moment it's just for for me it was just it was very simple it was not that I think Trump is an existential risk to all of humanity or that he's orange Hitler it's that here we had a sitting president who would not commit to a peaceful transfer of power that for me was such a shocking violation of our political norms and just like guard like like the main guard rail on the viability of our democracy right it's like it's not even I'm not even sure what to put before that I mean it's just like it's like the rule of the rule of law is the most important thing the following the Constitution is the most important thing but this particular law right like that we're going to abide by a legal election and transfer power peacefully is I maybe there's something in front of it but it's you know it was it there there literally is no other no other concern there's literally nothing could be on that laptop that would rise to the level of superseding that concern right nothing that you can imagine nothing that well nothing that I think is remotely like well I'm sure I could imagine something I think for people to understand what you're saying give them an example what could have been on that laptop where you'd be like okay now this is admittedly worse it would be hard because well I mean it would have to be a an a a a criminal intent on the on the part of of Joe Biden I mean hunter Biden is irrelevant to me really but it be some criminal criminal culpability of of of President Biden or not not not yet President Biden you know candidate Biden at that point um that was as sedici to the the the the the Norms of our democracy as not committing to a peaceful transfer of power right taking money from China let's say yeah it's not it's not as bad I mean it's it's bad it's awful I mean and to my knowledge nothing like that has been established on the basis of the laptop but um I mean all of that would be a and disqualifying but it's not as disqualifying as being a sitting president who will not commit to a peaceful transfer of power I I just think I think that's just an absolute no-o Zone and it should be completely discrediting to his candidacy now I mean the fact that he is the Republican candidate given that history and given that we didn't have a peaceful transfer of power given what happened on January 6th I mean as much as you want to Discount that and say that some of that was just you know liveaction role play and and it wasn't really they to call them insurrectionists is an exaggeration price all of that in it was still we still failed to have a peaceful transfer of power for the first time in our history and it was because of him it was because of what he the the kind of of populist lunacy he had consciously stoked and he he had done it throughout his entire presidency and he did it for full nine months in the runup to the election he was not committing to a peaceful transfer of power he was he was seeding the concern that the election was going to be a fraud in advance and so it was the most malicious use of Presidential Power I had ever seen you know directed against our own society and our own Democratic norms and I think it's it's yeah it's it's a 20 Megaton political problem you know it's not it's not the end of the world but it is it is it is potentially the end of our democracy I mean if we have a president who will not leave and we have a constant constitutional crisis that we cannot solve if if Mike Pence and half a dozen other people had behaved differently on that day I don't know where we would be right I mean like who would have sent in the troops to get you know Trump out of power when he's still the president who's not giving up power and calling the election a fraud and his vice president isn't confirming the electors right because he's he's created a perfect personality cult under him we were very close to that I mean it was just it was a handful of Republicans who still cared about the Constitution who who kept us from blowing through the last guard rails on our democracy um and so all the Republicans who are minimizing what happened on January 6th I think are being you know completely diluted and irresponsible and setting up you know setting the stage for something awful to happen in November I mean I you know I don't know uh it feels like half of our society is poised to not accept the results of the next election no matter how well-run it it it might obviously be um and let me just step back I think I think it's disastrous that Biden is the candidate from I mean I think it's it's just been colossal malpractice on the part of the Democrats to to leave us in this position that we're running a a a obviously Mor abund candidate you know against you know a a former president who show has showed his commitment to violating our most important political Norms there's one piece there's one thing you said earlier that I just want to close a loop on because it's certain points are very easy to knock down so like this allegation that my criticism of Islam has anything to do with racism is is there's a it's absolutely easy to see that that is a is a logical fallacy first everything I say about Islam and even everything I say about Muslims as people which I'm never really talking about I'm always talking about ideas and their consequences but even if I was just going to talk about Muslims as people Islam is Muslims exist in in in a hundred countries and and many of them are white like me right it's like has got nothing to do with race right like and conversely I have said again and again and again that I think some of the most important people in the world and the first people I would bring to the front of the line for immigration in our society are genuinely liberal Muslims and secular Muslims and above all ex-muslims right ex-muslims for me are just like superheroes because they know exactly what the problem is and so you you find you take someone who was born in Pakistan and who speaks uru take someone who was born in Iran and speaks farsy take someone who was born in Egypt and speaks Arabic and they are exm Muslims they are the there's no one I want more in our society than those people because we have a problem we have to inoculate the Muslim Community against religion I extremism and there's nobody better to do that than the people who know exactly how bad religious extremism is and the ex-muslims know it better than anyone have taken great personal risks to to announce themselves as having disavowed that ideology if you hold those two statements together you understand is just it's it's logically impossible to make the allegation of racism in anything I say about at Islam it's just not it's just it's a non sequer it's got nothing to do with Ray yeah no that one I will agree with I uh we may want to come back to how it gets memeified I don't know on that one though if it matters but I do want to close the loop on the laptop just by putting forth what I know I can speak for myself this is what I would want and I think that I represent a lot of other people when I say what I would have wanted from you in that moment since I'm already I count myself as one of the people that just grows more cons spirator minded by the day um and I look I'm trying to resist that gravitational pull but when I encounter you encountering that laptop I want you to do the emergency podcast do go live for 18 hours like whatever it takes and go through and say Let's Pretend because to your point doesn't seem like anything just like absolutely outrageous has ever been pinned down off the laptop but let's say that it had been and it was extraordinary but still for you fell uh the threshold of trump is going to destroy democracy and just say here are the things that he's done these are absolutely horrible things this is grossness management of the democratic uh um uh caucus whatever it's called Uh for party uh for making him the candidate but the reality is I think that this is way worse than anything that you um the things that Trump is doing namely that he's refusing to peacefully transfer power that could be the end of our democracy that to me isn't just slightly more important than this obviously horrible [ __ ] over here uh and therefore I I just want to go over and over and over this so that everybody has the information that they need and I trust you dear people of these great United States to make the decision for yourself but the thing is I know you can't trust the people to make that decision rationally and that's why people twig out yeah but they're just wrong I mean so listen I mean we we just know there's just enough known about cognitive bias that we know that I mean there's a there's something called the ucer truth effect which is even if you're repeating a story The more you repeat a story even if you're repeating it for the purpose of debunking it the mere repetition effect of it gets lodged in people's memory as there was something TR something about that story that was true right even if even if it's a complete debunking right so knowing that it's it's not you're not serving the interest of the public by saying listen I'm just you know sunlight's the best disinfectant we're just going to talk about it for four hours on Joe Rogan's podcast in front of 40 million people um we're debunking it but we know that I mean in this case it's not going to be it's never going to be a perfect debunking in fact there's just going to be awful stuff there that might be lured it's going to it could be analogous to showing a picture of a dead baby pulled out of rubble and and knowing that this is so inflammatory that literally 100% of people seeing it will their gut reaction will be there is no earthly justification for that ever anything that produces that is evil right oh the IDF produced that well the IDF is evil right that is just a a the human moral imagination in one of its failure modes right like we know we are psychologically ill equipped and I know my audience or any audience is psychologically ill equipped and I am ill equipped if I'm a member of that audience to process certain things in a way so as to get the right punchline especially when the clock is ticking in the middle of what is you know a kind of political emergency which is again a sitting president who's not committing to a peaceful transfer of power and and you know we're talking about a few percentage points right um in the election and again we have the example what happened to Hillary Clinton the year before when James James Comey said just at as an out of an abundance of scrupulosity I'm going to just revisit this whole email server concern there's a lot of emails here you're not going to be able to read them in time me you know we've only got two weeks and I'm G to hit you with 40,000 emails here but let's talk about it it's I'm doing just doing you know I'm I I just I trust the American people to decide about these emails that refer to Pizza Parlor and and you know half of America is going to think that this is code for pet a pedophile you know rape cult all right no I know that half of America is is is predisposed to think that there could be a pedophile rape cult in the basement of a pizza parlor that doesn't have a basement right I mean that's the country we live in we have to be honest about that I know that and yes it's just it's just and again I I when when I think it matters I ignore every all of the liabilities I just spoke about when like I know that some significant percentage of any audience perhaps yours will hear half of what I say about Islam and half of what I say about race in America or half of what I say on any other polarizing topic and think okay that guy's a racist [ __ ] or that guy's a you know uh a neocon you know warmonger or whatever it is and I know they're going to miss the point I know it's impossible to speak carefully enough or at at full enough you know comprehensively enough uh so as to close every loophole that people want to rush through to to malign you and hate you and and and distort your message and it's just you know so it goes with the territory but I just think you you H we have to be aware that there there is often a liability in just even having the conversation like like the the wrong message is is is is going to be delivered at scale just because we're choosing to talk about that topic at that moment and so it's like the the first editorial decision can be let's just wait on that let's talk about that in a month right I mean I've you know I've I've haven't talked about the trans topic very much just because I think it's while it seems politically super important it's it it affects a tiny number of people and there's way too much brain damage that comes with that topic it's just like that it's you have a a a crazy level of activism in proportion to the size of the problem right and it's just not worth it it's not worth it's not worth weighing in on any side of it um I mean I'm I'm comfortable with my attitude toward it I you know I feel nothing but compassion for people who have really have gender dysphoria and I think you know they should get all the help they want and need and we should have political equality for them and over here at the extremes where it's obviously social and contagion among teenage girls and it has nothing to do with a real you know condition um it's a social problem that we should get our hands on and all of the these weird political ramifications where you've got people who were men 15 minutes ago now competing women's sports and winning titles that you know belong to to to the girls um that's completely dysfunctional and obviously just rubbing people the wrong way for reasons that are totally understandable um and yet yet if you really are a transgender athlete you know we should figure out some way for you to be athletic and uh you know it's like without distorting everything because there's only five of you in in within within you know 500 miles and and uh it's just there are trade-offs this is a this is a situation where there are tradeoffs and there's not going to be a perfect solution but I have always felt that I don't want to there's no reason for me to be a person who dedicates 10 podcasts to that topic given the size of the problem and given the which is small and given the level of brain damage that comes at you when you say anything like what I just said for the last you know three minutes it's it's just not worth it you got to pick your battles yeah now I get that and I think that your point about tradeoffs is the right Point that's that's really what I'm trying to drive home I think that you I mean you're so consistent uh in your position but I think you're making a tradeoff on uh the way that you approach you're talking about Hunter Biden yeah where you say that um that's why I honestly I really did say it was a coin toss for me like I like I still did like I still don't I don't have a settled opinion on it it could be argued either way and I know that there you know journalists even at the New York Times who disagree with me right yeah but I'm just saying go back to the the thing that I will zoom in on in this exchange is uh there's a second order consequence to you saying that we just can't we know enough about the cognitive biases of people at scale in this country to know that they're not going to look at a debunking of this and and understand the argument that that's that even if he is corrupt it's just not as bad as breaking democracy and so I'm being very consistent me Sam Harris I'm being very consistent and this is what I make the decision on people just aren't going to hear that and when you say that we can't trust them to make the decision even if you're right because this goes back to tradeoffs that like for instance me in that situation I fully accept that to and this is how my mind thinks of it to preserve the Integrity I want to feel towards what I want democracy to be I have to let democracy be jeopardized I have to let it go all the way I have to let this is just my take but it's not a su democracy is not a suicide pact right I mean it's like we don't you you if you know you're jeopardizing democracy you don't have a democratic obligation to watch it go off clip because so here's the from my frame of reference which I fully recognize as being that one that's totally distorted but from my frame of reference it is a subversion of democracy to keep information from people because you don't think they can make an educated decision I get that it happens all time you always have there's not there's an infinite amount of potential information you as the New York Times or you as a podcaster or you as anyone can only get a hold of so much of it you're always making editorial decisions you're always deciding like the New York Times today has to decide well how much are we going to talk Focus On the Border are we going to publish another article about the Border are we going to wait a week is there anything new that it's all just like SE to the pants um intuitions of just like what what is rising to the level of Interest with Hunter Biden's laptop the way it when it appeared how it appeared what the Optics of its appearing it certainly looked like it it should have been Russ Russian misinformation I mean who why on Earth would there be a laptop just sitting in in a random computer store that happened to be Hunter bidens right um it just so that it was easy to see it was all the biases against it being legitimate seemed completely legitimate and um we still just wasn't that much there wasn't enough for a very calculated reason we weren't given enough time to really do due diligence on it I mean I don't know how much information was in there but it was just thousands upon thousands of you know emails and texts and documents um and and that was that was engineered to be that way right so I mean you you just Rudy Giuliani was wearing his his cynicism and Malice on his sleeve in how this was presented it was just like like I know this is only you've only got 10 days to figure this out and I know what that there's just a blizzard of weirdness in here and once you open this box it's just going to be so lured and we're going to be looking at naked photos of of of crackhead Hunter and um it's going to be massively embarrassing and so salacious that it's going to suck up all the oxygen right it's all we're going to be talking about do you really want a president whose son is you know sniffing blow off of off of a hooker and it's and it's like we we know that we have a we know that we have a society we know that we have a Machinery of you know click-based journalism that's not going to be able to help itself from focusing on that and we know that we have a society wherein the the Optics are often everything I mean it's like we know that you know in a presidential debate it has nothing to do with who's got the better policies or who's more has can demonstrate better knowledge of what's actually happening in the world we know that if one person is just more charismatic and gets a few laughs that person is going to win the debate for 90% of America right and so knowing that it it sort of matters like what it's just is is it even worth having it if you have a malicious con man who's just funny and charismatic which is basically what we have in the in the in in the person of trump is a debate even a good idea it's worth asking whether a debate is a good I mean I I happen to think you know the the fact that Biden wants to debate him is just a sign of the desperation of the Biden campaign but otherwise it's you know it's probably a bad idea right you know and um but this is not a this is not a matter of violating the Norms of Dem I mean people can get what whatever information they want r no one's going to pass a law to say that Rudy Giuliani couldn't leak Hunter Biden's laptop Giuliani is not going to get thrown in prison for this is not a violation of anyone's Free Speech the New York Times can just make the editorial decision we're just going to wait two weeks on this we we just this is this is just too much like Hillary's emails and an October surprise we don't want to we don't want to be be a part of this and the truth is most again I I I thought it was a it was a coin talk you know and I know you know I've I've spoken to New York Times journalists who don't agree with me about it you know I think that's fair my thing is I just want that all to happen out in public which is where we disconnect and I get that we just have different base assumptions my base assumption is that um the second order consequence of people feeling like there are people somewhere making a decision about what they get to see because they don't trust them to be able to make these decisions creates this sense that I live in conspiracy land and I think that that is worse than uh another four years of trump who was unable to subvert democracy in his first four years so I look at that and go yeah don't love that that's my candidate however it again this but what was worse what was worse than another because what the only thing that happened I mean the the thing that happened that I think shouldn't have happened was Twitter suspend did the New York post's account but short of that if Twitter hadn't done that and the New York Post ran with the story but the New York Times didn't that's worse than than having uh Trump win an election he wasn't going to win but for the the Airing of a of a la laptop story which still seems like a non-story to me I mean like I I still I mean I know there are people who are deep in the weeds of that laptop who think there's a lot a lot of interesting stuff in there but literally nothing of real importance has has emerged from that laptop and gotten into my my I I this just comes down to how do we read the the value of certain things so for me the whole idea of the consent of the governed that's super important the idea that things that I'm not being knowingly manipulated that once people feel like they're being knowing knowingly manipulated even though they are and always have been but you're always you're always being know it's not a matter of knowing I mean that's one that's one way to describe an argument when you don't agree with the argument but it but the argument was there's this is this is a machine of very very likely has all the all the appearance of a a a machine of political misinformation design partisan misinformation designed to affect an election at the very moment the election's about to be run right and the question is do we collaborate naively with this or do we just wait now it's not it's not to say that we're never going to look at this laptop it's just say that like do we give Rudy Giuliani again who's like the least scrupulous person on planet Earth next to the person whose interest he was trying to serve do we give him everything he wants when he wants it when we know what his intentions are and we have no reason to trust any representation of the contents of this thing being real like it it all takes too much time to figure out um or do we wait a Beat It just seems way I mean given what again four years before we saw what it looked like mean literally that you know it it it looks like Hillary would very likely at that moment would have won the election but for what Comey did my is because I can now track your value system your base assumptions what matters to you I completely understand where you're coming from I just have a different value system around that second order consequence of it it has made people feel that they've got yet more evidence that they're being manipulated by I let's just call it Elites as just a simple way but but but everything is a manipulation at that level so I I get somebody lying they're falling into conspiracy land no but but everything is like again everything is a choice and and more information more accurate information even isn't always better I mean for instance don't do you think that I don't understand what you're saying because really if you like to defeat my stance you would have to come at me and say where you're going wrong is being worried about people falling into um conspiracy land it it is not going to have the negative impact on human flourishing which Tom you said is what you want it's not going to have the negative impact on human flourishing that Trump getting back into office will have and then it's like okay then we can debate the Merit of that but every word I say for me is Downstream of I believe the second order consequence of making people lose faith in their experts and institutions is is creating so much derangement I'm actually way more afraid of that than I am the that we might get four more years of trump because we might again get four more years of trump and honestly I'm not even sure if people take RFK off the ballot I don't know what the [ __ ] I'm going to do because I've got one candidate that is obviously in cognitive decline good luck convincing me otherwise which means even if I elect him he's not the one running the country that freaks me out that doesn't feel Democratic and then on the other hand I have Trump who like there's so many things there that make me uncomfortable I don't even know where to begin and so I feel like okay now I'm left with these absolutely horrendous options and so all I focus on in this moment is I don't trust myself to be the Arbiter so that means that I this is just me this is just how I see the world I don't think that we can uh make that anyone ought to make the decision even though it is clearly a malicious thing that's being done by them to very much try to make sure that their candidate wins I I see that with eyes wide open so October surprise totally get what they're doing it's a total manipulation but the only thing with my worldview that I think is a bigger mistake is to do a thing that makes people lose more [ __ ] trust in their institutions because to me that moment feels exactly like the hey everybody don't wear masks because they don't work but by the way save them for our Healthcare professionals it's just like things like that make me go this is all a big [ __ ] lie this is [ __ ] crazy and so you're turning me a by Nature rule follower into somebody who's just pushing back against everything and I think continuing to push people like me farther into thinking everybody's [ __ ] lying to them and being paranoid and being like is this all a conspiracy that is the more unwise yeah well so to be clear I I I never thought that Lon was part of the ethical response like never lies the noble eye in my view always backfires or or virtually always backfires and I want to remind people you've been very clear about that a th% yeah so and it just it would entail no line it would just entail uh it could just it could just be you know we're working on the story and right now I am zoomed in on one comment that you made which is you said knowing the cognitive biases of people at large we cannot simply present this combat it with logic and expect that it won't influence well well like here's another example that just relevant for my personal life and it's like so I'm I I put myself among the people in this regard so if I have to take a medication for some health condition and I'm pretty and my doctor recommends it my my doctor who I trust re I found this doctor and I've settled on this doctor because I trust him he recommends it he's done it with all his patients and it's important that I do it right um how much time am I going to spend looking at the possible side effects am I going to really get into the fine print and am I going to go online and and seek out the bulletin boards where PE people for the last 10 years have been complaining about how this drug ruined their lives and and I know that I know that it's as scrupulously as you present that that information it is so hard to appro appropriately respond to it because in certain cases depending on who you are the mere idea of certain possible side effects is enough to make you feel like [ __ ] it's just I I'm I know I'm a bad judge of probability and I know it's only you know it's less than 1% of people had this thing but I'm going to feel so stupid if I'm one of those people and it's just that's it's like it's just not worth it so I'm not going to take the drug right and I understanding all of about myself in many I mean some in certain cases I you know obviously I I look at what's what's possible but in other cases I think it's just not worth it like I don't actually even need those facts and if I start feeling worse taking the drug well then then maybe I'll look at what the side effects are but I don't actually need to be I don't need to to engineer the nobo effect for myself I mean the placebo effect is a very real thing and the nobo effect effect the negative placebo effect is also a real thing you know and and so for you tell people listen this is this is this drug is great but you know you might um you know you might start feeling you know weak and and uh nauseated and um you know your workouts might not be as good and you like and what percentage of people are going to actually start feeling that way and it's just pure no sibo effect right it's going to be a high percentage so knowing that about the human mind it's totally rational to say listen I'm going to bet on the fact that if this if this drug got if we have institutions that I can trust and this why it's important to have institutions we can trust if we have a drug approval process that I can trust if we have an FDA I can trust if I know that this was this thing has been run I mean in in certain cases you have you know tens of millions of people who have taken this drug before you right if I can trust that if I can trust the clinical experience of my doctor I'm going to I'm going to use I'm going to Outsource My momentto Moment intuitions about whether I should be taking this drug to all of that you know collective intelligence and and place a bet that I'm not one of these statistical outliers whose head falls off when I when I take this pill I'm someone who's actually going to take it and it's actually going to have its intended effect which is to mitigate the illness that I've been suffering that sent me to the doctor in the first place and that's totally rational now for some people that might sound like okay you're just you know you know that's the ostrich strategy you're burying your head in the sand but the reality is is there there's a consequence to being the sort of person who goes down the rabbit hole and just studies side effects and horror stories for everything and and literally you can do it for everything and it's you'd be paralyzed if if you waited everything with the same emotional intensity um you would be paralyzed I mean so you know something like 7,000 people die every year this used to be the case I don't know if it's perhaps the number has grown I think it was you know the internet will correct me if I'm wrong it was something like 7,000 people die every year in America from non-steroidal anti-inflammatories like Advil you know ibuprofen I take Advil all the time right whenever I got I get migraine headaches I take Advil Advil works right it's how much time should I spend thinking that I know I know there's possible GI problems with taking Advil Sam the the analogy at least for me is very clear but the thing I want to make sure that we draw a straight line to is um given that I think that that's a completely rational way to do a lot of things in life and all of us are going to make a balance of okay am I just going to trust the that big connective tissue blob of things that have other people taking it testing FDA all of it um and and just just to finally close the loop on that I mean just imagine the analog analogy of me deciding to have you know a whole series of podcasts on all the people who have been killed by non-steroidal anti-inflammatories and I and to interview the the you know the the Widow of the guy who just took to Advil the first time he even took Advil and he just died outright on a vacation you know those people exist I'm sure right and I could talk to them and I could I could make this my hobby horse like we 7,000 people a year every year are dying it's a to even one death is unacceptable look at this kid that I'm from Gaza that's unaccept we're we're worried about 7,000 kids in Gaza who died because of the IDF we're calling it a genocide I'm telling you that 7,000 Americans are going to die from Advil this year it's a this is an unacknowledged genocide right be it would be completely delusional use of my time it's it's obviously I'm not tempted to do it but so much of what we're doing in alternative media is analogous to that sort of thing you can you can amplify the noise into some you know or find some tiny signal that seems like the most important one and and amplify it and disregard all of the other noise you're amplifying in the process and it it just strikes me as as irresponsible I hear that however we imagine you were doing those podcasts and you were uncovering true things where you really have been lied to sometimes by a small degree sometimes by a horrendously large degree large degree sometimes where you're like I could give him the benefit of the doubt but other times you're like this was just blatant lying and you know the famous phrase just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you yeah and you can flip that just because they're after you doesn't mean you're not paranoid like we keep finding out that we really have a reason to be paranoid and so all I'm saying saying in this is that there is the second order consequence of saying I know that there are these cognitive biases I know that people will fall for them and therefore they will not make a wise decision and they will reelect somebody that is uh a threat to democracy potentially and it's a towing cost I don't know what the right answer here is I just know that Slow Rolling going a beat is the right answer people just start to pick up on like oh wait we can't be trusted like wait a second what do you mean and so it's it's that just another in that case I mean the weai in was also just on no one could be trusted to do a good enough job to actually present the final story in the time ofed that's why it was an October surprise that's why he didn't leak it six months before elction of course I mean all of this really does come down to what tradeoff are people comfortable with um I feel you've been very articulate I feel you've also been amazingly clear and consistent and so I feel now that I have actually been able to map some your worldview uh and while we disagree on sort of what you put it on a bumper sticker I'll be well that'll be H actually I think we could get pretty close to a bumper sticker which would be uh let me really try given the fallibility of the human mind you must rely on Experts and institutions as a part of your sensemaking apparatus it's a long bumper sticker uh and failure to do so puts you at risk of um catastrophic error yeah I mean that's that's a point we haven't made explicitly until now but I certainly agree with it we just can't there's no substitute for institutions and institutional knowledge and it's like we just if without them each of us is forced to reinvent civilization on his own every time he gets out of bed in the morning and that is what's happening essentially it doesn't feel like that much work but you're creating an N of one frame of reference where you see a world that is slightly different than the world the next person sees slightly different than the next than the next uh and certainly the world of Independent Media is generating that at scale social media is generating that at scale uh to constant tin's point though there's no putting the toothpaste back in the bottle so then it just becomes a question of how do we deal with that and my solution and your solution somewhat in practice though I I have heard your very well articulated disagreements mine is you just have to put all the ideas even The Crazy Ones if they have a sufficient amount of popularity on the table and debate the merits and then whatever comes comes and that terrifies me because I see us racing in a direction that I think is just really horrible for human flourishing but I just come back to the world gets to be whatever the world wants to be and if the world wants to be majority uh Muslim then they're going to get it it just is it's just a a fact of the way that this all works and so the only thing that you can do is fight at the level of these are the ideas that I believe in and I think that the service that you do particularly well is give people the language that they need to grasp and convey ideas that otherwise by themselves they might not be able to think through and uh now me pitching back to the world again uh is what I hope they hear is even if there are times where they don't agree with you if they can map the base assumptions that you have or the value system that you have and go okay cool I see what he believes and then I get why he takes that there I don't share those beliefs and so that's a part where I'm going to say I can't um just Outsource to him thinking through this one I either have to do it myself or I'm going to work with other people that may be align in those values and that that's fine what drives me absolutely [ __ ] crazy is when people need everyone to see the world exactly the way they see it and they're not looking for tension and if they looked for um things that countered what they already believe and they hungered for people that think differently than they think and that they find a wise path forward uh by knowing where they're trying to end up using data to tell if they're getting there and then testing their ideas against other people who actually disagree with them I think they've got a way better shot yeah yeah well I agree there so thank you for the conversation obscenely generous with your time where can people connect with you uh the making sense podcast or the waking up app those are the two places I'm spending most of my time they are both brilliant and I spend a ton of my time there as well all right everybody if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care peace to learn more about these complex topics check out this episode with the one and only Jordan Peterson look how much I love my son he doesn't even have a penis anymore those women online displaying themselves they're not human you're a fool if you think that's human and Jews you know they have IQs that are probably 15 points higher than the typical so they're radically

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 120,829

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Sam Harris, Impact Theory, interview show, podcast, mindset, success, motivation, personal development, empowerment, transformation, growth mindset, self improvement, leadership, cognitive biases, decision-making, experts, institutions, independent media, illusory Truth effect, cognitive bias, public susceptibility, editorial challenges, contentious topics, transgender issue, democracy preservation, information dissemination, institutional trust, Israel Palestine

Id: VeHhJ6WjPgw

Length: 106min 6sec (6366 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 04 2024