You're listening to the Unspeakable podcast, with Megan down now on podcast
one.
People and corporations are highly risk-averse, right? And there's just no there's no incentive to step out of line when the the consequences can be that painful, right? There's no individual incentive to say. Hey, listen guys, it's you know, everything you think, you know about the cops and violence is wrong, you know, when you have people literally weeping over.
The footage. They just start of George, Floyd being killed, right? So it's like that's it. Never get. It never gets truly easy to do that. Even though many people can recognize that they are being swept up into a kind of public hysteria. And moral Panic.
Welcome to the Unspeakable podcast. I'm your host Meghan down. If you're a fan of this show.
Show my guest made me know or at least very little introduction. Sam Harris is a giant in the world of podcasting, particularly podcast that. Do what I tried to do here, which is grapple with complex or sensitive topics with intelligence curiosity and ample time. Now, there's a line. I thought up a couple of years ago that I've been known to repeat and it goes like this. If the smart thoughtful people aren't willing to stick their necks out and talk about
Key subjects. The stupid thoughtless. People are happy to do the job. I think Sam is a case study in the kind of smart thoughtful person. I'm talking about and that he's having these conversations in a way that's suitably provocative, but also ethical and respectful of his guests and audience alike. If you're not familiar with Sam, you can check out his podcast making sense, which originated in 2013 under the name, waking up a prominent voice in what's been somewhat.
Loosely defined as the new atheist movement. Sam is the author of several best-selling books about subjects related to religion and moral belief systems, including the end of faith and the moral landscape, he's trained as a neuroscientist and a philosopher. And in addition, to being known for robust, public disagreements with other prominent thinkers. He has a whole side, hustle in the world of meditation. He's practiced meditation for more than 30 years and has a meditation app.
Waking up with Sam Harris. As long as this interview is we did not talk about meditation a practice in which I am woefully unpracticed or religion, really for that matter. But we do share many areas of Interest. Some of which we talked about when I was a guest on Sam's podcast back in 2019 talking about my book, the problem with everything. I asked Sam to come on the Unspeakable because I wanted to revisit some of those free speech and
culture War issues, but even more. So because I wanted to ask him about something that I think of as a real casualty a spending a lot of time thinking about these topics, which is that it can become hard to just have a normal conversation with someone who isn't as deep in the weeds as we are. I call this problem. The problem of how not to ruin the dinner party and I wanted to ask Sam's advice about that though. As you'll hear. He sometimes goes to
Different sorts of dinner parties that I do. I also want to say that we recorded this conversation back in mid July. I've been waiting to post it for a variety of reasons. And in the time, since Sam has gotten into a rather high profile disagreement with another prominent podcaster, The evolutionary biologist, Brett Weinstein over covid vaccines, and if I'm summing this up correctly, the way Brett along with his wife, Heather high-end.
Also an evolutionary biologists are talking about potential risk factors and also potential treatments for covid. At the time of my discussion with Sam. This issue was starting to Bubble Up and we talked about it for a little bit of time. Although frankly. I'm not even sure that I was summing up. The the disagreement adequately or correctly. It was still trying to get my mind around it and frankly, I still am. Anyway, if you
Then following this controversy, that part of the interview might sound like old news to you. I considered taking it out, especially because this is a long interview anyway, but I ultimately kept it in because I think there might be enough listeners for whom this subject is new. And perhaps they'll want to dig in on their own. Besides. I am scheduled to interview Brett and Heather myself in a few weeks at which point, I guess everyone will be caught up on this late summer Tempest in a
A podcasting teapot. Okay, and one tiny less thing. At one point in this conversation. I say, Mass interpretation. When I mean, misinterpretation, it's obvious what I mean, but it's also the kind of thing that keeps me up at night. If I don't clarify, which may speak to the same, kind of temperament that causes me to ruin dinner parties. At any rate. Here's my talk with Sam Harris.
Sam Harris, welcome to the Unspeakable
podcast. Thanks, Megan happy to be here.
I want to start just by saying how much I appreciate. Not just your taking the time to talk with me today, obviously, but how much I appreciate the way you've handled your own podcast and just your position in the world of ideas and open discussion. It feels kind of poignant to be talking with you right now, because it's almost a year to the date that I started this podcast.
And when I was figuring out how to put it together and kind of find the right register for it. You were a real model. I have to say, you know, you don't have screaming YouTube clips, promoting the show, at least not that I've seen, right? You just have calm dignified adult conversation. So I just want to thank you for being a beacon there.
Nice. Nice. Welcome to the podcasting game. There's only blame million-plus of us at this point.
Yeah. It's not enough, always always more, the merrier.
So I guess what I want to talk about first and forgive me, if this is a long-winded opening question, but, you know, I want to kind of get at this impulse that I think a lot of us this impulse that I started to think of as intellectual nitpicking for lack of a better term. I think a lot of us in this space and it's heterodox space, whatever you want to call it, you know, we find ourselves burrowing into subjects much more intensely than
Most people do, you know we get really excited about looking at issues, honestly and understanding what's really going on. But, you know, the reality is that most people even the most educated politically socially engage people. Don't go through life like that, right, you know, most of our day-to-day friends are going to have a certain set of assumptions about the world that they don't really care to dismantle. So my question for you and I think you might be uniquely qualified to address this because so much of it has to do with mindfulness.
Illness is how do you balance your own need to be talking about things in the right way with the kind of social obligation, or maybe it's even just good manners not to derail every conversation because you can't resist telling people what they're overlooking.
Yeah. What? Yeah, unfortunately, I don't think I can recommend a general heuristic, or rule to follow here. It's just, you sort of you have to pick your battles. You have.
Do be aware of the different variables that make it seem more or less likely that a conversation about the issues. And in this case often polarizing issues. Will Converge on something useful, right? They'll be, you know, there's some there's something to be gained from actually getting into the weeds, you know, with with people. Whether you're, you know, at a dinner party or you've overheard somebody, say something or at me, like just waiting.
Just are you just how how much of an appetite you have to, to turn to the person, talking to their, their friend in an elevator and say, you know, you're wrong about this and you know, I'm only 18 inches away,
depends on what floor you're on and how far you're going up in the elevator.
So, you know, I've learned to pick my battles more. I think, I think I'm if anything there's, there's a fairly linear path to being more conservative.
Out this or more more jaded or more, you know, just a little less hopeful that it's worth the effort in in private. I mean, conversations where your this is not obviously your job to be disabusing someone of their cherished opinions, but when it is your job and when you're on a podcast or when you're in some way, I mean the truth is there are some dinner parties that
Invoke the the job description more than more than, you know, just add just the any normal social encounter might seem to and they're, you know, they're certainly dinner part. Is that I wind up at where I'm there to be it. I'm probably expected to be more of my public broadcasting self. Then I'm expected to be just a person who doesn't want to get into it.
Right? So brought you in as I sort of conversational ringer.
Whether it's, you know, whether the, you know, I was going to quote brought in. And anyway, it's just a given not a conqueror of the crowd. You know, it's like, I'm not the, I'm not the end. I'm not the entertainment at the dinner party, but, you know, given who's there, and you know, how much I do. I know people are, or don't know people and who they are and what their public personas are Miss. Sometimes. I feel an obligation to not give an inch on anything just because it
You know, the people who could be influenced in the conversation, have have a lot of influence in the world, right? So it matters to, you know, that some CEO or public personality is confused on this particular topic, right? So then I'm not going to shut up or, you know, so it's it's um, there are many variables to consider here, but I do think there's there's a lot of
Some scope for civility and and the certainly, you know, more or less Universal scope for kindness. And yeah, I mean if you're just badgering somebody and there's the to no good end, you want to recognize that sooner rather than later. And and the truth is I even on my own podcast. I've become more conservative, you know, I used to be that.
Used to be that I was willing to just go into the ditch with anyone and you can hear my first conversation with Jordan Peterson, right? I was just a disaster is likely, you know, it just a heroine, two hours of us disagreeing about the concept of Truth and it was some people loved it. But most people just thought holy shit. That was a just a I was just
excruciating. Oh, I don't remember it that way. Okay. Yeah. So
so like, I, you know, it's not that that'll never happen again, but it's
A little of that goes a long way, and if every podcast were like that, it just, it's just too is to dispiriting somehow. Because, what what, almost never happens is, you never have someone change their mind in real time, on some fundamental point and have the, you know, the rays of sunlight, just flood into the conversation, it just people dig in, if anything.
NG they change their mind in private, you know, after the fact and it's it just becomes a kind of commercial for the limitations of conversation and the impossibility of persuasion when people have a lot of a lot invested in a specific point. And I mean, yeah, I strive within my own, you know, mind at least to not be that sort of person if somebody is.
Actually making great points that are running counter to something. I really think I understand, you know, I want to be as quick as possible to recognize that and I certainly don't want to to resist that for, you know, you know, minutes and hours at a time in front of an audience because, you know, it's just, I mean
that's about about come back and Badger you about it. The audit, you're not going to get it past the audience. They're gonna
tell ya you push back. It's also
You know, if you're actually wrong and the person you're disagreeing with is pointing that out and the audience can see it. You know, it's just that's that's what it is, to be stupid in that context. Right? I mean, you're just not, you're just not getting it, right. And so you want to, you want to update your your view of the world as quickly as the facts and the the logic of a good argument demand.
And and so, if you can really be fast, if you rem, if you, if you can, if you can change your mind with without any any sign of inertia, right? Then the truth is, then you're not even, it's not, it's not even a matter of losing a debate. It's just you're, you're just conceding a good point. And then. Okay, what was the next
Point? Sort of give. I mean, there's it needs to be a
Kind of fluidity to Any Given exchange, you know, I mean on this subject of debates, I was going to get to this later but since we're on it now, you know, you're someone who's participated in a lot of debates. I mean, obviously, you're huge figure in the new atheism movement and debated. A lot of people about religious topics, you know, just said, you'd paid people, like, Jordan Pederson as recline. I mean, I've become lately just more curious about the whole construct of debating, you know, I don't know if that's because something has changed.
Last couple of years but I find it less and less productive. I mean, for instance, you know, people, especially with my last book people would say, well, why don't you debate like another, you know, a feminist journalist and you can have it out like, why don't you and Rebecca traced herbs, sit down and have a debate and, you know, I was resistant to it. And if first I thought, well, I'm just I'm just being a coward and there's probably some truth to that but like the more and more, I just feel like somebody, like, Rebecca Tracer and I don't mean to pick on her. She's just
Is coming to mind at the moment. We don't actually disagree on that much. There's probably like, you know, 80% we agree on and there's like twenty percent where we disagree on, maybe root causes and what to do about this thing, whatever the problem is, and I don't know why. I feel like just having a discussion where we talked and had a normal sort of back-and-forth conversation and the stakes somehow didn't seem quite as as immense or volatile is just is just much more organic to the nature of the way people.
Think and talk but I guess like there's still this impulse in the culture and media, you know, to say so many, you know, come to bait me now that kind of thing.
Yeah, my appetite for debate. It was certainly formal debate, has gone way down because it's not, it's not intellectually honest. Really. I mean, it is, it's more of a performance. It's yeah. Yes. Yeah. The party's show up knowing they're not going to change their minds. So it's not really an effort to
Persuade, the person you're speaking with and may. The truth is I have never engaged formal debate in that Spirit, but it is just given given the artifice of what it is. That's more or less what you're guaranteed to get. I mean, it's just you, you have two people talking to their respective audiences and it's not that it's useless. I mean, you know, it's to see a great debate can be thrilling and it can, it can change the minds of people in the audience, but it's almost
The changing the mind of the person you're talking to is really is not a possibility that is that is on the
table. Well, they're not allowed to change their mind, that's would violate the rules of
debate. Yeah. I mean that's that would that's synonymous with losing the debate. It's okay, you're trying to either this is a tennis match and you're trying to get the ball over the net in the right direction. And if you start, you know, if you jump on the other side of the court and start sending the ball over in the, you know, in your opponents.
Direction, you know, you're not playing the game. So yeah, I don't. So it's been many years since I've had anything like, a formal debate. I've, I've had some very difficult conversations, some of which have been occasion by something ugly, happening on social media, you know, where, you know, I have collided with someone in social media and invited them on the podcast to do an autopsy on on our differences. And so these have been
Every bit as adversarial as formal debates, but they just they don't have a formal debate structure. And I've certainly entered into these conversations hoping for some kind of convergence and occasionally that happens. But in certain cases, it's just the it's really been an unrewarding exercise. And you mentioned Rebecca traced her, you know, she's been on my podcast and I remember yeah, we you know people found that
Has change. Certainly many people did they found it somewhat excruciating. They the truth is it was actually it was actually worse than I aired. I mean in that case this one of the rare cases. I usually don't edit much for Content. But this is one of those rare cases where we got off on the wrong foot. And I said Rebecca, this is just you know that there's no point in US. Aaron. What just happened for the last half hour?
Just, you know, it doesn't all. It is going to spread in the world, is a sense that conversation is fucking impossible. Right? So, let's, let's just, let's see if we can restart here and get somewhere and so we did that and then that's what I erred. And, you know, is happy to have done that. But, you know, there if you go back in my catalog, there are some other examples of impossible.
Ian's that I that I heard and you know, I'm agnostic as to what the ultimate effect on the world is but it just in terms of how I kind of triage the use of my time at this point, I'd tend not to want to spend it that way and I cut my losses earlier. Now this goes to your initial question is just like we is this going anywhere. Okay, it's not let's just let's change the topic.
Well, I certainly did not mean to talk about Rebecca Tracer. She
Not this was not my intention. But you know what? I remember of that interview between the two of you. I you felt I felt like you were sitting on your hands almost which which you don't normally do and it's not I haven't listened to it more than once and it was been a really long time.
But yeah, we are you
sometimes? Yeah, good.
I mean, that's that's perceptive of you. And I think other people had that sense and we're frustrated with me that I didn't push her.
Order on certain points, but the reason why I didn't was I saw how Haywire things were going to go if I did. And I saw the result of that, like, I just it was just not, it was not, it wasn't going to be fun and it wasn't going to be instructive. It was just going to be, you know, bad bad radio in the
okay, but here's, but here's the thing you and I think that's bad radio but there.
Lots of podcasters, who would say? Oh, that's, that's gold. I mean, this is something I'd face a lot and, you know, just to be clear. I think Rebecca we have our differences, but she's extremely bright. Person really talented writer reporter. So just to be sure. But, you know this when you have a podcast and you invite somebody on to it, how is, is there an obligation to if you've invited them on especially to not really
Take the gloves off to it's to some extent like in all and actually and you know, so there's that but then in terms of just being successful as a podcaster, I mean, I've had people say to me. Well you had this interview go Haywire, I would definitely you're crazy not to are that and my feeling is I don't want to run an interview with a mentally unwell person. I think that that is ethically irresponsible but from a business standpoint, it might be economically are
Possible not to do it.
Yeah. Well, I guess I might My Philosophy around this is that I never intend to do a gotcha interview. I never want to get someone at their worst, right? I'm never ate. And I always tell people that if there's something we say here that that, you know, you don't want to are. Well, let's flag that and we can we can just hide the seams as we
Go, I mean, I don't send people the audio and Gila give them an edit of it because that would be a nightmare. And, you know, it would produce it just, you know, incoherent podcast, but in real time in our conversation, if somebody says, okay, that's not what I meant to say, what and they, they want to take their foot out of their mouth or they want. They want to take my foot out of there. That's fine. I'm I want people at their best. I want people. I want people to be even no matter how much I
May not like the person's point of view or may not even like the person right in certain cases, again. I've had someone come on the podcast, who I think is a genuine bad actor, right? Who's who's treated me badly or others badly? And we're trying to sort something out in conversation. I mean someone like that, you know, as recline was an example of this. I still want them to be happy.
With their side of the conversation, right? So I could give people every opportunity to put their best foot forward. So, that's, you know, that's not where most journalists are. And and I don't consider myself a journalist. And so it's that, that's a difference that I'm happy with. But as far as airing just every
Murder or every murder suicide on the program. It just it's it just it depends. What one's goal is. I just think it's yeah, sometimes it's tension can be can be good radio, but I just I don't know. I feel like there's certain messages. I don't want to send and you know, so and so far as I'm going to exert some kind of editorial control over over, what happens here.
Here. One message. I don't like the sand is that it's hopeless, right? And sometimes it is hopeless, and it's hopeless. We in the case of a specific encounter, but what's the point of of making that Epiphany, you know, in some ways indelible, right? Like you just can't talk about this topic, right? This is just, you know, this is, this is just plain with plutonium. I just don't, you know,
I just want to give it a, give it another try with somebody else, you know, and, and then, and show path forward, right? I just don't, I don't see the point of broadcasting too many failures of conversation.
No, although certainly people are making a lot of money doing doing that places, like YouTube. What did you think about the discussion with Ezra Klein, you know, I remember listening to it. And, you know, I guess, Mike,
Confirmation bias would be more toward your side. I remember listening to it and thinking, you know, you were clearly the quote unquote winner, but then I spoke to someone else who, you know, generally shares My Views who thought it was the other way around and insofar. As, you know, we don't want to really talk about who it's not a debate. It's a discussion. But what did that feel like to you after you did the conversation? And then after it posted,
well, it was one of those conversations where it was it was obvious.
That each of us would win for our respective audiences, right? But I respect my audience much more than I respect his. I mean, he all he had to do to win for his audience, was to make allegations of racism or you know, tribe tribalism, right? I mean, for all you all he has to do.
To win is to say, well, you're wanting to get Beyond race is just your way of being identified as, you know, white and privileged. Right? I mean, like I said, see that you have the luxury of getting Beyond race. So you're just, you're playing is the same identity politics game. Is anyone else now, that is absolutely untrue. I can, I can make it, you know, clear by argument that that's untrue. But for his audience,
That that view that everyone is inevitably stuck. Identifying with some you know, subgroup that's that's just gospel, right? I mean that is you know, that is the that doesn't have to be argued for that's accepted as a Dogma. Right? And it is painfully honest. Patently obvious that it's true for that audience and many things like that. I mean just just the the allegation or the implication that you know, as a white.
Guy, you know, can't possibly understand up or down on the topic of race in this country, you know, or you know and like that that just playing playing the the identity card on this topic for a certain audience that will always win, right? Move is a very clear case of this is when I collided with Ben Affleck on Bill Maher show, you know, for him for all he had
Do to win this, you know, non debate with for his audience is to call us racist. I mean that's that is just that is a knockout blow. It's like it's like fully half the audience perceive that as him brilliantly unmasking our racism, right? Like like he's some investigative journalist. Yes, right who discovered are racist past, right? And then and veiled the unveil the evidence in real?
Time, right? No, all he did was allege that a certain position was racist and and for anyone who actually understood the issues, it was absolutely clear that he was wrong about that. Right, but it's just for you, just use these magic words and fifty percent of virtually, any audience will be taken in by them. So when you know, you're having a conversation with someone who's coming from there.
You know very well populated Echo chamber, you just use a fait accompli. You know, that there's absolutely nothing you're going to say, you know, no matter how persuasive it should be and no matter how exhaustive and exhausting it is. I mean, you can just coat. You can go on for literally four hours. You'll know you're never going to diffuse the the
The power of these specific rhetorical moves like calling someone racist, you know, like maybe it's this isn't it's a debate about religion at this point, right? There's a role in religion of woke - and you took to use this topic that they cover the covers the Ezra Klein and Rebecca Tracer conversations, you're talking to people who are who are religious adherence and it's there just the
You know, they're taken in by the power of specific magic word.
Well, it's like arguing with a conspiracy theorist, right? You can't win because you're part of the conspiracy as far as they're concerned. So you started your podcast in 2013. What made you want to do it? Where they're things going on in the world that you wanted to specifically address?
See if I can remember. Well, I think I had been on a few other people's podcasts. I think it had been
A on Rogan's. I'm sure that point and I just thought this is, it would be fun to play in this medium, you know, just to speak and let the first draft of one's thinking out there and get feedback on it. And, but very quickly, the, the opportunity, just it became obviously better than writing in two, crucial ways. And this is just
She's the power of incentives. I mean, one is that I actually three crucial ways. He write a book, you know, you take a year to write a book, you know, it's a pretty early and sometimes two or more and then you have to wait for the better part of a year. Usually something like 11 months for it to be published and then you it goes out there and you know, if you know the numbers of people who read it.
Are a mere fraction of what you get with a successful podcast, right? So, if the goal is to reach people in a timely way, there's just no comparison. And this is even with a successful book. I mean, you know, I've had several, quote, New York Times bestsellers. That is just the numbers of people have reached with those books are around anout rounding error on the numbers of people have reached since I've
It podcasting,
I think people would be shocked when they hear, what sales figures really are. What it what it takes to be a best seller is not nearly what people,
imagine, you know, met their bestsellers and their bestsellers, and I've had, I think five New York Times bestsellers, but the numbers of books sold is is minuscule. And the numbers of books sold. They get red is right. Well, we're still
long as they buy it. But yes, but so
Teen, you know, that was, before the discourse changed. So radically, I mean, I feel like back in 2013. We were still able to talk about things in a relatively grown-up manner. I didn't start. You know, I think we talked about this probably when I was talking on your show. Like I didn't start noticing the change until 2014 to 2015. What so were there, do you remember like what your first subject was on the show? What you who your first guests were like where?
Things particularly bothering you or interesting, you know that you found interesting at that time that you wanted to delve into.
Well, I can actually look. Do you want me to do you want me to actually have this
inaccurate does? I'm just get, you know, if there's anything because you know, this was not you were you were in this before everybody else was for the most part and you weren't reacting to Trump. I mean, I think a lot of these podcasts have come up. Yeah, they've come up. Not only reacting to Trump but people reacting to people.
Reacting to the Trump era. So, you know, and I'm also curious like, if you were you talking to journalists right away. And and if you even like talking to journalists and writers as much as scientists or other kinds of
yeah. Yeah. Well, so so the first consideration was just how many people I could reach and how quickly. Like I have an idea and I want to
Press it, and I can express it now, and people can be hearing it tomorrow, right? And reacting to it tomorrow. And and the scale of it, you know, is is completely astonishing when you're coming from the world of books. So that that was immediately attractive, but then I realize, as I think, the first things I released were just pieces of audio. That was just, you know, like audio essays or just me talking.
Aching. But then I decided. Well now I want to talk to some people and I realized that it could just be a kind of almost a guilty pleasure because I could decide what book I want to read next. And I want to read this book anyway, but then I could kill two birds with one stone and talk to the author of the book. And so I started doing that and then I realized it's just a nice thing to be able to offer someone else.
It's not one side had an audience. It wasn't a matter of people doing me a favor by coming on the podcast. They really wanted to be on the podcast to talk about their issue or promote their book. So it just, it was just a real good feeling of synergy with it, which is again, is unusual. When you come from the place of jobs are spending years, working in solitude on books, right? You just eat it. You're not even if you want.
I didn't tend to interview people for my books. But even that is a different and more selfish Enterprise, like I'm going to now take a few hours of your time and who knows if any of this is going to show up in my book and is who knows what benefit that could possibly be for you. Whereas here. I have a venue I can invite you to and at very little cost. I mean, it's really just a phone call, you know, you can be talking to hundreds of thousands or even Millions.
Two people. It's just a great. It's just a great thing to be able to to offer to other people who in most cases should be more famous and influential than they are right me. They know, I think we want public intellectuals to be to have more of a presence in culture than they do and certainly in America. And yeah, so the the, the Golden Age of audio that pond
Casting his ushered in has been very helpful there. I mean, we have been many changes for the worse of late, but one change for the better is that there's so much. There's so many high-quality conversations. You can listen to now.
But were you back in 2013 becoming weary with the mainstream Media or had that frustration not kicked in quite yet like where you sitting there listening to NPR and thinking like, what, what happened here?
Is nothing going on here or was that later?
No II had not been really well on a few topics. I noticed that the the mainstream media was was reliably biased, right? And that troubled me
but like what topics?
Well, you know, the the the connection between the actual doctrine of Islam and the phenomenon of jihadist terrorism. That was it.
Being endlessly, obfuscated by our best sources of news, you know, the New York Times could be counted on to write a really slipshod and biased article, more, or less. Always in response to terrorism, right? They just, you know, maybe their articles on jihadist terrorism, where you can't even figure out what the, you know, what the the idea of the ideological.
Commitments of the perpetrators are Riga. Islam is never mentioned. They just do every time. You think that maybe the franciscans blew Blew Up This Plane this time around. I mean, it's just, it's Bonkers. So, and it's clear how they were bending over backwards to do that out of some kind of under some kind of policy of political correctness that
That related to to, you know, Islam being a something that that only only big attractive. Growth criticized right here, you're there with the the burners of the Quran. If you're going to link that, you know, these specific doctrines to the, the actual religion. So, I was noticing that, but it wasn't noticing it happen happening on every other topic. And yeah, so it hadn't, the wheels hadn't come off.
Yeah, but I was I was noticing how for me personally putting putting any of my content in a even the best mainstream Outlets was. There is no longer an incentive to do it. Right? It's like I was at that point. I was blogging a fair amount and the numbers of people who would read my next blog article would be better than, then those who would read.
Any article, I would, I would place anywhere else with with the possible exception of an op-ed in the New York Times. Right? So for me, they were different for me to write an op-ed for the LA Times or the Boston Globe, or to try to get an article into Vanity Fair or something, or the Atlantic at that point. It seemed synonymous with my just hiding my content for no, good reason. Why would I why would I want to do?
That
so, and and were you feeling to like you were not going to be able to say, quite the same things? If you wrote something for the New York Times or
elsewhere? Yeah. Well, certainly on the I'm a, I had I did have this experience with specifically on the point of Islam and terrorism. Yes. Obviously, I found op-eds rejected by. I don't know. I might even the Washington Post or at me, they would clearly there were, there were
Something had been solicited. I submitted it, the went through, you know, editorial review and then the kinds of things they were not comfortable. Staying were we're just a deal-breaker for me. Right? So I've had some failed op-eds, but it wasn't so much that it was just when you look at how many people read articles, it's just you just, you get the numbers and then you decide. Is there any
Edge to having fewer. People read this thing. I took the time to write and it's usually the answer is no unless you're trying to maximize your contact with a specific audience.
So this thing that we call the culture wars again, and there's all these terms floating around that have that are increasingly meaningless. When did you start to be aware of them or care about them? The stuff that we have been talking about Ad nauseam for the
Last several years just you know identitarian ISM infiltrating all kinds of cultural academic institutions, this all this kind of stuff. When did it start to bother you?
Will it again it bothered me on specific topics at the very beginning and with my you know, my first book was a broadside against organized religion in the end of faith, and it was also it was a, it was an attack not just on fundamentals.
but also on religious moderation in some ways I put even more opprobrium on on religious moderates because really they, you know, they don't have the the courage of their convictions the way fundamentalist do and they don't actually have a leg to stand on theologically know their minds have just been changed by science and modernity generally and they haven't admitted the origin of those changes and they just ignore
What's in the Holy books? Right? So, I those even more more criticism directed at moderates and fundamentalist, but after releasing that book or even in the process of trying to get it published, I discovered the the, the the the size and shape of the, the Overton window on this, these sets of topics right related to this business specifically religion and its conflict with
Hands, and just, you know, our response to 9/11 with respect to Islam, right? So there is a few different cuts that, that, that topic, but it was. Yeah. I was just noticing that certain things were considered taboo to speak about, you know, and even among atheists among atheists. It was taboo.
To treat release religions differently, you know that most atheists thought all religions were equally bad equally confused equally at odds with science, equally inimical to a modern secular approach to ethics. And they were very uncomfortable, hearing that. No, actually some religions are are more rational than others. Some religions are more benign than others. Some
Legends are are are not even worth worrying about and some represent a kind of political emergency at this moment. So, I was from the moment. I started producing anything publicly, you know, you know, by way of writing, or speaking, I was coming up against this. What I was calling at the time, political correctness and
The power of taboo and Falls consensus to, to prevent honest conversation on important topics.
And do you mean I think we're about the same age. You're I think you're a few years older than I am. Wendy. What do you think of political correctness as you were imagining it or experiencing it back in? You know, the mid Arts. Oh, no, not the bit of submit. Whatever.
10 2011, 13,
you know, like my first book came out in 2004.
So, okay, so early aughts. So was that manifesting differently than you remember it? Say back in the in the late 80s, early 90s, when the I think that's when the coinage political correctness, kind of first took hold. What difference is were using by the early aughts?
Yeah. I think I was just oblivious to it before I started writing professionally. I think, you know.
I was in my 20s. I spent a lot of time thinking about more, esoteric topics. I mean I was I was spending a lot of time meditating, you know, informal Retreat. So it's been a lot of time in the Indian, a Paul studying meditation. And when I wasn't doing that, I was thinking, and beginning to write about the nature of the mind and, you know, to go doing work in philosophy of mind and then I had to go back to school and finish my my degree and get my PhD and and all of that.
Was, you know, so the topics that occupied me were not at all political, right? I just, I was just not focused on on it so I can it's hard for me when I look back based on, you know, what I read about the time. Now, you know what we're dealing with now seems to have been there in Crystal form. But, you know, I share the sense that something really went haywire somewhere around.
2014 or so.
Yeah. Yeah. So I guess 2014-2015 is when this group emerged that was eventually called the intellectual dark web and that would. So the kind of main figures there would be people like Brett Weinstein and Eric Weinstein. I believe you were part of this group. I think you have tried to distance yourself from at least the term. So I want to ask you about that, but, you know, this.
This kind of loose constellation of thinkers. I don't want to leave with Steven Pinker, maybe part of this. They were I actually wrote about the IDW in the Los Angeles times and I think it was like, March of 2000. I don't know 16 or something like that, but it really people got to know about it from Barry Weiss's piece in the New York Times. And I can't remember who all was featured in that piece. Christina, Hoff Sommers was one. So, what did you think of that? Like it was a, there was a sort of
Of suddenly, this kind of these these informal conversations that were happening on YouTube and in podcast and kind of coming up organically. We're now being packaged as as a thing. So, I wonder what your initial response was to that and how it may have evolved over time.
Yeah. Well, it only seemed like a, it was tongue-in-cheek.
Initially exactly. Exactly. And just
a meme from my podcast and I was a
Launched it. I titling a podcast, you know, this is something we have the intellectual dark web was in. It was in the podcast. And this was a phrase that had been first spoken by Eric Weinstein and
like, totally off-the-cuff. By the way, has he was, I think he was on the with Dave Rubin or something, and he was just, he kind of
knows it. I think the for it. Well, the first use it was in, maybe he'd used in other contexts, but the
The podcast where I launched. It was a podcast, I believe he and I and so it was you guys. Okay. In Shapiro had been ranked stage in San Francisco. And so I release the audio of that live event and titled it, you know, something having to do with the
intellectual dark web. Okay, so at this is your fault
really? Yeah. Yeah, it is my fault, but it's really Eric's fault, but I always made it clear that it was always tongue-in-cheek from my point of view, and then they were different.
Attitudes with respect to this this grouping within the group and me that Eric was not always joking and I think Eric felt it was more of a thing than I did. And and so it was somewhat in my view. It was somewhat analogous to the new atheist thing. It was a, it was a it was an epiphenomenon of a. In the case of new atheism. It was just a publishing phenomenon. It was just a fact that the
The four of us who your four of us atheists had published books on atheist centrally on atheism. Although in the end of faith. I never even used the word that had become best sellers Ryan. This is me and Christopher Hitchens and Dan Dennett and Richard Dawkins. And so it was just we got wrapped up as a, you know, in a, in a single term as essentially, a four headed, a
And then then treated as essentially a single person in all of the pushback. We got you know against our arguments that Drew invidious comparisons between science and religion and so it was really inconvenient about that is that people treated us as though we had the precisely the same views on every topic and which of course we didn't so it was just misleading.
No, people would say, well they, you know, these guys don't understand religion and spirituality at, all, right. They had, no, they have no experience of, of, of the, the deeper truths, to which our religions give witness. Well, I mean, that's probably not true of any of us, but it certainly wasn't true of me. I mean, it was like, I had spent, you know, literally years on. Silent meditation. Retreats. And, you know, endlessly studied religion.
East and west and, you know, so it's just, it's just not news. It's not helpful to be summarized, as being part of a group in that sense and it was even less helpful in the case of the IDW, because people just started getting added to this bin but it's not
clear what the, what the requirements were
for. Yeah, you know, so I was finding myself in the company of, you know, Candace Owens and and then and
I was vulnerable to the next thing that you know, Dave Rubin or Bret Weinstein would say and it just I found, I found myself getting so much hate mail that wasn't actually addressed to me that I just thought, you know, this was this was always a joke in my mind. And now I'm and now there's, you know, there's so much daylight between me and some of the people who are also considered to be part of the IDW.
I just have to make it clear that, you know, I don't consider myself part of this group. And and so then I did that at some point on my podcast.
Is it possible to have any kind of to have space for people doing the kinds of things that people like, you're doing people like beer doing without it emerging as a group, just in people's minds. I mean, how, how do we expect people in the world to even sort of process what this is?
We at this, at this point. I mean, I, I am sure you get this to. I get people saying like, oh well now what you've just given up, you're just, you're just one of these Fringe. You just want to say whatever you want to say and you're just one of these Fringe people and you're just you're just asking questions this kind of thing. And I just I'm always struggling with how to fine-tune this kind of mode of of conversation. I don't know what I'm asking, exactly. But I just wonder, I mean, this is something that you've been extremely successful with you've just stayed the course and
And and I think you're just very disciplined with the way, you comport yourself and present your ideas, and kind of, you know, speak with your guests. But is it is it just is it is it just unavoidable that this is going to look like some kind of tribal movement a tribe that complains about
tribalism. Well, no, I mean again only if people are committed to seeing the world that way and yes,
People are mean, this comes back to that. As recline Point me. He thinks I'm practicing my own version of identity politics, but what's my identity? Right? Maybe they lazy allegation here would be well. I met a wealthy white man, right? Who's, you know, over educated, you know, I'm an elitist, you know, white elitist.
You know, sis gendered hetero me with a, you taking keep it, keep adding variables there. But if you just look at my my disagreement with Cline, right, you know, he and I should be part of the same tribe then, right? We we lie. We are we aligned on virtually all of those variables, but he's precisely the person. I can't talk to, right. So, how does that make any sense? As an allegation in the
Takes over a disagreement. I've got way more in common with Ayaan hirsi Ali, then I have with Ezra Klein. You know, she's black. She's African. She's a woman. It's just she's my sister, right? She's and he is someone who is acting and utter bad faith from my point of view, right? So the allegation of tribalism
It just makes no sense to me. And it's, it's also, you know, I as I don't consider myself part of any group and I'm not ideological, right? So I like I'm not, you know, I tend to be left on many questions. Certainly virtually all social questions. And therefore you historically I've really only voted Democrat right and I'm a registered Democrat but
You know, I spend most of my time criticizing the left at this point because it's derangement is so intolerable and affecting everything. But you know, I've said as much as many bad things about Trump as anyone, right? It's so it's a, you know, I've criticized both sides of the political Spectrum, but I'm not going to be dishonest in my criticism of someone like Trump. So when the left is calling
I'm racist for something that actually gives, no evidence of racism. You know, I am not going to Echo that calumny, even if I actually think he's racist which I, which I do, right? It's like II just but if you think you just have to extend a principle of Charity and you know, intellectual and maintain intellectual rigor, even when you're dealing with your enemies, even when you're dealing with people who you think are truly,
Irredeemable. It's like you may even even when you're dealing with Hitler, right? Like you can you can criticize Hitler and point out what was wrong about his worldview and what was wrong about him without exaggerating how bad, an artist he was rights, like maybe he's actually he's a better artist than many people, give him credit for, right? So I guess so it's not you just is so lazy, too.
Just to make note to make no effort to get the details. Right is it's like it just it just opens you to amla's embarrassment and it's like, you know, you read. This is a trick that I forget which author played this in his book, but he presented a page of text and then you know, the it rolled over to the next page and it's only only when you do only when you turn the page, do you see who wrote this piece of text?
So you're this comes to Art of in the flow of some argument and basically it reads as as a completely reasonable diagnosis of some of the problems of modernity and then you flip the page and you see that it's an excerpt from the Unabomber his Manifesto, right? Yeah. The Unabomber is Manifesto had some very reasonable
things and that's right had some attributes. Yeah. Well, I mean it was long enough. So yeah, there's got to be something I
didn't of luck.
Yeah, right. Well, I mean to this idea of
Criticizing the left and also being on the left, you know, what do you do with the people who say, why are you spending all this time? Beating up on on the left when there are tiki torches, tiki torch? Carrying Nazis marching in Charlottesville and trumpism is on the rise and etcetera. Etc. We've heard all of this. I find it. It's it's not it's a boring question at this point, but it's also to be fair and
An obvious, it's an obvious question for a reason people. I think some people genuinely don't understand why if we're in such a time of political cultural crisis, People Like Us are wasting our time with this. And my answer is, well. I find this more interesting and that's actually not a very satisfying answer. It's a little selfish. So, I wonder if you have a better response to that.
Yeah. I know. I think I can Shore up your response a little bit of me the interesting.
Is valid mean that, you know, what is wrong with the tiki torch carrying white supremacists and anti-semites is so obvious and this, so it doesn't require an argument. It doesn't require me. Literally. It's is everything's right on the surface, right? You just have to point it out. Okay, what's wrong with them? Is they are in many cases actual Nazis, right? I mean, what about, you know, Nazi or
See, don't you understand at this point in history? So there's very little to say now. It's not, you know, I've done podcasts on white supremacy and just just trying to figure out how big a thing it is currently in the US and if it became bigger, well, then I think we would need to spend more time talking about it and talking about you know, what to do about it, but it really is a convinced, it is still a
Fringe phenomenon and, you know, apart from the fact that it seemed to be given a little more energy and and freedom to move under Trump. It's still, is The Fringe Of The Fringe of you write
numbers. I'm sorry to interrupt you, but do you know if there are actual hard numbers on how many quote-unquote white supremacists? There are like the, you know, the Marchers, in Charlottesville. How many were there, a couple thousand and the counter protesters?
Sirs, outnumbered them by orders of magnitude. Do we do? We know how many of those people there are?
Yeah, I don't think we do. And, and part of the reason is that the people whose job, it has been to keep watch on all of this and, and, and tell us how worried we should be have revealed themselves in recent years to be totally unreliable. I mean, the the southern talking about Center. Yeah, Southern Poverty, Law Center mean, there are very few who
Sail changes in reputation, this this astonishing. I mean, it went from this utterly Noble and necessary organization to a all to well-funded group, of crackpots and hysterics, who were, you know, Finding racists under every Rock and maybe, you know, I you know, I say this as a personal Target of there.
The
lunacy and weren't you on their their hatewatch? Let's curl when they're my
wound up on their hatewatch page. And you know, as did maajid Nawaz and maajid, you know, sued them being in England and where it's much easier to sue people for libel maajid sued them and God, I think three and a half million dollars for his troubles because their allegations have just been so insane. But, you know, they made it made allegations against Ayaan hirsi Ali and, you know, Charles Murray and of it later.
Lots of people who are who are absolutely not white supremacists. And, you know, they're wrapped up in the same breath as David Duke or, you know, anyone else who is a white supremacist, so it's crazy over there. But so it's hard to find out, it's hard. It's hard to know what the actual numbers are. And but and we should we should notice the the work of bad incentives here and we haven't
Organization, like the Southern Poverty Law Center that has to raise millions of dollars, each year to function rise. Got a massive budget. It's not in the business of putting itself out of business, right? It has to keep finding the a reason for its existence year after year. So if we, if we ever solve the problem of white supremacy in this country given the incentives, the
Poverty Law Center might be the last to admit it,
right? Well, this is what's happening with glad and the ACLU. When it comes here, you know,
we do have an incentive problem. I mean, there's an incentive problem with with many Charities, but it's specific. It's especially bad. When you're talking about these kinds of culture War issues. So yeah, I don't think we know, but I, it is just, what is clear, is that white supremacy?
And you know real real racism ideological racism is not influencing the culture and mainstream institutions to any significant degree, right? It's like us there's no there are there, no Fortune, 500 companies and Hollywood Movie Studio Movie Studios and universities that will you know,
Tell you that the Holocaust didn't happen and, you know, black people are subhuman and
it's been that way for a
long time. Yeah, I mean, this is the, these, these views are absolutely reviled by mainstream culture and to be a part of the white supremacist Fringe is to be disqualified for inclusion in almost any good organization?
Or saying conversation about public policy. It's just, it's just not happening weird. It was not having to deal with Nazis in our in our daily lives. And again, I'm not I'm not denying that there are some number of these people in our society and that they may yet create a tremendous amount of harm. Right? I mean the next Oklahoma, City Bombing level event, could be a very big deal and tip us into something very ugly politically in this.
Certainly, given given that the four years we experienced under Trump and the aftermath given cultic movements like q and on. Its this is there's a powder keg phenomenon on the, the fringes there that that could affect the lives of everyone else. And it's were right to be concerned about it, and I'm definitely keeping my eye on it, but it is just not
Not a mainstream phenomenon, whereas and it wasn't even it wasn't a mainstream phenomenon. Even with Trump in the white house, right? Maze. It's know. Having Trump in the White House was not having was not the same thing as having a white supremacist in the White House. And again, I say this as someone who, who believes he knows to a moral certainty. That Trump actually is a, you know, certainly an Archie Bunker like
racist. Do you actually think he's a, he's a racist?
I mean, I've talked about this with people. I don't actually think he's a sexist. I think he's a womanizer, right? I don't think he's a misogynist. I just think these are these are, you know, these are tiny little discrepancies. But like, is he a? He's an opportunist. So he'll he'll take anybody he can get
right, right? Yeah. No, I'm a think. He's a, I think, is an absolutely odious person. Right? And I think, and from what I believe, what,
What? I have seen of him publicly and what I've heard about him privately. I think he is, you know, it's absolutely shocking that he managed to become president. And it's it's a it suggests a a terrifying vulnerability. We have for, you know, con men and lunatics most certainly moral lunatics getting
Power in this country. So it's a, I viewed his presidency as a disaster, but he was not a grand Dragon of the KKK and he was not giving witness to a massive cultural influence of, you know, white supremacist, thinking in our society and to the degree that the left alleged, that the left went properly crazy under Trump and
So the asymmetry here is important to point out. The reason why we focus on what's happening on the left and the extreme voices of woke, no seams and social justice and identity politics. There is because The Fringe on the left isn't just The Fringe anymore. The Fringe on the left has fully captured our institutions, its captured Academia. It's
Assured, the media, it's captured Tech is captured Hollywood. And so, I mean, we're living in a world where the most powerful people in our society, produced their own hostage videos saying, it's rending themselves talking about their their rate internalized racism and how they're going to do better and and it's that they're not, you know, I mean the most powerful people have a kind of
Arkham syndrome. Yeah, well, they're just they don't even know what's happening to them
thing. Is they do we say capture and we actually literally mean that because your eye on these people who are in charge of these institutions, don't actually believe this stuff. See, this is what I keep coming up against. It's almost like we're fighting some kind of phantom. I mean, we're reacting to the fringes on the left and the right and insofar as this very vocal minority, on the left, has managed to attain this outsize influence.
And I'm curious. Do you have any thoughts like, what goes on in the human mind that has allowed this to happen? I can't believe that, you know, many, if any CEOs of major companies, think this is anything but nonsense, so what is so difficult about standing up to it?
It's useful to focus on specific strands of this problem because it's is clarifying. So, you take something like
Police violence, right? Police violence against young. Black men for the most part, right? Like this became the kind of the master variable of the last year, you know, in the the aftermath of the killing of George. Floyd everyone. There was a virtual consensus, in our society, certainly on the left and it's subsumed most of the center.
That what we had witnessed there was proof positive of a, an epidemic of sadistic racist behavior on the part of cops directed. It black men in our society. It's been going on for years. It's a legacy ultimately of slavery, but it's who could doubt that we have an epidemic of
Of white cops, killing black men completely out of proportion to their representation in society and in ways that are completely unwarranted right now, people thought they have people, people genuinely believe they have seen the evidence based on cell phone video, right? This is like, how could you watch it with nine minutes? Watching this black man, who's already cuffed and then
The lies and therefore no threat to anyone it watching him asphyxiated by the knee of a of a sadistic white Derek Chauvin, right? Every the whole country whole world saw that now I would argue that this is a mass delusion right me what you did, you know, I saw the same video and I was just as appalled by it as any other morally sane person was
Was, but the video itself offered absolutely no evidence of racism 0, right? And I can show you an analogous video where the same thing happens to a white guy, right? So so what we're dealing with here is is the effects of a media and social media, and it kind of
It's a kind of political pornography that has has has a fat has affected everything, right? I mean, in this case we have, you know, exactly
doesn't tune. It's almost like a cartoon. It's exaggerated. Like,
it's just, it's pornography, very hard to interpret. I mean, unless you unless, you know, there's a lot to talk about with respect to these videos, and I've spent a lot of time.
Doing this on my in various podcast, but what for the most part, most people when they see a video of an arrest gone wrong, you know, an arrest that escalates into violence. Most people have terrible intuitions for what they're looking at, right? They just don't they, they do not understand the Continuum of force that cops have to be thinking about and responding to. In each moment. They don't know, they don't understand a cop's eye view of the world.
Don't understand the absolute Primacy of of what the the person being arrested is doing with their hands or not doing with their hands. Right? What will, you know, whether or not they seem to be complying with with the cops instructions. None of this relates to the show of in video because that was he was already cuffed. And and that was a very different situation. But so people watch these videos and they just they have crazy intuitions about what should have happened.
What could have happened? What was what it was rational or ethical for a cop to do in that situation? How likely a person would have been treated the same way, had those, the color of their skin been different and people have absolutely no awareness of the actual statistics around violence, and police violence in our society. And they, they just, they're completely confused. They think you mean they just have no idea how many people get killed each year by cops under what circumstance,
right? Because they're seeing
Every video, every single incident they're seeing. There's usually if there is video of it that video will
go, that's not true. They they're seeing video of black suspects being,
right? That's what I've been cops. They're almost it. Almost
never seen video of white suspects being mistreated by cops and there are more of them right there. More and more white people killed by cops. Every year than black people.
Although yes, but it proportionally. There are still I think they're armed or unarmed black men. Well, no way.
Yeah, no,
no, no, but it's good that we might as well just daughter eyes and cross our T's here because it matters for virtually every year, you know in recent memory about a thousand Americans are killed by cops each year. The the vast majority of those people killed by cops were violently resisting arrest. Usually with Firearms, right? These are not innocent.
People just goes haywire. And for the reasons that that only the cops know and you know, they get executed on the side of the road by a lunatic. Cop know, these are people who for the most part are trying to kill the cops. Right? And the numbers of people who are unarmed, you know, who may be violently resist still violently resisting arrest, but who are unarmed who get killed each year.
Year around 40 rights. They have a thousand people who get killed about 40 of them are unarmed about 10 or 20 of them at most are black. Right? And so there's a, you know, there's a dozen people each year who are unarmed who are black, who get killed by cops right now. You would think and this is a, this is on the back of tens of millions of encounters with cops. Each.
Here, right. So, if if we are going to if if our society is going to be absolutely Riven by the next video of a black man, being an unarmed black man, being killed by a cop. It will be Riven every single year until the end of time because we are we're never going to get down to zero, right? Certainly not, unless we completely changed the complexion of crime in our society.
And see
how dismantle policing resume would trust soundly, destructive way.
And you just, just look at Portland to imagine what the effects of that would be. You have. Your homicide rate can go up by 800% the but the in terms of the representation in society, right? The to intuitions, you could, you could have about this. I think only one of them make sense. You could say well cops are because
Could say well African-Americans are 13% of this of the population. So anything more than 13% of arrests and 13% of of negligent, homicides or Justified homicides on the part of the cops, anything more than that has to be a sign of racism, you know, or you know, probably inappropriate profiling of black suspects. Well, no, because
African-Americans are involved in a vastly, disproportionate amount of violent crime, you know, I mean, they're, they're, you know, African American Crime counts for 50% and in some cases, more of violent crime in
America, right? But there, they argument, is, that's a product of, systemic
racism. Okay, but it's is one that's a bad argument. You could even if you're going to to allege that, that
It is, that's the origin story of a big argument. Was just the, there's nothing. There's no what, what, what systemically racist policy can we change today? That will prevent the murders? We know will happen in Chicago, this weekend to black people by black people, right? Like what like, if we could wave a magic wand and get rid of all the racists and all the racist policies.
Would we expect fewer murders this weekend in Chicago? Right? That's it's a very hard argument to make it. So how we solve the murder problem in the black community is a is a very difficult question to answer. And it is by no means clear that the current existence of racists, or racist policies is, is the proximate cause right now, you might say it's the, the original
Pause but even if we acknowledge that, it doesn't necessarily give us the remedy in the current in the current circumstance, but it's just, it's just a fact that when you're when you, if police are going to be looking to stop the most violent crimes as they should, they are going to be meeting Farm anymore, black people. A disproportionate number of black people then Asians.
In attempting to do that and they'll be doing it. And if they're effective, they will be stopping the murders of disproportionately black people because the overwhelming number of victims of black crime. This is why people tend to kill white people. Black people tend to kill black people, Etc. So it's so, you know, you can, it seems, it seems totally irrational.
Expect that the third that the of the thousand people who are killed every year by cops in America, 13% of them should be black. Not given the fact that 50% of violent crime is is being committed by African-Americans. And so and the circumstances under which cops are forced to draw their guns and defend themselves are in responding to the work of violent criminals for the most part. So and so
The truth is that the numbers killed each year are somewhere between those two numbers. I mean, it's not that 50% of black people commit, 50% of violent crime, currently in America. They're not 50% of the people killed by cops. They're more. Like, I believe, it's closer to 30%, So it's anyway, I mean, you know, these are, it's a hard. It's a hard conversation to have, but it's Anna.
Possible conversation to have if you're going to allege that one, white guy like me, can't say anything, right? And to the answer has to be always racism and that's and that's where the left seems to be on this
topic. Right? And so, getting back to the question that led to this.
Why what do you imagine these these Gatekeepers these editors of newspapers? These you know heads of organizations. Are they just like sitting around somewhere saying? Well, we you know, there's a you know, there's there's a viral video of this, you know, white police officer shooting an unarmed black man. We're going to do something with this and we are going to ignore the the gang violence that happened in Chicago over the weekend. Like what, where is this coming from?
Is it I think that it's just like there's this sense that everyone is in a defensive Crouch and you know, all it's going to take is one person to kind of change the approach and the rest will follow. But this this kind of collective hostage situation. It seems unending.
Yeah, you know, it depends. How informed someone is my talk. If you talk about the editor of a newspaper, the pretty, or times person right that that then there's, there's a
A lot of bad faith and and intellectual dishonesty. Are
they afraid there? Are they, are they afraid or do? You think they really am? I guess, it depends on the person's individual basis. But like are they are, do they really think that there is some there? Some, you know, it's, you're on the right side of history or there's a you're morally righteous position to proceed this way, or are they just afraid of Twitter?
Well, I think it's both and I think, you know, one can grade into the other. I mean, your, your motives for doing anything can be can be multiple, right? And self-reinforcing, and the you don't, most people don't spend a lot of time scrutinizing. Their actual motives. They just feel pushed or pulled a strongly and they get and to resist that Pusher pull is uncomfortable and then they tend not to think more about it, but
There's a False Consensus here that exerts a lot of pressure on people. Let me take the reason why I brought up the police violence cases, just in that. In that case. I think most people, genuinely thought they had seen the evidence, right? Like this was a racist murder. This was a lynching. We all saw it. And so are our society that we need a reckoning around this. This is, this is the
The cancer is visible, right? But the truth is as I said, there was Zero evidence of racism in that video. Now, I'm not saying it may be, it may come to light that Derek Chauvin is a is a rearranging white supremacist, right? That maybe could have been his motive. I'm just saying, we don't know that and we still aren't we still don't eat? The guy has been sentenced to prison and we still don't know that right, but the because everyone felt they had seen.
It that, you know, most people who felt it, a moral imperative to react Against Racism on the basis of that. I think they were doing so in good faith. I mean, they just they, there they are, their eyes weren't lying. Right? But the truth is, they are absolutely wrong about what they think is true down on this particular topic. I mean, I like you,
Los Angeles erupted in riots, right? How many people rioting and Los Angeles would know that 2019 had been the year of literally, the lowest use of force in the history of the LAPD, right? Like that, like that. The LAPD had never been better in in minimizing their use of force against anyone, right? And
And the decrease in police violence had been had been, you know, Gathering Gathering energy for, for, for decades. Right? So, it's like that. Like, it was just if you just look at the numbers, there was nothing, but progress, and yet we as a society were reacting, like it's never been worse. It's and, and so it is the problem with what's coming from the left. And and the effect it's having on.
Mainstream institutions. Again, like the New York Times is that he where where I get Trump aside. I mean he has Trump did represent a kind of anomaly or or you know, kind of backslide and I could see how it seemed like a kind of political backsliding in what was otherwise, a story of moral progress, but we have mainstream institutions.
Which are among the least racist collections of people and collections of ideas that have ever existed rending themselves over there supposed racism and institutionally Princeton University, you know, they go is publishes an open letter signed by hundreds of professors castigating itself for its history of racism. And it's just an absolute Maiya culpa, which rather delightfully was
It was taken at face value by the Trump justice department. And they said, well, if you've been racist all this, while maybe we should, you know, open an investigation into you to see if you're in violation of the 90s. That was great. Almost made me love Trump to exactly
that she did, right?
But it was, it was so, it was so dishonest, you know, and the head of admissions at Princeton at that point may still be
Who was African-American and Princeton's Princeton practices, aggressive affirmative action, right? And there they have many celebrated black intellectuals on their faculty. As just this is not a racist place and you had the fact that that there was a consensus there and and in mainstream institutions like the New York Times, it would report on this topic that they
They, you know, finally, they finally, they they're dealing with their the absolute poison in their system. It's just, it's colossal bullshit and it's sanity straining. It's unethical to be destroying the reputations of specific people, who won't Echo these new pieties. And it's, it's just it's Madness. And but the problem is the only, the only,
Effective and is thus far, not all that effective, but the only effect of retort to this kind of thing. It has to come from black intellectuals, writes like a white guy like me saying, this is just again will never convince anyone in the, the Vox Camp, right? Because they, they're practicing that minute. They're filtering based on identity for every single conversation at this point.
Aunt, and they don't, they don't see the intellectual or moral errors. They're making by doing that.
Are you having conversations with people behind closed doors, who are leaders at these sorts of Institutions? I mean, you're at these dinner parties with people whose opinions matter in the in the public sphere. Are you hearing people saying in private? What they're not going to do or say publicly?
Yeah. Yeah. This is the face to
Days. And by email that has been a lot of this over the years and it's an enormous problem because a given gives a sense of a False Consensus or are a false sense of consensus to everyone else. When people think they're alone and they're not and we have here is a very perverse and
Dangerous Emperor's New Clothes phenomenon, where no one will will admit the obvious, even when it really matters, I mean, and there are people whose reputations have been destroyed, where it's just, it's absolutely obvious. They're not, they're the wrong, they were the wrong target, right? You know, this is not a racist. This is not a transphobic. This is not a misogynist. This is not and yet, they're being hurled from the ramparts by a
Up. And, you know, often the cancellation is being affected from within an organization where, you know, some the CEO of Netflix has to agree that this person should be fired. Right? And otherwise, they wouldn't be fired, but it's just obvious. The person isn't
racist. What is that about? Why can't they just are they just afraid like we're going to sacrifice one person to Save Our Ass more broadly like
What's the psychology or what's the fear? Like, what do you make of it?
Well, so certain organizations are are in thrall to their woke employees, right? They have a van enough of awoke employee base that they feel like. All right, we'll just have to sacrifice. We got throw this guy overboard because, you know, we just had two thousand people signed a petition that they don't want to work with him. Right? So that seems like a fire that has to be put out and it's pretty easy to put
Now, you just acquiesce to their demands, if 2000 and Ploy. He's demanding that Antonio Garcia, Martinez be fired because he wrote a best-selling book. Few years ago, that said something that there are construing as misogynistic. And
oh, yes, which they knew about full. Well, when he was hired.
Yeah. Yeah, and so but so there and these two thousand employees who signed this list almost certainly had never at the book. They just saw a pull quote from it, but it's just you know, the
Oh, yes. Use the the the powers that be felt like, oh, his such as easy to acquiesce here. So they did and then they get a new letter, which says, now act Apple should be taking a position against Israel and their conflict with the Palestinians, right? Like it's not going to stop but it's people in corporations are highly risk-averse, right? And there's just no there's no incentive to
Step out of line when the the consequences can be that painful, right? There's no individual incentive to say. Hey, listen guys, it's you know, you're everything you think, you know about the cops and violence is wrong, you know, when you have people literally weeping over the footage. They just saw of George Floyd being killed, right? So it's like that's it. Never get, it never gets truly easy.
To do that even though many people can recognize that they are being swept up into a kind of public hysteria and moral Panic. It's just it's a coordination problem. It what is what would be solvable if we all did it together becomes completely irrational and self-sacrificing for one person to attempt to do on his or her own. Right? If you were the person who's going to step forward,
And you and no one else does. Well, then you can be the next you know, you have the pleasure of being the next Salman Rushdie, right? You want to go into hiding for 10 years because everyone thinks you're, you know, Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan or, you know, some, whatever
the topic is your transphobia. That's an interesting analogy, though, because I mean, someone rushed obviously, his life was in danger, but this to be cancelled by your own side. Does a degree of damage.
Damage that, you know, if to be canceled, I'm not really comparing anybody that Salman Rushdie situation, but I think people sometimes underestimate the degree to, which being canceled by the other side isn't even really a cancellation. It's it increases your currency right, though. It's, it's people fearing. Their their own side. I just like is there is there a world in which everybody could just do this at once? Do you have any hope? Like do you see this? Still going on 5 years from now? 10 years from now.
Um, I can't imagine it going on to this degree. I think the spell will have to break. You know, I'm more. What I'm worried. Is that what I'm really worried about is that there's a there's a self-fulfilling prophecy part of this or possibility here. That would be genuinely bad to, to accomplish, which is to say that all of these allegations of racism and too.
Take one variable and it's not, it's not what we've been focused on racism because it's just easy shorthand and it's taking up most of the oxygen here. But it this also relates to me to it. Also, relates to the trans issue, right? So, but Emma to take race as one part of this. These endless allegations of racism, you know, Finding racism. Even wear it manifestly doesn't exist. I think.
Could have the consequence of really harming race relations in this country and make and essentially making manufacturing more racists for us, right, you know, and or at least making people callous to the the problem of racism insofar, as it still does exist, right? And, and making people callous to the very real problem of social inequality. That is
Highly correlated with race, right? I mean that's, you know, I've been for all this time. I've been criticizing the lunacy on the left. I've also been worrying out loud about the problem of wealth inequality and there are other sorts of inequality this. But you know, so much of it is anchored to the problem of of class. Essentially and wealth. Inequality is yes, there's a
Significant correlation with race. I mean, it's just something like 8 1 or 10 to 1 that the disparity in wealth between the white and black community. Right? So it's enormous and that's having enormous consequences as you'd expect. And I really think we have to remedy that and I really want new Norms, political political and ethical norms.
To form around how we think about inequality, and how we, how capitalism can be revised.
Ultimately, I was gonna say it. Can we do this through capitalism?
Yeah. I think I think capitalism is the best system. We've got took to produce wealth. But so, you know, I'm not a certainly not a communist and I'm, and I'm not even a socialist, but I do think that we just have to picture what success will look like for us.
So we really get our act together. And all of the, the trends toward automation proceeded to some happy Terminus where, you know, we basically have canceled the the role of drudgery in our lives. I mean, no one need ever. Do a boring and dangerous job again because we now have robots to do those jobs. What does the world look like? Well, it should look like a situation where we have figured out how to spread that abundance around.
And so that that life has gotten better and better and better for everyone right now. And whatever inequality we have is on top of a really acceptable, you know, social safety net right now. You can call that socialism, but I don't really, I don't really think of it in those terms. Anyway, it would be, it would be very, you know, you know, I was the Fairly is open-minded about Universal basic income and, you know, I
There is a real problem of inequality that we have to solve and we cannot live in a world where we have a few trillionaires and forty percent unemployment and you know, people living in tents in our in our wealthiest cities, right? So it's, it's is a, there's nothing I'm saying, they should be construed as a lack of awareness or the around the problem of inequality, or how that that problem interacts with the
race, but I'm worried that all of this, do this dishonesty and hysteria and hypocrisy and bad faith will make people just no longer care about real problems, you know and real real truly unconscionable disparities in
In luck, in our, in our society. So yeah, I do see many people just tuning out and saying these people. You can't talk to these people. They're totally dishonest. I'm done, right? I'm just going to live, you know, I've got, I've got a great life. You know, I live in whatever Newport Beach or Miami or
The Upper East Side and I'm going to, I'm going to try to live my life so that I don't have to deal with these problems. Right? Like, I'm just going to keep the homelessness out of my backyard and you know, keep the crime down and I'm done thinking about this because everyone who's telling me that this is a five-alarm fire has been lying and that includes the New York Times and NPR and 60 minutes and everyone else. I used to trust to
Tell me what was going on in the world.
And is this a matter of algorithms as much as anything? Because I don't think it would be dishonest to sit here and say that, you know, the social justice activists. I don't like to call them sjw, social, justice Warriors, but it would be, it would be wrong to say that people in that space don't care about income inequality. I think they care about it a lot. But do you get the sense that there's just a feeling of perception in that sphere that it's easier?
Easier to talk about racism. It's just sort of a cleaner shot. And then if we kind of solve that then then we can move on to income inequality. Is it just is it just a simpler thing to have memes about and to talk about and to kind of have the algorithm do its thing and reach more people?
Well, yeah, I think many people are just confused and many people are
Attached to this religious precept that it has to be about identity and race, right? And if you put it in terms of inequality, your you're just not interacting with it with the, the sacred variable that they care about, right. Maybe we're dealing with conceptions of something like original sin, you know, I mean like when you're talking about the problem of whiteness or white,
Today, or it's just there. There's a this, it's just, it's not, it's not a bad analogy. Me the analogy to religion, or the analogy to a cult is, is just fairly literal. Yeah, it is except
do it. I hate to do it because it seems like such a such low-hanging fruit, but there really is no other way of looking at it that I can find
these days. Yeah, but the
You know, they obviously they do care about inequality. I mean that's that is the, that is in fact, what, what is real in many cases for them to care about and when and when there, and again, there's there's a significant interaction between race and inequality here. So like if you, if you could convince yourself that, what you really care about is inequality, right? Inequality with respect to wealth and income and access.
To health care and health outcomes. And, you know, environmental inequality and exposure to to pollutants in certain neighborhoods. Neighborhoods versus others, and images. You make that list as long as you want. And then you want you started to respond to those problems and help people who are actually on the, on the wrong end of a bad, you know.
Dice roll, you would disproportionately be helping black people and people of color in our society, right? And that was a, you would be saw and, and in each case, you're the solution would be targeted to someone who by definition should be helped, right? I mean, this is someone who's, who you because, because inequality is the is the issue here, but, you know, and you're not going to be worried about whether, you know,
Jamie Foxx is Black or White? You know, it's like Jamie Foxx is doing fine. You know he's doing he's doing better than almost anyone has ever done in human history. Right? And he is, you know, he's as he's more talented than almost anyone in our society, right? And is making the most of those talents. And, and he's just a story. It's a story of absolute success. How much time?
Do we have to spend worrying about the legacy of racism? In the case of Jamie Foxx? Right? It's just, it's just, it would become, you know, I, you know, I haven't spoken to him about this but, you know, and and perhaps in the current environment. He would have a whole story to tell about how even he is, is under the shadow of this thing, but insofar, as we can touch any kind of objective measure of well-being and success, and, and good luck verses.
And look in our world. Jamie Foxx is on the on the fortunate side of basically every possible trade and you know, which is great, so good for him, but it's not the it doesn't fit into a story of Hollywood is so racist. Right?
Do you think that people are getting from this? What?
People once got from religion. I'm sure this is a question you've been asked before, but I think it's it's still worth asking. Like there is some kind of dopamine hit. There is some kind of visceral experience that people are having when they start thinking this way and they start just kind of either self-flagellating or Reckoning or just taking inventory, taking a moral inventory. Do you think that this kind of phenomenon could have arisen?
And in a time, when there was just more organized religion.
Yeah, you know, I think this is, you know, religion is not a bulwark against it because religion shares in this is, this is a kind of new religion. Hey, you know, this is a religion without the Supernatural. Is it without the transit Transcendence in any kind of contemplatively, or mystical sense? But it does have a kind of
It offers the same Transcendence that the that fusion with a mob has always offered. Right. And, you know, it shares a lot with, you know, kind of the fanaticism of any kind of crowd Behavior. I mean the fanaticism of, you know, soccer hooligans, right? Like it would how do you explain the fact that in the aftermath of a victory or a loss in the world cup or as just happened in the, you know, the
Cup, you can get totally normal people to behave like absolute sociopaths on mass because a goal got scored or didn't get scored right. Miss just, it's, it's, it's a crazy crowd Behavior. It's being facilitated by social media. I mean, that that part is genuinely new. So there's a kind of performative aspect to this that we're
the consequences of which were only now discovering, right? So it's a very unnatural situation to be able to from the the safety of your, your parents basement to be able to talk to a crowd, it to talk to you to single out, a specific victim in front of a crowd and you know engage the drama of all of that and you know to join others in doing that and to do it anonymously.
In on Twitter, for instance. It's just, you know, that's that seems to be maximizing this this this appetite we have for witch burnings and, and just the spectacle of a, you know, not in this in most cases, not a real murder, but a reputational murder, you know, and no one you're virtually. No one is truly immune to this. Maybe it's instructive to watch the cases that
That were right on the cusp of of cancellation of me. Somebody like JK Rowling, right? Like she, if she had not been JK Rowling. I'm pretty sure she would have been cancelled over her Skirmish with the, the trans
Community, if she'd been a bit list author.
Yeah. I mean, it's like her next book would not have been published. And I mean, you some perspective here. I mean JK Rowling is, you know, not
Not my kind of New York Times bestseller. I mean, she's dead. They literally open theme parks to make money off of her intellectual property. It's, you know, there you can count on one hand. The number of authors who have her kind of stature with respect to the business of books. So she should be, you know, utterly immune, but she's on another planet and I, you know, she wasn't immune
She just she's weathered it. I don't know. Her personally. I'd be surprised to learn if she's suffered any actual career damage, but it's you know, when you have the the actors who starred in the movies derivative of your work, you know, Abby actors who in most cases. Oh every oh their entire careers careers to their participation in your IP lining.
To disavow their association with you publicly. It's, you know, that's quite a moment and, you know, and so it's most authors would not have survived anything like that.
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Let me just to kind of circle back to what we were talking about at the top. As we wind things down here, you know this again to this. If the theme is, you know, do we ruin the dinner party? I think there's a there's like a media version of this too. And I think a lot of what we've been talking about here has to do with a perception among again, editors television news, producers, whatever it is that the public somehow is not able to
Taba lies complexity. So we can't take any risks. If we want to, you know, stay on the right side of things and be, you know, release some kind of coherent message. We have to just avoid talking about certain things. And I you know, I'm curious if you think that that is sometimes true. You know, I was I was struck by, you know, somebody like Brett Weinstein we've talked about the Weinstein has a lot in this conversation, but
You know, he was on Tucker Carlson fairly recently talking about vaccines and, you know, he's making it, he's making a nuanced point. He's talking about how the fact that the vaccine is imperfect and can therefore allow a few breakthrough cases, that will then further, the outbreak that is a point about the coronavirus vaccine that strikes me as something worth thinking about, but the
Question is is it only worth? Is it mostly worth thinking about in a classroom or a medical conference as opposed to on Tucker Carlson? Where it's subject to mass interpretation. I I'm really, I'm conflicted about that. Like I'm here banging the drum of nuance, but I'm also saying choose your
moments. Yeah, you know, I don't agree with what bread has been doing on vaccines. I think this is a very specific.
Context, we have a public health emergency, you know, globally speaking. And we have to figure out how to respond to it in an environment where we know there's considerable vaccine hesitancy and disinformation. There's a fair amount of misinformation, but there's also a lot of disinformation, right? There's the intentional spreading of lies about vaccines and
People are dying as a result and new variants of the of the virus are being continually spun up in the population that is unvaccinated and it's just a matter of time before one of these variants begins to blow through the vaccines, right? So it's like the people who are not vaccinated or not just problems for themselves. Their problems for everyone else, too. So to be to be sounding off in this context,
About how reasonable it might be to be vaccine hesitant right when it's actually not very reasonable, you know, even if it's like his arguments are wrong, right? It's just me to put it simply here.
It really the really only two paths in this, in this Garden of possibilities. There's, there's the path of you're going to be exposed to the coronavirus with a vaccine or without a vaccine. Right. Me like that. It's just it Forks there. It's like you're eventually you're going to be exposed to the coronavirus if you're living anything like a normal life. So the question is, do you want to be vaccinated before that happens and now vaccine?
Are everywhere available now? It is vaccines any, any vaccine and any other medical procedure or medication carries with it some risk, which is to say that, if you give it to tens of millions of people, there will be some number people who have some terrible experience associated with that vaccine or intervention. This is true for literally everything. We do, you know, it's true for Advil is true for tile.
And all is true for antihistamines. As you know, it's true for foods, you know, if you feed started feeding peanut butter to people, some number of people are going to die out right by being exposed to peanut butter. So, you know, quite how big of a peanut butter problem, do we have, and should we Outlaw it, right? And if peanut butter gave 95% protection against coronavirus, you know, would you be recommending that people get, you know, have a peanut butter sandwich immediately. Yes, you would. So,
The really is just a choice between between being exposed to this virus with or without a vaccine and bread is acting like the the vaccine is more dangerous than than covid getting covid without without having the immunity conferred by the vaccine and we just know that's not the case. And we've run.
One of the largest experiments ever on this on this front. We have something like a hundred million people at least have gotten coronavirus without the benefit of a vaccine and you know, 600,000 of those people died. Right? And then we have something like a hundred million people, you know, or more who have gotten the vaccine. How many people have died due to getting the vaccine? I'm not sure anyone has, but yeah.
It's certainly not 600,000.
Is he making I? Maybe I'm misunderstanding. Is he actually saying I mean we don't have to dwell on this, but is he saying that people that it is actually on some level unsafe to take the vaccine? Or is it just kind of? Because I was interpreting this as a kind of thought experiment
that you he's open to him. He's been saying that the vaccine is as yet, there's some evidence that it, it damages, the blood brain barrier. I believe he said that based on one.
Study and but of course we have to compare that to what covid does to the blood-brain barrier. When you can someone who hasn't been vaccinated and he's just he's he's he says he's not anti-vaccine and that's fine. I'm sure he's got another vaccines but he's definitely concerned about this, being the university in particular, the MRNA vaccines being new. And as yet, you know, in terms of long-term data, we by definition, don't have any
So he's worried as any rational person, might be worried. Who knows what this is going to do to us in the fullness of time, you know, is it possible that 20 years from now will recognize that that this Spike protein that the vaccine generated in US was harmful. Well, yes, that's a possibility. But what we know now is that getting covid is worse, right? As
witness by the body bags that, you know, that are that are accruing on one side of this experiment. And get the vaccine isn't killing people and the vaccine is as effective in preventing severe disease as we could, as we could possibly hope at this point. And this is a, we're in the middle of this crisis, which is not going to stop until we get a sufficient number of people vaccinated or otherwise.
Immune. And then he has a whole thesis about how Ivermectin is is actually a good prophylactic against covid.
And I was kind of persuaded by that. I have to say, I was, I was just, you know,
I mean the the evidence for that is that bit best unless, you know, less than fully substantiated at this point, but there's as far as I can tell, there is no evidence.
Since that it is a prophylactic on the order of one of these vaccines. Right? It's just,
but what about as a therapy? Sorry, we don't need to piss is.
But this just goes to the fact that it's like this is the reason not to get on television and an open up, this can of worms is because you can know in advance, that it is. It is interacting with a an
Level of vaccine fear that is posing a real problem for just the kind of group behavior and public health messaging, right? It's just like with vaccine, hesitancy is a thing that has been harming us for for many many years. And it's, it's, especially bad now, given the current crisis and it's, it's, um,
So just seems like it, like it, unless, unless the data on Ivermectin were, you know, just amazingly persuasive, right? And it had a real Counterpoint to the, to the remedy on offer. There's just no real. There's no reason to pick this particular battle, right? It's like, well, why would you be be speculating about this kind of stuff and sowing doubt? When the real thing that the thing?
It differentiates America. This moment from so much of the rest of the world is we have access to these vaccines, right? That's that maybe we're incredibly lucky and you know, he's treating it like this is no. We're actually this is a an instance of self-harm now that is, you know, it's it's own moral emergency that has to be responded
to. But is there a way that this topic could be talked about where it was like a? Yes. And like get
the vaccine and there's some evidence that Ivermectin might help in early stages of illness and it's probably not going to hurt you. So Physicians should be a, you know, get the memo and know about this.
Yeah. I mean, this is first, I mean, you know, in breast offends, let me acknowledge that there have been so many missteps and pratfalls in our Public Health messaging in the last 15 months. That it's, you know, the Trust In institutions.
Broken down with it. This is, this is what and broken down for. In many cases, good reasons. I mean the whole Lab leak thing, you know, being treated as a, as, you know, essentially racist pornography, because Trump had been talking about it, you know, it was obvious from the beginning that that was a plausible thesis. Right? And it's to be in, this is, this is, this is the problem with political correctness and
And identity politics and and just having Politics as the lens through which you talk about objective reality. In this case, epidemiology. It makes it impossible, right? So, you know, so it's a me, the reason why I didn't focus on the lab League, hypothesis 12 or 15 months ago is because it was irrelevant, right? It's not that it was never because it was implausible. It was just who cares. We sequence this genome in some time.
11 days. Now, we know what we have to vaccinate against. Let's just solve this problem. It doesn't matter where this came from, you know, we'll deal with the Chinese later. We know something's wrong over there, either. They have to close down those wet markets or they have to get their Labs under control. It was never plausible to think that someone consciously released this, you know, in order to kill everyone because we know why would you release it on your own City? First?
So but it's just, you have to have your priorities. Straight me. What is what's important to talk about now? And and so, yeah, I mean that's that's where we differ, but it is, the breakdown of trust in institutions institutions, like the CDC, you know, or or the New York Times that is that something that is genuinely seems new or the degree to which its happened seems new and
It's an enormous problem because it just makes it may then. We just have a bunch of podcasts telling people what their worldview should be and whether or not, they should get vaccinated by. Like, it's just that podcasts and sub stack. Newsletters are not an adequate alternative to having a functioning government and having functioning, you know.
Journalistic media companies, right? We need a bureau overseas that can report facts, right? It can't just be somebody holds up an iPhone and says, here's what here's what I just have captured from my street. Look what the cops are doing.
Yeah, we've crowd-sourced reality. Yeah, and a search warrant, but it's like, I mean getting back to this throughout the pandemic, we had any number of officials come and get on TV and refuse to open up a can of worms.
Yes, but as a result, there was every can remain sealed. Like, how do you will be thread the
needle, the confession, to make it, like people people need a mature, understanding of probability, and statistics. They need to know how to consume data. I mean, so, so like Anthony fauci, I would agree. Has been mediocre at Best in his messaging on this and people like Redfield were just catastrophically bad.
And and Deborah birx was also terrible, right? So, that the capture of the prominent Public Health, officials by politics and by not wanting to offend the president in the case of perks and, and Redfield, it was that was all disastrous, but you could you still can talk about these things in public but you, you would just try me, you would strike the note that I'm attempting to strike here, which is, yes, everything has risk.
And if you're going to, if you're going to have tens and hundreds of millions of people exposed to something, you will always find a terrifying story of a complication that happened to five people or 50 people or in some cases 500 people. And again, you would have that with peanut butter, right? So and it's like, how do we talk about playing?
Crashes and your attitude toward getting on an airplane, in the immediate aftermath of a plane crash. Well, there's a way to do that, but we don't and there's a way in, there's a way to do that badly and then we could do that. So badly that we could have people, we could destroy the airline industry and we could have people saying I'm never getting on a plane again, right. We could have basically, you know, as I sort of what happened after the movie, Jaws came out, you know, you had you had a generation of
Of people who just did not want to get into the ocean, never again. And that right. Really? Yeah. I mean, you know, I don't know. I don't know. I'm probably exaggerating with the 70 size of his
creative quicksand and sharks,
her hair. Quicksand. Yeah. Yeah, where is all the quicksand? I remember, as a kid thinking quick sad,
socially engineered quicksand at
a society quicksand. Was that was a legitimate way to way to go, but it so it's just, we know,
That there are good and bad ways to assimilate data and to we know what can drive, our intuitions can be pretty irrational and we have to figure out how to correct for that. And you know, so I don't again I have not gone completely down the rabbit hole. I haven't spent eight hours listening to what he said on this topic, but I've spent I spent at least an hour on it and and too much to my ear. He's not striking.
In the notes, I would want to strike about, you know, vaccines their safety, their their possible dangers and the, the possibility that that Ivermectin can be taken as a prophylactic instead of getting
vaccinated. Okay? Well Sam, I've kept you for a long time, pleasure. Well, just, you know, kind of final question here, you know, I wonder if you have any thoughts. I mean on this this thing I think about a lot. I mean, people often.
Think accuse People Like Us of harping on the idea of honest conversations, you know, just just for the sake of talking as if we want to kind of, you know, as if we want to sit around and talk about cancel culture, all day or whatever it is. But, you know, my argument is that there are in fact practical matters, urgent issues even that, you know, we have a society as a society, been wrestling with, for a long time, but can only be addressed through the kind of innovative imaginative solutions. That in fact,
wire these kinds of conversations that are often rendered taboo. I mean, I have a couple of of, you know, a couple of examples in my myself, but I'm wondering for you. Like what are the biggest problems that you think cannot be solved unless we can wander into some uncomfortable terrain.
Well it so I'm never talking about these things just for the hell of it. It's really I tend to focus on things that I think have I mean
There are times where I'll do a podcast on something that's just purely a matter of intellectual interest, right, you know talking about the, you know, talking about physics or the nature of Consciousness, or whatever it is. And then there are other things really in, in, on the terrain. That, you know, we've been covering what I'm focusing on them. Not because they're interesting because if many of them are deadly boring but because they're hugely consequential and, in many cases, those consequences are not being acknowledged and
what, you know, they're I think this this issue of what's happening on the far left and it's capture of most of our institutions. It's consequential for two reasons. One is, it's creating a tremendous amount of obvious harm, but perhaps even more than that, it represents a an intolerable and ongoing opportunity cost. I mean, it's like look at all of the things.
Not talking about and all the problems. We can't figure out how to solve because this way of speaking and thinking and reacting and emoting is blocking everything else. Rise. It's just it's
so what are what are some of those things just off
the top of it? We you know, if we should be talk, we really should be talking about inequality and what to do about it and we should be doing that in a way that is not
Not needlessly polarizing and and tribal izing, right? We should be talking about the, the real sources of the most needless suffering in our world, right? I mean, there's a, we should be responding to real suffering, and so far as it exists and real risk of
Of suffering and harm insofar as it really looms. So should we should be thinking about things that pose existential risk to us that can could just screw up the whole human project, you know, the the ongoing threat of nuclear war. Something we do not think about enough it almost is almost certainly the most likely way we can still end it all for ourselves, but you know by by intent or by accident we should be to it. We should the pandemics
Would have inspired us to spend a lot more time thinking about pandemics both both natural and manufactured. That's an enormous problem. That's not going away. And we should be just putting immense resources toward toward detection and because the speed of our response and if anything is
Especially depressing out of the, our experience during covid is its, you know, we're really bad at this. I mean, this was a dress rehearsal for something quite a bit worse and we failed. It just categorically the only thing that the only success here is how quickly we produced these vaccines that Brett Weinstein doesn't want to take, right? So hit me that and that has been a genuine success but
in
Going to get credit for it. By the
way, it doesn't matter. It's just yeah, it doesn't matter who gets credit was just we, we want to be able to do this. We want to be able to do this faster than we did it. And if any, if there's any, if there's a glimmer of hope here, it's that we we have our game together on the, on the molecular biology front enough, that we will be able to do this faster and faster, and hopefully that will that will also be a story of being able to detect.
Detect these things faster and faster, but our our inability to cooperate with one another politically. We both of, you know internationally, you know, you know the US and the Chinese but you know, you just domestically especially the fact. This became so tribe alized and you know mirror mask-wearing became a shattering variable in our society. It's just
It does not suggest that we're going to get our arms around many of these other. Major problems, may suggest to me that a political response to climate change is impossible. Right? We will never convince the people. We need to convince to do anything, to make any sacrifice with, respect to climate change, or to do anything differently. It's just, that's that path is not open to us. And that's the, that's the conclusion. I draw from covid.
It's not to say that there's no path open to us, but it can't be the one of political persuasion. We will. We will solve the problem of climate change. Despite the fact that something like half of our society cannot be convinced that it's even a problem. Right? And the way to do that is to have the 5,000 people, whose opinions actually matter, just decide to Ram through the policies that will actually make a difference. And on the other side.
To make the technological changes that we want to make any way that actually produce the products that people will really want to buy any way that just happened to be more in line with, with a, an environmentally saying future, right? So we, you know, once we build electric cars that are cheap enough that everyone can recognize that they're just better than gas-powered cars. Well, then.
Then people will buy them, not because they're solving the problem of climate change, but because they actually would rather have an electric car because it's just better. That's so that's, that's the way we're going to do this, but I have absolutely no. Hope that we can we can get people to respond appropriately to data with a much slower moving emergency than covid-19.
We need to focus on the ways in which bad incentives are causing people and causing all of us. Collectively to maintain our core Collision Course, with all of the the hard objects that await us in the future, you know, I mean, just how many icebergs do we want to to try to Ricochet off of before we experiencing for?
Anything like, you know, truly open water and smooth sailing. I feel like those open waters are in view. I really like we can, we can obviously get past racism and race as a variable in our society. We're so close to doing that. The people who have the people who are successful, a really successful have already done it, right? I mean, it's just it's not a factor.
What do you
I mean by that. Actually what say what do you mean
people was just, I mean, the people who are the people who are thriving, you know, Meghan this speaks to the issue of inequality, but when you're when you're, when you're wealthy and educated and you can spend a lot of your time just enjoying what other creative people do and you can enjoy your own creative engagement with the world, right? The one year, one year among the very lucky people who
Or just or just living in a world of ideas and who, you know, who are, who are getting all the good parts of cosmopolitanism without any of the bad, right? Who, you know, it just who you know, who you when you when you were, when you were free to be a student of history and a student of many cultures, and, and you get the benefits of travel and
Mobilization without, you know, having your livelihood outsourced to China and you know watching your your your town destroyed because the all the factories closed right? Like you just you've got the you've got the abundance without the casualties of the of the kinds of changes that have happened in the last 50 years. You, you were living in a world where virtually all of what people are focused on now is no is no longer a problem.
Mmm, right? And then the question is, how can we get the rest of society to enjoy that, you know, that frame of mind and the actual, it's material requirements, right? Because again, in equality, is, is a significant variable here. And it may be the master variable. As I'm not saying there are no Rich racists in the world, but for the most part,
Some, it's just a moment. We're living in very different worlds. You know, it's like this is the best one thing you just need to appreciate that. Your each of us is in a kind of echo chamber and as much as you try to get out of it, it's it's hard to know what the the person who is behaving like a a Madman out in the world. It's hard to know. It's hard to diagnose that situation without
Knowing what they're seeing based on their engagement with media and their peers. And, you know, social media in particular. I may just like, how is something like Hugh and on even possible, Right Miss. It's just when you look at the details there, when you look at the fact that people are willing to risk their lives and certainly their reputations in in under the sway of the belief that, you know, Hillary.
And is drinking the blood of babies. I mean, it's just that's it's almost impossible to persuade yourself that people actually believe this, but it is, in fact, the case,
you know, so well, we're all, we're all listening to our own podcast,
but that that's again that's that's one of the real problems with the breakdown of trust in institutions. And that that's why it matters mean that when you ask when you why do we spend so much time? Whinging about woke nose.
That's why it matters. When the New York Times gets it wrong. And that's why it matters. When Princeton has his head up its ass and that's why it matters. When the CDC can't be trusted to just actually talk science, right? Because, you know, it's the difference between a real institution that has real integrity and and all
The resources, it needs to to drill down on, on facts. The difference between that and, you know, Breitbart or something, that's just, you know, obviously a confection of political tribalism that difference has to be maintained. We need the, we need a bowl work between the New York Times and Breitbart insofar as New York Times, the New York Times begins to resemble Breitbart, but just the leftist version of it. That's a
Um, you know, that's a huge cost to all of us. I mean, whether it whether you read the Times or not, it's just it's a we can't we can't give up that difference. And what were what we're finding is that the people who are running, those institutions are as it seemed to be just happily tearing them down, you know, thinking that they're doing the Lord's work. And it's, you know, that hence, hence, our
Sun on them and not on on bigots with tiki torches,
right? No, it's it's crazy making. Well Sam. Thank you for all you do to cut through this and you really you play a really important role. So thanks for for doing your part. And thank you for taking so much time with me as I really. Am very, very
grateful. So yeah, well happy to do it and I love your work and I wish you the best of luck with with the
podcast. Thank you. All right, well to be
continued someday. I hope that was my interview with podcaster, best-selling author, neuro, scientist philosopher, and meditation, teacher and practitioner Sam Harris. You can find him and his podcast at Sam Harris dot-org. You've been listening to the Unspeakable podcast. As you may have noticed. This podcast now has advertisements here and there, if you'd like to get ad free versions of the podcast as well as Early Access,
To it, please support it at any level on the patreon page at patreon.com the Unspeakable. There are lots of other perks. There are two, including if you sign up at the $10 a month level or higher $10 off your first purchase of official unspeakable podcast, nuanced AF merchandise. There are hats mugs thermoses. Stickers magnets, a baby onesie for that exceptionally nuanced infant and your life.
You can find all of this in the Nuance store on the podcast website, the Unspeakable podcast.com. And if you're new to the show that website will tell you lots of stuff. You may want to know and make it very easy to listen to All of the interviews nearly 50 by. Now that I've done since the show launched a year ago, the of course, you can also do that on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. Finally as you may have noticed, the show is now part of the podcast one.
Work. That means that the last six weeks or so have been something of a whirlwind trying to make the transition over to podcast one. And in light of that. I just want to take a second to thank the team that's been helping me out from the beginning. This is a solo Venture, but I do have editing and production help from the amazing people at talking, silkworm, podcast, production firm, specifically David Perez, who runs the shop and mayor,
Ortega who gets my editing notes week after week and does a beautiful job editing. The audio including all those unwanted barks from Hugo. I'd also like to give a shout out to Scott Schaffer who does graphics and web design for me. I sometimes complained about how I'm all alone in this project, but the fact is I've got some really talented people. Helping me every week, your patreon support helps me continue to retain their services. So on behalf of all of us, thank you again for that.
That's it for now. I'll be back next week with another Super nuanced guest until then. Thanks for listening. See you next time.
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