Making Sense with Sam Harris - #197 — A Conversation with Caitlin Flanagan

Episode Date: April 12, 2020

Sam Harris speaks with Caitlin Flanagan. They discuss the different sorts of experiences people are having during the Covid-19 pandemic, what it has exposed about our education system, the 2020 election and the many problems with Joe Biden, why the press has been slow to cover Biden’s #MeToo allegation, the perceived double standards in the press and within feminism, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

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I am here with Caitlin Flanagan. Caitlin, thank you for joining me. Thank you for having me. If people only knew how difficult it was under pandemic conditions to get a valid connection, this has been brutal, but you're inheriting my bad tech karma because I just break technology wherever I go. Oh, I assumed that you always had perfect connections at all times. No, it's just bad luck, but it happens enough that I'm used to it. But it's great to have you here. And I actually, I did go out on Twitter when we first scheduled this, and we got some hundreds of questions, and I have a few

of those seated in here. But let's just start with what's on your mind and what this experience of quarantine has been like for you thus far. Well, I first want to say, Sam, that I think you saved my life, because I am a person that has all these underlying conditions, and I was not taking this seriously seriously as so many people were not. And I'd even been, I have to go to the doctor a lot and I'd even asked the nurse, what about this COVID or Corona? Is this a problem? And she said, oh, it's not a problem. It's a flu. And you just take some, you drink a lot of fluids and you take some Tylenol. And it was so appealing to think that it was nothing. You want to believe the good news always. And so I was going along thinking everyone was hysterical.

And then you just happened to send me an email, a short email about something else. And at the bottom, you said, be careful. This is shaping up to be a really big deal. And that caught me. I thought, Sam is really smart. And this is the kind of thing he would be really smart about. And that kind of sat in my mind, but I still had to go to a work lunch. And as I was sitting in the work lunch, noticing the restaurant wasn't nearly as crowded as usual, the guy I was interviewing and I, our phones kept going off with all these different things being canceled. And while he was sitting there, a job he had booked that was really important to his family economically, financially, I should say, dropped out. And so it was kind of just seeing someone in real time losing work and

income. And I walked out of there. And I remember I never eat enough at a work lunch. I'm very nervous in work lunches and I always don't eat. And I stopped, I was walking to the car and I stopped in a drugstore and I bought a candy bar and I sat on the, it was a bench, a bus bench, a bus stop bench on Ventura Boulevard. And all of a sudden I just thought, I need to go home.

Sam Harris said this, I'm seeing a lot of signs in it and I need to get home. And so I really personally have to thank you because I would have been, and still may be, in really serious, serious trouble if I get this. Well, I'm glad to be of service. There was this really uncanny part of this mass induction into reality where I was essentially a week ahead of everyone in my life. Yeah. I began to feel like a character in a movie where it was just me and one other friend who was even probably 24 hours ahead of me. And it just was a bizarre experience, bizarre conversations with family members and friends. And what was it, Sam? I'm sure you've covered this before, but I'm so interested. What was it that got your attention? What was it that made you realize this was a

really serious thing? A few things. One, I've been primed to think about this. I've been waiting for a pandemic on some level. I actually did a podcast maybe six months ago on this topic. I have a template for this sort of thing happening, although I'm fairly amazed at how little detail was in the template and how strange this experience has been as it has unfolded. But the prospect of this happening wasn't foreign to me. The dominoes started to fall pretty quickly. Frankly, I feel pretty late on this. It really wasn't until the end of February that I was paying attention. And people who were really paying attention were a month earlier than I was. For whatever reason, I was so distracted by other things. I wasn't really noticing the reports from Wuhan. But I also just

happened, by sheer coincidence, I happened to know someone who got this very early and- No kidding. Who's still in an ICU. Oh, God. Who's not especially old. He was 52. And so the prospect of this was just like the flu seemed far-fetched, albeit for reasons that are not statistically sophisticated. I could have happened to know someone who died from the flu, too, and had my intuitions move there. But it kind of anchored me to a sense that, no, people my age are going down from this.

And I don't know people dying from the flu or being intubated and spending more than a month on a ventilator. So that just sort of woke me up. And again, it's moved so quickly. It's just been interesting to see how long a week is in COVID time. A week is like a year. Yeah, isn't it? Isn't it? And I think that's the emotional thing that everybody's, you know, everyone's had a personal crisis. And, you know, we all know what that's like, and the feeling of shock and of panic and sort of getting our vision very, very narrowed into what's, you know, when there's a crisis, people get their priorities straight in about two minutes. people get their priorities straight in about two minutes. Most of the time we bumble around and we wonder, what am I supposed to be doing with my life? And is this the right direction? And could I advance myself or my children in different ways? And then there's a crisis and you get down to the material aspects of life and what really matters. And we're all sort of having this at the same time, this incredible feeling of dislocation, of fear, of the intensity of love that we have for the people we love that, you know, you can't really think about that too much in regular conditions because it would just tear you apart and you could never leave them for a minute. So we're all in this very intense experience.

And I kind of think of it as when I was a kid, we were in Ireland a lot in Dublin. And in Dublin Bay, when the tide goes out, there's a certain strand and the tide will, you know, when it's low tide, all of a sudden you see everything that was underneath the water for the last 12 hours. You see the pebbles and the sea glass and the big dangerous rocks that would have hurt you if you'd gone out. And then it gets covered up again and you can't see any of it in that brown water. And I think that's what it is now.

We're seeing the big rocks and we're trying desperately to avoid them in our personal life, keep the people we love safe. And we know that things, everything here is beyond our control. One thing that we can't lose sight of is how different, I mean, we're all in some kind of common predicament, but there's so many different kinds of experiences to be having now. And it's easy for me to lose sight of that because I'm in touch with many people who are having a pretty similar experience to the one I'm having and not so in touch with people who are in some ways having the opposite experience. Actually, that's not entirely true.

I'm in touch with a fair number of doctors who are working, who are performing surgeries and who are on the front lines of this. working, you know, who are performing surgeries and who are on the front lines of this. But they're the people out in the world who are part of critical infrastructure, who are still working and exposing themselves to this and, you know, exposing others if they're unaware that they're sick. And then they're the people like ourselves who are sheltering in place. And those are obviously very different experiences. And then there are the people who are locked down as we are, but who have their lives totally disrupted. They can't work because their work was synonymous with not being locked down. It'll say they're running a restaurant or working in a store, both of which are closed. And then there are people who either don't have families, now they're experiencing social isolation of a sort that they may have never

experienced or to go for years and years without touching. And then there are the people like ourselves who, I mean, you and I haven't spoken about this, but I can assume you're probably experiencing at least to some degree a silver lining effect here because you're probably experiencing, at least to some degree, a silver lining effect here because you're locked down with your family. And there's been something really beautiful about discovering some of the things on the beach that were truly precious that you were not necessarily seeing on an hour-by-hour basis. Well, I think that we're really seeing this division between, Well, I think that we're really seeing this division between are you a laptop jockey or not? If your work is able to be done entirely in this immaterial space of data that's transported back and forth between computers, then you're probably not taking a financial hit. And it's interesting, the New York Times will endlessly fascinate me until the day I die, where they cover very well and very broadly the situation in all times, but now in particular,

of what it's like to be out of work or to be low income at this time or to be sort of fragile in terms of your financial status and then have it all ripped away. They cover it very well, but all of their social coverage is, you know, their cooking recommendations are endless. And they're, watch this on Netflix and what a great time to reorganize the pantry. And you realize that if they're a product, they know their consumer very well. And the consumer is probably a laptop jockey. But even within that social class where we are lucky to live, I think it's even deeper than, I mean, including the nature of love, but I think it's bumped us quite suddenly into the material world and the realization of how far we have gotten away from it. And I've been the thing that amazes me, Sam, more than anything else, you know, the toilet paper shortages, there'll be jokes and whatever about that.

And I'm sure books will be written. I mean, all of this will take a decade or more to understand this. The thing that amazes me is that America is out of yeast. And yeast doesn't mean cookies and brownies. Yeast means bread. And Americans in a huge number, that's one of the most elemental human activities there is. There is this calling to make bread. There's no bread shortages we can get slight the same sliced bread that we always got but people are being drawn i think and you know i don't want to sound i don't know too out of the real to say this but i noticed that our you know i've written about this a lot that our homes have become this weird place we don't have a. As much as we think we have a deep connection to our homes,

and as much as HGTV, the redecorating channel, as many fans as it has, even for those kind of wealthy people remodeling homes, they're not centers of production. They're centers of consumption. Lug in your chips and your sodas and watch the TV. And then off you go to the soccer game, to the job, to the vacation. But all of a sudden now our homes aren't places to display ourselves or our wealth or it's sort of, oh, thank God I have a stove and an oven. And thank God I've got this freezer. And people are, we try to live a life, it's just sort of like mind, body, spirit, we try to live a life that we can just, the way I grew up, you live totally in your head. But then you get to a point you realize, no, you've got to live in your body too.

And I think that we have gotten in that kind of feeling of just our homes are these pit stops, and they're these display areas. And then anybody who's in that laptop jockey level of the economy, which is a very small percentage, but with a huge influence on society, their homes are often much too big for them. They can't hear their children in them. They can't even find a really warm, close place to be together. And I think that's just went way down the line. It's nothing to really think about or be concerned about now. But I think when the water comes back in and when we're well again, and this is over, I think we'll be thinking about that. You know, is there a way

to live our lives where the things that were exposed to us that are of high degree of worth, where the things that were exposed to us that are of high degree of worth, is there a way that we're willing to sacrifice other things to keep that revelation? And we don't know. We're in a mystery right now. Yeah, I think it will reorganize many things. For all the people who are successfully working from home now, they'll be faced with a choice about whether or not to return to the former pattern of being in an office building for their job. And I got to think many of the companies that successfully pivoted to a distributed workforce may stay distributed just for quality of life reasons. And what do you think it's going to do to education?

What do you think it's going to do to education? This is, to me, having been a teacher and writing a lot about education, this has been the most interesting thing to me. Well, everything's interesting. It's a time where everything's interesting, which is why we're all exhausted. But, you know, America, in this incredible thing, you know, hat is off to the teachers of America that in two weeks, they scrambled to get a distance learning program together for basically every child. It's not a good program. It's not high quality. How could it be two weeks to totally switch, you know, methods of teaching? That's really, you know, obviously it's not very practical, but the thing that parents, I talk to a lot of them because I'm so interested, the thing that parents complain about more than the quality and more than how harassing it is,

all these different systems and passwords and really little kids need a lot of help with that. The thing they complain about is how short it is, that before they know it, that they imagine that their children would have seven hours. They'd have sort of seven hours of coverage the way they do when they drop a child at school. Yeah. But the actual instructional time in an American school for the core subjects that are the make and break of a child, boy, that's 90 minutes. That's 90 minutes. Yeah. That's been pretty startling to discover. I struggled on how to take the temperature of this thing. So what I've defaulted to is just

asking my oldest daughter her perception of how much she's learning at home now. And her perception is that she's learning more and it's in a fraction of the time, is that she's learning more and it's in a fraction of the time, which makes me feel like, okay, school, at least at this age, is essentially daycare plus a play date with friends. It's not really optimized for learning. If she can learn as much in two hours as she does in a full day of school, what's going on over there? Right. And I think in the wealthier communities or in the private schools, it doesn't add up to a problem because a wealthy parent, they get a test score in, a standardized test. And if it's low, a reading score, that's perceived as an emergency. And tutors, sometimes very expensive tutors are brought in.

And tutors, sometimes very expensive tutors are brought in. And, you know, unless there's a problem, you know, reading and math in particular, you can remediate quickly and reading to an extent. So and wealthier parents nowadays, they you hear people who run private schools talking about this all the time. Wealthier parents care tremendously about the experience of the school day. They want their kids to be engaged every minute in a sort of delightful way. And so they're willing to have that happen. But when you look at, I mean, California's education, it is in crisis. It is. I mean, Sam, just do this. When you get off with me or if you have some time, go online and take the basic proficiency reading test that 60% of kids flunk, can't pass, that are in school at 12 this is what the Khan Academy is really stressed. When you start falling behind in math, a year goes by, two years go by, you're lost. You're just lost and you can't catch up and you don't have the private tutor.

So what we're really doing, as you say, is we're covering the day for working parents. We have a tremendous disparity because when it's the wealthy parents are going to remediate, the non-wealthy parents, they're probably in a different address by the time that test score comes in. And the test score is the farthest thing from an emergency to a low income person. And if anybody thoughtful was looking at it and said, gee, the number one thing that holds these kids back is math and reading, then we would teach a lot of math and reading. But in California, we have 180 day school year. And that doesn't mean you're going to get 180 lessons in reading because you

have assemblies and special schedules and all sorts of things that block into it. We're not required a number of hours in these essential subjects. So I think we're all getting a look at things we don't want to think about. We don't want to change. We don't want to face facts about our lower income level of education. We don't want to face facts about, gee, if my kid's really just having an experience at school, is that the best kind of experience? And you know who's having the last laugh now are the homeschoolers. Because as all the laptop jockeys are running around

looking for a password and being so upset that 90 minutes later, everything's done. Boy, the homeschoolers are on top of that. They know how to do this. I spent about 30 seconds thinking about the irony here because the homeschooling movement, at least my perception of it in the US is that it's, I don't know what the actual percentage is, but it seems like fundamentalist Christians are overrepresented in that movement. I've been hearing from them over the years for obvious reasons, but just to recognize that these people have to be the absolute experts in what everyone's facing right now. But the other interesting thing, and I mean, this is back to our decadent life before we all are in imminent threat of dying.

You know who's getting in on homeschooling? The very wealthy, because they realize that school is an interference to the thing that gets you in the Ivy League. You get in the Ivy League if you're from a wealthy family because you have such a developed talent that is recognized usually on a national or even international level, and that school is a harassing block of time. And so they hire people to get the kids through higher level curriculum for sure, but they want to be free from school so that they can develop the thing that gets you into the Ivy League. So it's just a really, I guess, it is a, once again, with the haves and have nots, this squeezing out of a middle class entirely, and there's just entirely different experience. So how much of a reset do you think we're experiencing here? How different do you think

the world will look in a year or 18 months or after the epidemiological and economic implications of all of this run their course? Again, I don't know what the timeline actually is, but it's hard to see how whatever the new normal is will seem anything like normal shorter than 12 months from now. Well, you know, I have no idea that, you know, just in America, the notion that once again, up against Donald Trump, we have the weakest Democratic candidate in my lifetime. Okay, so let's put a pin in the great Joe Biden for a moment, because there's a lot to talk about there. But actually, let's race onto that.

But I just wanted to point one thing out here, that there are at least two, if not paradoxes, ironies that we're going to be slamming up against now. The first is one that I pointed out on Twitter yesterday, as did several other people, which is that if social distancing actually works as intended, which is to say if we flatten the curve, which it seems like we're doing in many places, such that the healthcare system doesn't break, the level of contagion and morbidity and mortality is more flu-like than smallpox-like. The people who have been resisting social distancing, the people who've been crying hoax, media hoax, they will feel totally vindicated. I'm in touch

with some of these people. And they're absolute imbeciles. They're smart people, many of them, but they've managed to craft for themselves a truly unfalsifiable worldview. Only bodies piled to the sky would convince them that they were wrong about this, and maybe not even then. And then there's just this very strange element to this confirmation bias, which is the cities, the blue counties, were the first and hardest hit by this, right? So in Trumpistan, the virus is only now arriving, right? It's just that this was perfectly tailored for misinformation and conspiracy theory and confirmation bias and just a complete failure of public health split along political lines. Something like 97% of

Americans are actually under lockdown orders now. So you got to think the social distancing is happening even in the reddest of red counties to some degree. But up until very recently, there were, you know, scenes of people, you know, impact churches and, you know, how this is going to interact with our politics in the coming months. I don't know, but it's been a pretty depressing spectacle to watch on social media. Well, I'm always amazed by, well, first place, the thing to really know about America is we're a really strange place. We're a really weird place. We put on a story that we all believe that has to do with us sort of all heading in the right direction together. was, he was a freshman in college when Pearl Harbor was bombed. And he, you know, went off to the Pacific and did his thing and then finished college. And, you know, I never thought about it at all. And then Tom Brokaw came up with the notion of the greatest generation. And I was like, oh, that's my gosh, you know, my own father, you know, lived childhood in the depression. And then,

you know, going off to war. And I said, Dad, do you know you're the greatest generation? And he looked up and said, if you had known one of the enlisted men on my ship, you would never use that foul phrase again. And he just said, the level of ignorance, of racism. I'm not at all speaking to the troops of today for whom I have a great respect. And obviously, we're talking about men who were raised in the 30s and mostly Southerners on his ships. But we're a strange country. And I really realized it when there was a video of a woman, I don't know where, but she was somewhere in Trumpistan. And she was driving somewhere. And I think a cop and a cameraman at the same time, camera person,

were witnessing this moment where the policeman was saying, you know, you have to go home. This isn't safe. And she said, I'm covered in Jesus's blood. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I tweeted that as the atheists have finally found their Super Bowl commercial. Yeah. But on the other hand, can you imagine to live in that life, she's much more at peace with death than we are.

I really have that belief, which to us is, I mean, doesn't even sound like a good thing. Like you're covered in Jesus's blood. Like, is that good or bad? I wish she had said blood of the lamb or something even more cultic and creepy. But for some reason, I thought Jesus's blood was more. I don't know. But to be covered in it, I'm sure this goes back. I always say the people who are really understand their religions are the fundamentalists. Like we all like, you know, say the worst things about them. But I'm like, you know, you read the Quran, you're like, it's pretty bloodthirsty book, you know, it's like, but we all come along. And, you know,

I'm, you know, Catholic, and I just sort of we all pick and choose, we use our birth control, whatever. But then there are these people who really believe this stuff. And, you know, there are snake handlers. And, and why do, I mean, not bringing you into this, obviously, but who do we go to like St. John the Divine and then like have a nice brunch afterwards with Joan Didion or whatever? Why do we think that we are better than they are? You know, they seem to really understand it. I'll take the brunch with Joan Didion. Can I meet you for brunch after church? Yes, you may. During which I'll be praying for your soul. Your reference to birth control reminded me of one of your recent delightful tweets. This is right at the beginning of our quarantine, where we're wiping off packages with Clorox. And I think you wrote, I haven't been this nervous about getting something wrong since

I got my first diaphragm in 1983. Well, it was really, I mean, it was a joke, but it was true. I remember being a young person and you think you're doing it right. And with most things, if you're mostly doing it right, then you're mostly getting the benefit. But I remember this thing like, if I get this wrong, it's going to be this incredible disaster. Like there's no a little bit or not. It's all 100%. But mentioning that, you ask what's going to change. I think we're going to see a very positive change in sexuality because being my generation, which was after the sexual revolution, before AIDS had really spilled into the heterosexual population or was even understood,

sex was this font of tremendous pleasure and tremendous closeness to the young man whom I dated or whom I was in a relationship with, kind of serial monogamy as a dater. And it was this just intensely exquisite thing that would keep you in relationships longer and that would give you an illusion of more closeness of the true minds on something. And now I hear so many young people, especially young women, whom you would think, well, boy, they have the keys to the kingdom. There's nothing to hold them back. And they're miserable. And I think a little bit more discernment, a little bit higher stakes, a little bit more sense that, OK, let's get to know each other.

Let's find out a lot about each other. okay, let's get to know each other. Let's find out a lot about each other. Let's find out our testing on this, not just the callous STD testing. But I think this could really change this idea of ultimate randomness, especially for heterosexual youngish women. The idea that that is a pleasurable thing for the majority, it's an error in thinking. It's not accurate about women. The idea that that is a pleasurable thing for the majority, it's an error in thinking. It's not accurate about women. So I think that this may begin to change that porn-driven culture, which has been so bad for most young women. Well, we're going to talk about women in a second because we're getting into politics. I want to drop your Twitter handle here because I don't know where this is going to be paywalled, but everyone should follow you on Twitter. So what's your Twitter handle? It's at Caitlin Pacific.

So yeah, so everyone should follow Caitlin. Caitlin has figured out Twitter and it's delightful. Thank you. Okay, so the election, my God, what have we done here? Like we have a nation of 330 million people. We couldn't find one who either doesn't have dementia or doesn't seem to have dementia. It is, it is bewildering because you're going to lie when that is the case. and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org.