Making Sense with Sam Harris - #250 — Broken Conversations

Episode Date: May 21, 2021

Sam Harris speaks with Jesse Singal about a variety of controversial topics. They discuss fragmentation in the media, bad incentives in journalism, Jesse’s encounters with cancel culture, transgender activism, the case of J.K. Rowling, the capture of cultural institutions by the far Left, racism, class inequality, the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, whether Jesse should try psychedelics, 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.   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

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As always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't get access to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option at SamHarris.org to request a free account. And we grant 100% of those requests. No questions asked. Okay. No housekeeping today, apart from reminding you that I have released a new podcast series with Ricky Gervais. That can be found over at absolutelymental.com. And people really seem to like it, and it was a lot of fun to make, so enjoy. Okay. Today I'm speaking with Jesse Singel. Jesse's the former editor of New York

Magazine's The Science of Us. He has written for the New York Times, The Atlantic, Slate, the Boston Globe, the Daily Beast, and other outlets. And he has his own podcast with Katie Herzog, Blocked and Reported, which I recommend, and he has a new book, The Quick Fix, Why FAD Psychology Can't Cure Our Social Ills. We really don't discuss the book much in this podcast, electing instead to touch a wide variety of controversial issues, from racial inequality to trans activism to the conflict in the Middle East, we really make a fair amount of trouble for ourselves. Anyway, I hope you enjoy it.

Now I bring you Jesse Singel. I am here with Jesse Singel. Jesse, thanks for joining me. Hey, thanks for having me on, Sam. I will have properly introduced you, but to remind people, you've got a new book, The Quick Fix, Why Fad Psychology Can't Cure Our Social Ills. And you have a very enjoyable podcast, Blocked and Reported, which you do with Katie Herzog, and you have a Substack newsletter, which is also a great read. So I guess there are many intersecting things here I want to speak about with you. I think one thing we should cover is something that I think you and I both

typify at the moment, which is the fragmentation of media and how this relates to all of our other cultural problems. Maybe that's the lens through which we could focus this conversation. But before we jump in, perhaps you can give a potted history of how you got here. How do you think of yourself as a journalist and what has been your career prior to the properties and platforms I just mentioned? Yeah. So in my 20s, I was sort of just mostly a liberal opinion writer. And by mid to late 20s, I became more interested not just in arguing that people were wrong, but trying to understand the roots of disagreement. And John Haidt was a big influence on me on that front. Ended up getting a public policy master's in a program with a pretty heavy psychology

component for a public policy program. But yeah, I was sitting in a coffee shop on a fellowship in Berlin trying to figure out what the hell to do when I got back to the States. And I saw New York Magazine was launching a whole behavioral science vertical. So I was the first editor of what was called Science of Us. And that sort of brought me more into that stuff, just writing and editing stories about human behavior every day. And along the way, I learned that a massive amount of social psychology is probably complete bunk, which was disappointing. But the bright side is it provided good fodder for a book.

And yeah, I'm condensing a lot of stuff. But I also became slightly controversial among some people along the way, which I think probably helped me gain a platform on Substack and Patreon. So now, like an increasing number of journalists, most of my income comes just from direct subscribers, which if you told me that would happen three years ago, I would have said that probably means there was some sort of catastrophe and I had to go that way. But it's just turned out that's the better approach for a lot of people. Yeah, let's start with the fragmentation of the media. I think this individually, it's clearly the right choice. And as we get into some of the controversies here, I think, well, it'll become explicit why

it is the right choice for you. It is certainly the right choice for me. But ultimately, it's a choice that I'm still worried about. It's a choice that doesn't really scale. I mean, we just cannot devolve into a wilderness of competing substack newsletters and podcasts, right? I mean, we need institutions, we need a New York Times and other media properties that function by intellectual standards and journalistic standards that we can all rely on and defend.

And so this flight to the suburbs of media is troubling even when we're really succeeding at it. And it also has a kind of winner-take-all dynamics to it, which is worrisome. It seems to me there are many points of contact between the kinds of things that are so difficult to talk about that are forcing this fragmentation of media and some of what you discuss in your book. I mean, your book kind of rolls over social psychology in a fairly devastating way. And you take on the self-esteem industry and grit and the implicit association test, which purports to reveal unconscious bias. And there are many other exports from social psychology of late that don't withstand all that scrutiny. And some of them are directly related to some of the problems with wokeism and cancel culture that we'll talk about.

I guess as just a first step in this direction, what is it that you are most concerned about now with respect to the state of media and the career of a journalist and the bad incentives that seem to be reliably pushing us in the direction of being less and less competent to talk about socially polarizing issues? Yeah, I think there's two issues here that sort of overlap but are useful to separate out. One is just the general collapse of funding models for media and for newspapers in particular. So, you know, we're in this conversation, we have shared interests, we're probably not going to talk a lot about this, but we should keep in mind that America as a country has an interest in us knowing what's going on in the Baltimore City Council or the Nashua Courts, all these areas of life where unless there is a local newspaper that is well-funded,

they will just not be covered and there'll be no incentive for people to not be corrupt, basically. That's just gone. So the bigger story here that sometimes gets obscured, and I'm sure I've helped to obscure it because I have my own interests, is just a steamroller devastating the American media ecosystem. So that's one thing. Then there's what's going on at the elite outlets, at the New York Times or the Atlantic or the Voxosphere. And there, I think in part because when your livelihood feels more precarious

and like it's collapsing, and then you have Trump, I think all of this has combined to create a mainstream media ecosystem that, as you said, is having a harder and harder time talking seriously about complicated issues. And I think it's leading to a lot of groupthink and a lot of work that ranges, you know, some of it's just unreadable, but fundamentally harmless. It's just bad X-Men analysis or whatever. And then there's stuff that I think causes some harm because it's actively misleading on important policy issues. Yeah, well, it relates, I guess this is a direct point of contact with your book, it relates to concerns about inequality and meritocracy at this point. And much of the stuff in social psychology that hasn't held up very well

relates to this notion that inequality can be fixed in ways that would be wonderful if true, but like boosting people's self-esteem or understanding and improving grit, and whether or not that's just a synonym for conscientiousness is another matter, but whether or not that's the case, whether improving those things, if you could improve them, would really fundamentally address the inequality that is becoming a greater concern and more and more difficult to speak about insofar as it interacts with variables like race. And maybe we should get your own misadventures with cancel culture out of the way before we jump in.

You come trailing a fair amount of cancellation-related debris in your orbit. What has been your experience here? Yeah, we should say attempted cancellation, because I think some people rightly point out, like, you know, screw you. You're not canceled. You make a good living doing this, which is true. But most of it stems from a 2018 cover story I wrote for The Atlantic about trans youth and about the question of what you

should do when a 12 or 13 year old wants to go on puberty blockers, which pause puberty, or cross-sex hormones, which, you know, if you're a natal male and you go on estrogen, you'll develop some female secondary sex characteristics, and that is generally not reversible. It's a 13,000 word article. It goes to great lengths to explain why transition is important for people with gender dysphoria, because it is. The science on that isn't great because this is a difficult thing to study, but I think it's fairly solid.

But it points out that for kids, there are reasons to maybe be a little bit more cautious and to ask more questions. It's not an anti-transition piece. It's not a pro-conversion therapy piece, but it sort of launched a firestorm that's continued to this day. And it sort of occupies so much real estate in the minds of a group of people where when Donald Trump did something bad in anti-trans, or more recently, these states trying to pass these laws banning transgender healthcare for minors, which I'm very much against. Everything just traces back to my article. My article is sort of the cause of all transphobia in the States. And I just think that's a result of people spending too much time online.

But it's been a weird experience because if you told me 15 years ago, I'd be added to a glad their enemy list of supposedly transphobic thinkers, that stuff like that would happen to me, I would not have believed you. It's been strange, but at the end of the day, I stand by the article and no one has pointed out any factual flaws in it. In the interest of not creating more hassle for you, it was grammatically ambiguous as to whether or not you were saying you were against the laws against transgender health care or you were against transgender health hormones for minors. I'm very much against those laws. I think there are serious gaps in the research that I'd be happy to talk about, but saying there's gaps in the research is not the same as saying I trust the Tennessee legislature to weigh these issues in a way that would take the right out of parents' hands or doctors' hands to weigh that issue in a different way. I think they're terrible laws, and I've tried to be outspoken in my opposition to them.

think they're terrible laws, and I've tried to be outspoken in my opposition to them. So was there anything truly controversial or that you understand to be why it would be controversial that you put forward in that piece? Or is this really a case where there's just a fairly concerted effort to demolish you with bad faith, misconstruals of what you actually said. A lot of it was bad faith. In some case, just sort of making up things about the content of the piece. The genuinely, to me, the fair points are, there's two of them. One is, why focus on detransition? People have argued, I basically, I talked to some people who transitioned, regretted it, and then said that they felt they were sort of led too quickly down the road of taking hormones or getting surgery by what they saw as incompetent therapists and healthcare providers. You could

make a good faith case, like, you know, why focus on that? People often say detransition is rare. We don't know that it's rare in an American context because in the American context, there's basically no binding guidelines for things like mental health assessment and how long, you know, before you get surgery, stuff like that. So that's fair. The other fair critique is I presented sympathetically the idea that some teenagers who have other mental health care problems going on might, you know, become convinced through peer influence that really their issues come down to the fact that they're trans and they haven't transitioned yet.

I didn't sort of say as myself, I think this is happening, but I presented parents and cases of kids where it does appear to have happened. So the thesis there is that there's a social contagion component to this, the trans phenomenon, which if true, would be something that many people would be concerned about. Yeah. And so one thing no one disagrees about is that the number of kids being referred to youth gender centers around the world has skyrocketed. And the question is whether that's just people being the reduction of stigma. More people feel like they can go to their parents and say, I think I'm trans. Can we go to a gender

clinic? Surely that is part of it. The question is whether in some cases it's kids who are, you know, a little bit going through a phase or slightly confused. And I, having sat and talked to kids who that has happened to, I find it impossible to believe that the number of cases of that is zero or close to zero. Now, does that, how much of the increase does that account for? We have no idea. Anyone who claims to know how much of the account the increase is X versus Y, I think is lying or is overconfident. We don't know. But I just, there are very compelling anecdotal accounts of kids doing what kids honest, compassionate approach to getting to something

like ground truth here. It is a picture of kind of scorched earth activism on the one side and a range of well-intentioned and block-headed approaches to resisting the activism on the other side, right? I would certainly put you in the well-intentioned camp, but then you've got everything that's happening in Trumpistan going on over your shoulder from the point of view of the left, and it's just very difficult to sort out. But it culminates in just culturally bizarre products, like, I don't know if you recently saw this on Twitter, but Sarah Silverman, the comic who I absolutely love, who's brilliant in so many ways, but she on this topic, she's

clearly drunk the woke Kool-Aid here, and she just attacked Caitlyn Jenner, of all people, as a transphobe. Did you see this? I did, yeah. I mean, if you're calling Caitlyn Jenner transphobic, at some point you need to check your math along the way and wonder what cul-de-sac you have argued yourself into. Well, but I mean, I could do you one better than that, because something like that, you can understand why, because she's just trying to stay... She's been criticized in the past for for offensive humor but like cnn in a news article not an opinion article a news article recently said there's quote no consensus method for assigning sex at birth with a newborn like no does it does

it help trans people to say that does anyone think that's true or that it helps anybody to think? Does anyone? That sex is a total mystery at birth. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. And this is the kind of thing where people often jump to the Soviet comparison or the cultural revolution comparison. I obviously don't think we're there. I do think it's completely bizarre that we're at a place where CNN in a news article would try to tell its readers, we just don't know what sex babies are. Who knows? Yeah. Well, so this is an issue that I basically have not touched. I mean, this is what we've just said. Apologies in advance, Sam. Now is as much as I've ever said about it.

I guess I should probably put out a few fires before they start. But I just think that there's no question gender dysphoria is a real phenomenon that isn't merely a product of cultural contagion or propaganda, right? I mean, you know, I know someone who at the age of four, know, it was just obviously identifying as the opposite gender and alleging any brainwashing from the parents or the culture just doesn't make any sense when you get close to this case. And clearly there needs to be some path for her to live as happy a life as possible. And, you know, whether that requires transitioning through hormones and surgery at some point, you know, that's for the parents and the child to figure out. And only someone who's really just not sensitive to the difference between happiness

and suffering here could doubt that we would want some process to make that as orderly and as sensible and as compassionate as possible. I mean, and you wanted to terminate whatever someone winds up doing in this space. You want a political environment where there's just no question that there's political equality, whatever one's self-identified gender. But around cases like that, there's an activist culture that is just not at all committed to having a sane conversation about this. And the trade-offs between women's interests and trans interests and the interests of the gay community and trans interests now are increasingly zero-sum in ways that are pretty weird. And, you know, the J.K. Rowling affair was a flashpoint around this. I think the argument here is that we want

to be able to talk about this, but it does seem like the controversy here is completely out of proportion to the numbers of people who are actually implicated in this issue. I mean, I don't know what the, even with an explosion in gender identity uncertainty in the culture for, you know, whatever its origin, whether it's just, you know, exposing the level that was always there, or there's some component of social contagion, it's still a, it has to be a sub 1% of the population phenomenon. And yet it has a presence online in particular that, I mean, you would think it's as big as wealth inequality or racial inequality in our society. Do you regret touching this topic at all? I do sometimes. It's just, it's sort of, when this gets its craziest,

it gets very crazy. And, you know, I'm not trying to report from Syria. I don't feel my life is at risk. But, you know, there's a subset of people who really try to inflict as much reputational damage as possible. And it's not fun to go through. That said, I'm confident in my work, and I'm confident in the Atlantic's editing and fact-checking. And I would still point people to this article as a good way to understand this issue. And it includes the voices of happily transitioned young people. So I can't really say I regret it. Also, on net, I've benefited from the controversy because controversy attracts eyeballs. And then people read the article itself and are baffled as to what's controversial about it. And the question of why the issue is so big, I do think it's complicated.

There's a subset of people who, from a very young age, are deeply dysphoric. And when I first started learning about this issue, the idea of forcing people to live as men or as males when this is just going to bring them tremendous misery and when in 99% of cases, this won't hurt anyone else for them to transition. I find there is a genuine level of cruelty there or a level of maybe like rigidity of thinking where at a certain point, it really is, there should be a little bit of who cares to this discussion. Who cares if people transition if they're not hurting others? And then there's that 1% or 5% or 10% of the issue when you're talking about kids and diagnostic procedures, or when you're talking about sports, or sort of non-everyday but still important issues like prison, stuff like that,

where we need to be able to have a sane conversation, or there's just going to be endless culture warring and backlash. But there's absolutely a subset of people who I do not think will be able to live authentic, happy lives unless they're allowed to transition. The percentages are tricky because a lot of social science institutions and media outlets have sort of taken cues from activists who are trying to lump together very different cases. So basically, the definition of someone who's transgender at this point is someone who identifies as transgender. And that ranges from people who don't have any dysphoria, who will never need medical health care, to people who are deeply dysphoric. So that sub 1% figure, I think, is actually not true. I mean, some polling shows much higher numbers, especially among young people,

but that's because no one's ever bothered to really define gender as it's used today in a coherent way. Gender seems to mean a million different things. So when we talk about a gender revolution, which is language you often hear, sometimes that really is just, you know, 14-year-olds saying, I painted my nails, so I'm non-binary, which is fine and doesn't hurt anyone, but that's not the same as having dysphoria and needing medical help. What would you put the percentage at? Well, I mean, the UCLA's Williams Institute, I think, puts it at around 1%, but I do think, especially in the rise of people, kids especially, identifying as non-binary, any chunk of the younger population, it's probably significantly higher than that. And it doesn't

matter. This is not a threat to anyone. The only cases I'm concerned about are when medical interventions are on the table. Right. Yeah, it's difficult and no one should envy any one parent or child going through it. But the style of conversation on this issue and on so many others at the moment is so poisonous and so explicitly aimed at defenestrating people. And the people who survive the mobbing are either very lucky or they've been previously insulated from the consequences of this. I mean, someone like J.K. Rowling is probably the best example because in her case, I think it's pretty obvious that had she not been J.K. Rowling, she would have been canceled. I mean, her book would have been...

Too much money is on the line. Yeah. I mean, she is literally a billion-dollar colossus in the publishing industry, Too much money is on the line. Hollywood actors whose careers were entirely defined by her intellectual property come out and disavow her. That's a big deal, especially given how anodyne the things were that she said on this issue. Yeah. I mean, you know, it gets complicated because they're expressing their opinions. They have every right to. In the Rowling case, she was mostly responding to the idea of reforming the Gender Recognition Act in the UK so that self-ID is basically the law of the land, meaning you can transition your sex

without much of a process. You just sort of announce bureaucratically, you sign something and you say, I'm now a man, I'm now a woman. It's just been weird watching the conversation over that unfold. I generally don't have a strong opinion on it. I haven't looked deeply enough into it. But you would think that we should at least be able to talk about a proposed change to the law. about it is treated as though you want trans people to die. And I'm not really exaggerating there. And that's just not, I don't know, watching mainstream media outlets go along with that and pretend that there couldn't possibly be any trade-offs here, to the point where The Guardian wrote an unsigned editorial simply stating there might be some trade-offs here. And The U.S.

Guardian, several staffers there, wrote a scathing rebuttal about how transphobic their colleagues across the pond were. It's just, you need to have an actual conversation about a policy issue. And that means that those of us participating in it, we run the risk. Maybe 20 years from now, we'll be history's mobsters. But to not have that discussion at all, to skip right ahead to this is the right policy and anyone who questions it should be destroyed, just isn't a sane way to do business. I wasn't even thinking of that aspect of the conversation. When I saw things kick off against Rowling, it was just on her obvious concern about the degradation of the English language.

She was pushing back against some, I forget who it was, but someone was not using the word woman in the context of talking about people who menstruate, right? They didn't want to use woman because that would be denigrating to all of the trans women who don't menstruate. So they referred to menstruators or people who menstruate, and J.K. Rowling got on Twitter saying in a somewhat snide way, well, surely there's a word for someone who menstruates, and then reap the whirlwind on the basis of that. Yeah. I think there's an extent to which, not just among trans activists, but activists in general, there's been this weird Tumblrization

or Twitterization of everything where the specific fights we have aren't always the most productive ones if your goal is to convince people who aren't yet convinced. I mean, imagine the difference if you're new to trans activism between hearing an interview with someone who is just going to be miserable unless they have access to transition services. And there are a lot of people like that versus your first encounter with it being, you can't say pregnant women anymore. They're pregnant people or they're menstruators. There seems to be here and elsewhere, little people aren't really attending to the idea that maybe they should try to couch the political claims in language the as yet unconverted would be sympathetic to. So now how do you pick your battles at this point?

Because you don't shy away from controversy, even though you are battle-scarred on this topic. Are there things that you decline to touch now because of this experience, or do you just keep forging ahead toward any culture war issue that interests you? I mean, so one of the benefits of having a sub stack is when I do write about these issues, it's often behind a paywall. And there's downsides to that because, you know, if you'd like to

contribute to the public discourse, but especially given that my views aren't that radical, I mean, you can avoid the Twitter shitstorm, which is nice. I do think people who write about cultural issues, there is this risk that you get pulled into this black hole where your entire intellectual identity becomes centered on fighting the SJWs or whatever, or fighting the worst college professors. And I'm worried about that because there is some incentive to do that. Like if I wanted to maximize my sub-stack revenue, I would just do culture warshit all the time. But there are more important things in the world.

So I haven't figured out how to strike the right balance, but I'm trying to. Yeah, that is a real liability of touching these topics. It's this phenomenon that I've discussed at a few points, which goes by the name, at least in my brain, of audience capture, where if you train your audience or you acquire an audience that wants to hear from you on this hottest of topics, yeah, you can kind of self-incentivize to keep doing it. And I've certainly done my best to avoid that. Really not because, I mean, the main reason for me is

just that it's too boring, right? I mean, it's just deadly. There's not that much to think about here once you have a modicum of intellectual honesty and goodwill in hand, it's just not, this is not, it's not rocket science to see what's wrong with essentially lying and seizing upon confirmation bias as though it were some kind of virtue, and then trying to destroy people who won't play that game. I mean, so criticizing that whole tangle of bad form in argumentation again and again and again, it just gets deadly boring. And there are people who do it, and they become single-issue people to a point where then they allow themselves to make alliances that are obviously ethically or intellectually questionable or both, right? I don't know that we need to name names

here, but there are people who I think I agree with 95% on the topic of what's wrong with wokeism or cancel culture or identity politics. But the 5% of daylight between us opens on to the full horror show of Trumpistan and QAnon and just absolute madness that these people refuse to criticize because those cultural forces are pointing in the same direction against the wokeness on the left. And so, you know, it's just this principle, you know, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, which really is just a bad heuristic. That was like a big moment for me as like a warning sign of what can happen if you're not intellectually careful and don't have some humility. Watching all these sort of anti-woke people either announce they were voting for Trump

or claiming there wasn't really a big and meaningful difference between Trump and Biden to claim to speak for liberalism, classical or otherwise, and then not be outraged by Trump, it all becomes tribalism. And in many cases, they take on the characteristics of their enemies. You'll see them talk about wokeism in the same way the least thoughtful thinkers on the left talk about white supremacy as this mystical force that just infects everything and can't really be explained in normal terrestrial language. And you end up sounding like a cult member at the end of the day, not someone capable of intellectual engagement and weighing trade-offs. I just, yeah, I can't stand that at all. I also, there's a really good

book by Todd Gitlin called The Twilight of Common Dreams. He wrote it in 1995 as a lefty attempt to make sense of the culture wars. And he's outraged by the 1995 equivalent of wokeness. He's also outraged at conservative attempts to sort of piggyback off it in bad faith. And it's such a depressing book to read because there are almost, other than social media, there are no differences between the fights that were going on then and the fights that are going on. It's just, it's all the same shit with slightly different language. And it's just like, how many decades of your life do you want to spend doing the culture war thing when there's not, I'm not sure it's going to be any different 30 years from now.

But something has changed. I mean, this may be a difference of view between us in terms of how dire the current moment is. Because, I mean, in 1995, there hadn't been, unless I just slept through it or I was too young to care or something, it does not seem that there had been the same kind of institutional capture by what certainly to my eye seems like a public hysteria. And the difference, I mean, the reason why it makes sense to worry more about the far left, and I guess we just can keep calling it wokeness to capture the whole phenomenon, the reason why it makes sense to be more worried about wokeness than by white supremacy, say, is because genuine white supremacy is a true fringe phenomenon on the right. The people who show up with tiki torches are obviously retrograde assholes, and they don't,

I mean, apart from the fact that Trump gave them some comfort with his ambiguities, we're not talking about real cultural power for the fringe on the right, whereas the fringe on the left really does seem to have captured academia and media and tech and Hollywood, not every inch of it, perhaps. And obviously, there's a ton of preference falsification. I mean, there are many, many people who are just keeping mum or paying lip service to an ideology that they don't actually share, and they're waiting for everyone to wake up so that it'll be safe to be honest again. But it still has been captured to an amazing degree. So in terms of cultural influence and the stifling of honest conversation that's happening in mainstream, really in every mainstream quadrant of culture, that is a leftist phenomenon. So I agree that that's a difference between then and now.

I guess part of me, I think the preference falsification thing is huge, just based on the emails I get from professors and journalists who think their own department or newsroom has gone crazy. If there is capture, I'm not sure how sustainable it is because so many people are quietly freaking out about what the Trump years have done to their institutions. And there seems to be a steady stream of stories that leak and that outrage every... It's just, it's a very, whatever it is. And I agree, wokeness is, I don't know if that's the best word, but you could fight all day over what to call it. It is not a popular ideology. It really isn't. I mean, whatever polling you look at, but the people who believe in it, they're people from backgrounds like mine. They're well-educated, they're in media. I'm not sure you can sort of foist it on people for that long without there being backlash. And I think that does partly explain the Substack

thing and the success of our podcast and others. So I guess what I don't want is total balkanization where these outlets keep going down that road. And to get the other view but still left of center view your only choice is is substack or certain podcasts yeah that i think is totally unsustainable but what to do about it is the question i mean i was recently at a um a meeting of very connected people in tech and media and i say i won name anyone, but I mean, these are people who are running or were running some of the biggest companies. These are people with massive influence. And these were people who are on the same page with everything we've said here. But when told that they really should just present a united front here

and not tolerate these mutinies of their woke employees. So the example I gave in this meeting was, you know, what happened to Nicholas Christakis at Yale. So my premise was, at some point, and I think we're at that point, there is no substitute for institutional courage, right? I mean, you can have the courage of individuals, but at a certain point, the institutions themselves have to say, okay, no more. This party of masochism and delusion is over. So when you look at what happened at Yale, when you watch that video of Nicholas

summoning more patients than anyone, you know, short of, you know, a Christian saint who has been crucified with a happy smile on his face has managed to muster, and you see the behavior of those students that was borderline physically threatening at points and totally intolerable from an academic point of view. It's just, it's patently obvious to me what should have happened there. Some of those kids should have been expelled from Yale. It was completely beyond the pale what they were up to there. And what actually happened is they got awards for activism. They were literally given awards, right? Some of them, I don't know how many got awards, but some of the principal people in that video got singled out for their heroic activism, which was antithetical to anything a sane

university needs to be committed to in terms of a dispassionate search for truth. So I floated that example to these captains of industry and I said, at what point do your companies just hold the line and say, if you feel that way, go work somewhere else? And everyone in the room agreed that that was not going to happen, that there was no way that was going to happen. Just because of the backlash, you mean? Yeah, that it's gone too far, it's too scary, there's too much money to lose. It was a complete non...

It went over like a lead balloon. It was a complete non-starter. And I kept pushing it. I said, listen, the people in this room literally know everybody. You could have a star chamber meeting where everyone agreed to be on the same page here so that the mutineers from Google couldn't just jump over to Amazon or Facebook or Apple. You could literally get everyone to agree to just wake up simultaneously. And they said, there's no way it's going to happen. It's over. It was an incredibly

bleak picture coming from people who either are at the top or were at the top of some of the biggest businesses in tech and media. Right. And which suggested to me that this is, you know, the situation is worse than I thought, not better. I mean, I wouldn't want, I saw the video, it was terrible, but I wouldn't want the kids expelled. Why can't it be a middle way where you don't expel them, but you just explain, at a certain point, you need to explain like, you know, you guys don't make the rule. Something similar happened at Simon & Schuster where, you know, Mike Pence's book, employees wanted to cancel it and

the higher ups were like, no, we're not canceling it. Obviously, that's another case where a lot of money was involved. So it wasn't like doing it out of the good of their liberal hearts. But I mean, that's a depressing story. I just think it doesn't seem like the places that have just said, sorry, we disagree with you on this, have suffered as a result. I mean, there's another dumb blow up involving Trader Joe, where some blogger or Twitter or tried to say their brand names were offensive and Twitter just, Trader Joe's just said no. Why can't more people just say no? That's the one example. I mean, that and Basecamp are the examples of companies standing. I don't

think Trader Joe's suffered any. I don't actually know, but I haven't heard that they suffered much of anything as a consequence. But Basecamp lost, you know, whatever, 30% of its employees. And I think the picture of something like that happening at Facebook or Apple or anywhere else is too terrifying. But that only presumes that they would have somewhere they could go. I just think that at a certain point, institutions have to present a united frontier. I mean, the problem is that if you flipped it, if you flip the, to take the variable of race here, it is reverse racism. And it's creating a completely hostile work environment.

You mean like the Yale thing? No, the Yale thing was deranged around this issue of Halloween costumes. But I mean, the thing that is causing so much chaos in most of these instances in these corporations, obviously the trans issue comes up again and again, but it's much more common that the issue is born of concerns about racial inequality, common that the issue is born of concerns about racial inequality, which obviously are understandable and need to be addressed in some way throughout our society. But there's just a continuous allegation of racism where the allegation is not only unwarranted, it's obviously unwarranted, right? Like all the participants actually know that it's unwarranted. We's obviously unwarranted, right? Like, all the participants actually know that

it's unwarranted. We take the case of, I mean, there are so many cases here, but the one that comes to mind here is what happened at Netflix with the head of communications, Jonathan Friedland, who got fired, you know, for using the n-word in a context that was not a use of the N-word as a slur. It was the use of the N-word to tell people just, you know, what a concern it was that they get their messaging correct. I mean, for those who don't remember this episode, briefly what happened is Tom Segura, the comic, released a comedy special on Netflix where he used the word retard over and over again, and they got a ton of blowback. And so Jonathan Friedland, who was head of communications in a closed-door meeting at the company, said, listen, this is a huge deal. It turns out

that using this word is like using the n-word for the black community. But he didn't say n-word, he used the word. And for that use of the magic syllables, in a context where he's expressing his own, you know, very liberal opinion that they have to be even more scrupulous about the use of the word retard, he wound up getting fired. But it was in a context where literally no one thought that he was actually a racist, right? This was not a case where there was a, that his use of the word suggested to so many people that he really is a closeted racist. No, he had simply uttered the word Voldemort and it was, the taboo is so deep that there was no digging out. So there's a couple different things. There was another case

similar at the New York Times involving Donald McNeil Jr. that I found similarly infuriating. And you had 150 Times staffers signing a letter demanding he be reinvestigated. I do think there's maybe a difference between cases like that where basically what people are trying to do there is establish what would be a good, interesting, and good relationship. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast,

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