Making Sense with Sam Harris - #251 — Corporate Cowardice

Episode Date: May 26, 2021

Sam Harris speaks with Antonio García-Martínez about his recent firing at Apple. They discuss his experience in tech, his book "Chaos Monkeys," the controversy at Apple, cancel culture, 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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Okay, well, like many of you, I'm feeling the tractor beam of normal life pull me back into the world. It's quite a feeling to have civilization reboot on the wings of a successful vaccine campaign. Pretty amazing. One thing the United States appears to have gotten right is the last-minute vaccination of a society that couldn't even agree we had a pandemic. What an incredible situation we've been in. what an incredible situation we've been in I can imagine many of you share my sense that whatever was good in the great reset of the last year should be maintained

a sense of greater clarity with respect to one's priorities but it's worth observing that it will be hard to maintain without some ongoing attention. Anyway, I wish you all the best of luck as things return to normal here, and we find ourselves eating inside restaurants once again. No Real Housekeeping, just a reminder by the new podcast with ricky gervais that is available over at absolutely mental.com there are 11 episodes on various topics three of which you

heard on this podcast someone's back the titles are why do we dream? What makes something funny? Will we be replaced by robots? Would you rather? What's the point? Where does morality come from? What makes us who we are? Why do we fear death? How can stories make us cry? What's so great about life? And how will civilization end? These are episodes organized around questions that Ricky poses to me, and I endeavor to answer them, but then chaos ordinarily ensues. Anyway, it was a lot of fun to make. People really seemed to love it, so it is there if you want to hear it at absolutelymental.com. Today I'm speaking with Antonio Garcia Martinez. Antonio worked at Facebook and other companies in tech,

and was recently hired by Apple, then quickly fired over the discovery that he had written a best-selling book, which Apple already knew about, and there were some lines in there that 2,000 of his fellow employees at Apple thought made them actually unsafe to work in his company. This is yet another cancellation coming from the identitarian moral panic that has engulfed the left side of our political spectrum. that has engulfed the left side of our political spectrum.

And I wanted to talk to Antonio because this was really just such a clear-cut case of us having reached a precipice that we really must pull back from. This was a case where he had written a book which, as you'll hear, was a case where he had written a book which, as you'll hear, was widely vetted by liberal journalists and widely admired, and was published in 2016, which, though it is only five years ago in calendar time, might as well have been in the Middle Ages with respect to current attitudes. Anyway, I know some of you are still struggling to convince yourselves that this is even a problem. I will admit that it's possible to be too online and to magnify this problem,

and many of the people who are focused on it I have criticized for becoming too myopic. But I do think we've reached a point where there's a level of activism and capitulation to the mob that we just can't sustain and certainly shouldn't want to sustain. Politics has invaded everything, right? It's just crazy that we have to think about politics this much. This has become absolutely stifling to our intellectual lives. And if you were privy to some of the closed-door conversations I've had about this,

you would be aghast at how paralyzed even the most powerful people in our society are at the moment. Politically speaking, this will be the ruination of the Democratic Party, which you might think deserves to be ruined, but what does it leave us? The Republican Party? And the pendulum will swing back and perhaps not land in the center. We don't want an overcorrection to this either. Anyway, I think this has all been taking us to a very ugly place, and it's time for all of us to find something like a true north where

real ethical coherence can underpin our politics, and politics can recede to the edges of life and culture where it belongs. Anyway, I feel like I have to pick my moments on this topic, but the instantaneous capitulation of the richest company on earth, Apple, just needed to be talked about. And now I bring you Antonio Garcia Martinez. And now I bring you Antonio Garcia-Martinez. I am here with Antonio Garcia-Martinez. Antonio, thanks for joining me.

Hey, Sam. Thank you for having me on. So this is an interesting topical moment. It's interesting for me. I'm sure painful and chaotic for you. But before we jump into the matter at hand, maybe you can summarize your background. What is your potted intellectual and tech biography? Yeah, it's slightly strange. So I guess it all started when I read Michael Lewis's Liar's Poker when I was working on a PhD in physics at Berkeley. And it just convinced me that I had, believe it or not, that I had to go work on Wall Street.

And so I dropped out and got a job at Goldman Sachs as a credit derivatives pricing quant, basically on the trading floor, right when the credit bubble was going to explode. And I saw that whole fire sort of play out. What year was that? I left Berkeley in 2005 and left Goldman in 2008. Yeah. Okay. So you were there when the wheels fully came off. Oh, yeah. As a wet behind the ears, former Berkeley grad student, I had a front row seat on the incineration of the American financial system, which formed a chapter in my later book, which we're going to get to. But anyhow, the financial world was blowing up. One good intuition I had in

my life was that this whole finance thing was kind of going to, you know, be kind of over for a number of years, and that tech would be sort of an oasis from the coming catastrophe, which it sort of was. And so I moved back west, actually, to the Bay Area, where I'd been a grad student and worked at a big tech startup. That startup was run by a sociopath, didn't actually do very well, but I did meet co-founders. And I got into what's called Y Combinator, which as many of your listeners probably know, it was the original sort of tech incubator accelerator that takes founders who don't know what they're doing and hopefully takes them to a point where they know slightly more about what they're doing. And I started a company, ran for about a year, sold it to Twitter,

and through a bunch of drama, I ended up as an early member of Facebook's ads team, specifically working on data and targeting and privacy around 2011. How big was Facebook at that point? Well, the company as a whole, I think I was like employee 2000. But given that the ads team started relatively late, or that the entire ads product started rather late in Facebook's life, the entire ads team at the time in terms of engineers was maybe 25 or 30 at most with five or six what are called product managers, i.e. sort of, you know, the product leader

who kind of defines what gets built. And I was the one for targeting. So it was super early days. There had never been a targeting roadmap of any sort at Apple. That was my first mandate when I got there. So it was very, and you know, the cool thing about it and why I thought it sort of merited a book, which we're going to get to in a second, you know, was watching Facebook go from that sort of very embryonic, you know, almost slightly frat boyish culture to, you know, a proper public company. I was, I was there overlapping that, that, that

period, the company went public when I was there, it forms kind of the, the crowning part of my memoir. So that, that was the sort of interesting part to it. And so when I public when I was there. It forms kind of the crowning part of my memoir. So that was the sort of interesting part to it. And so when I left Facebook for a bunch of reasons, which, I mean, we could talk about or not. And then, you know, I held a few other roles. I was an advisor at Twitter. I was a VP of product at an advertising company. You know, it's sort of, well, and then my mother died was a whole nother story. But it sort of struck me that, you know, not that my story was actually that unique, but it was emblematic of a certain time and period in Silicon Valley and that it was worth sort of recording in a book. And that's what I did. I basically sold everything, moved to Europe, because I assume I'd be canceled for writing

the Telememory. It turns out, I guess I was canceled, but for slightly different reasons, and wrote a very unvarnished view of my history inside Silicon Valley called Chaos Monkeys, which unfortunately is still in the news, which is why this conversation is happening. Yeah, so I will confess, I have not finished your book, but we just grabbed this podcast in terms of my workflow pretty much on the fly. I think I'm about halfway through, but certainly enough to get a sense of your point of view there and what kind of read it is. And we'll get to that because the reception that the book got when it came out was, I'm sure there were people who wrote some

hit pieces, but there are an incredible number of effusive responses to the book as an insider tell-all of Silicon Valley. And it's very well written. It's very entertaining. It's easy to see, however, how someone might not like you on the basis of reading it. I mean, it's like the persona you adopt is extremely catty and contemptuous. I mean, you're basically contemptuous of everyone, including yourself, at least for the first half of the book. I don't know if there's some downpour of gratitude and generosity that I'm going to encounter at the end. But up until the midpoint, everyone, I think with the exception of Paul Graham at Y Combinator,

gets fairly crucified by you. But I think we're getting ahead of ourselves here. So you've written this book, which is now poised to detonate like a time bomb in your life. What happens next? I hear Apple hired you for a job recently. Yeah, indeed they did. Well, I would pause maybe, and I think the launching of the book is maybe worth commenting on for a moment. As you said, it was widely reviewed. I mean, I don't like tooting my own horn, but whether Apple knew or not is one of these questions. So I need to cite the fact that it was like a month on the bestseller list of the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times. It was reviewed by everybody.

It made a big splash. I announced it on like CBS America this morning, whatever it's called, that show with Gayle King. You know, it made a splash when it came out by any objective standard. And if you go to like the Amazon page for it, you'll see this wall of positive blurbs from every major, you know, elite reviewer, media organization in the country, you know, commenting on it and all the rest of it. So, I mean, this book was about as secret as Christmas Day, really. And I would just point out that this is relevant because you, some people

will anticipate where we're going here. You have been fired by Apple over the discovery of this unhidden book for reasons that have everything to do with the identitarian moral panic that's occurring on the left here. But the thing to point out, it's not gratuitous to cite all these great reviews because they're coming from the highest echelons of liberal media a mere, what is it, four years ago, five years ago? When did this book come out? Yep, 2016. Yeah. So maybe it was an NPR best book of the year. You have multiple positive citations from the New York Times. Andrew Ross Sorkin is one of them. It looks like you had independent, separate reviews in the weekly paper and in the book review.

I mean, to call this effusive is to understate it from a publishing point of view. And these are liberal voices who, if anyone was going to discover that you were a right-wing monster, it would have been discovered here. We've got Leonard Lopate loving the book. We have, you book. You did an interview with Kara Swisher at the time, and while she pushed you on topics related to sexism and misogyny, she completely got the context in which this was appearing. And as we'll get to, the context is everything. So it's deeply ironic that every liberal voice in sight seems to have not noticed the problem that, and again, I'm getting ahead of the story here, but that 2,000 employees at Apple, based on their clairvoyance, one must imagine without having opened your book,

read into the depths of your soul and realized that you needed to be canceled. Yeah. And, you know, it's funny, a female reader actually DM me yesterday, I won't name who it is, but I screenshotted her, her DM said, you know, I really think 99% of your detractors have never even read the book. Because, you know, again, 99% of the book has nothing to do with, you know, I really think 99% of your detractors have never even read the book. Because, you know, again, 99% of the book has nothing to do with, you know, dating in San Francisco, any of that stuff. It really has to do about technology, entrepreneurship, and all the rest of it. And speaking of being right wing, Sam, you know, it's funny, because I went back and reread some of my passages. By the way, authors, I at least don't go back and reread Chaos Monkeys

on a regular basis. I had to remind myself of a lot of the tone and stuff because you just leave a book behind and get on with life. I was rereading the chapters and I realized I come off like this radical Bernie bro because my criticisms of the sort of pageant of capitalism involved. For example, the IPO, which was a major event at Facebook. I was right there in the courtyard right in front of Zuck when he pushed the buzzer, you know, all that stuff, you know, front row seat on the whole thing. And, you know, I kind of objected to it.

I saw the cult-like elements of it. I saw how at their extremes, hyper-capitalism and communism sort of meet. My parents are Cuban exiles. They fled the communist revolution. I've been back to Cuba, actually, reporting for Wired on the underground internet. So, you know, it's, but it's, and obviously there's differences there. I'm not saying, obviously, Facebook equals communist Cuba, but there's elements of the culture that are very similar in sort of disturbing ways.

And so I actually do get into that a lot. But again, that's wholly and completely uncommented on. Most of the context, or sorry, most of the quote is about one sentence quoted out of context, in which in a very, you know, ham-fisted and awkward way, I make this sort of paean to the then mother of my child. And, you know, I don't think I need to repeat it, but, you know, there was a certain passage there that everyone's talking about. But again, you know, the other 512 pages of the book are not about that. And so if there's one thing in particular that peeves me, it's kind of that completely, you know, biased parsing of the book. Okay, so let's start at the moment where you get recruited by Apple,

and what happens next? Right. So, you know, I was working at a large venture-backed startup before, and I was fairly comfortable there. I had invested a lot of time and sweat there. Well, let me just maybe fill in the gaps, because might be wondering, what's the deal here? How do you go from a writer back to tech? I think it's relevant to the story. So after the book came out in 2016, one of the things I didn't realize as an author, I'm sure, Sam, you know this now way more than I do. The author is part of the product that's sold with the book, right? And I didn't quite understand that. I thought I could sort of sell this book, crazy gonzo journalist thing, and then kind of go on with life or whatever. I ended up staying in writing. I became a columnist at Wired. I wrote

book reviews for the Washington Post. You know, I became your standard ambiguous media figure who spends too much time on Twitter and writes here and there and tries to make a spectacle of him or herself. And it drove me basically crazy. I literally went into a deep depression. And we don't have to turn this into a sob story, but it just became untenable. Right around 2019, I understood that I can't keep on doing this. And so I came back to tech, which to me, I didn't know. Again, there's a sort of code of silence that exists inside tech, like you're not supposed to. Everything's always up and to the right. Everything is positive. And no one ever talks about the reality of it, which is often a little bit darker than that. And I had. And so I thought I was canceled from the employment perspective about that alone. But it turns out

I managed to wangle a job at a very respected, successful startup and spent a year and a half there. I'm like, OK, I'm back in business.. I'm a tech guy again. I've left the writing world behind. It's a shame, but whatever. So then Apple, through a former colleague who worked there, reached out and said, look, we've got X, Y, and Z going on. We think you'd be a real fit here. Let's start talking. And it took a couple months, but basically they persuaded me to come in, interview. I spoke to a bunch of their team. It's how it works in tech. You do a loop in which you sit there and talk to a half dozen people all day, and they made an offer. And people often ask me, and I'm guessing this is, I might be preempting your next question, Sam, which is like, well,

did Apple know about the book or what? And they absolutely did. I mean, when, when you apply to get back into the tech fold, right? Like this writer, this writerly period is almost like a gap in the resume. You have to explain, right? At least that's how I felt about it. And so I put it on my CV. It's on my LinkedIn. Practically every interviewer I brought up. So like, Hey, I know it's kind of weird, but there was this like three-year gap where I spent too much time on Twitter and wrote, and that's it, but I'm back in business. I'm a tech guy now. That's what it is. And so, of course, they knew about it. And then in addition, you know, you provide professional references when you apply to tech companies and, you know, Apple actually checked them and did their due diligence and spoke

to all of them. And I spoke to those references. And indeed, they asked specifically about the book and, you know, is Antonio actually this person? Can we trust him to like, not divulge internal secrets? What is he actually like as a person? And the answers were all, well, look, the book is one thing. The person is another. You're fine. We support him. We get behind him. I mean, some of my references were people at Facebook that I'd actually written the book about. And so All Systems Go was hired. And then, of course, what happened happened three weeks later. So you moved, right? You were in Washington? Yeah. So one of the, among the various imprudent things I did in 2016, in addition to publishing this book, I wrote the book in a part of the world called

the San Juan Islands, which I didn't know about at all. And probably most Americans don't know about. It's about 130 islands northwest of Seattle, kind of practically in Canada. That's part of the US. Gorgeous, gorgeous, beautiful place. And I randomly, quote unquote, discovered them. And when I got the book deal in 2015, they were like, oh, we want it by next summer, which is lightning speed by book standards. And they're like, so can you get us a manuscript by Christmas? And I'm like, oh my God. Okay. I've basically got to go to a cabin in the woods and live like a hermit and just pump out prose, and that's it. And that's what I did. I rented a house on this island called Orcas Island on the northern shore of it. I, you know,

drank a lot of IPA and wrote and fumed a lot, which I think maybe created part of the tone in the book that is still now an issue. And it came out and I kind of fell in love with the place. So then when the first advance check sort of hit, you know, which was nothing, nothing enormous, by the way, I bought a few acres of bare woodland up there and for the next two or three years became what you call a homesteader, taming the wild, putting in a well, putting in a solar panel system, building structures. Initially, I showed up in September of 2016, three months after nonstop book publicity with a backpack and a tent and said, I will make this home.

And so that's what I did from about 2016 until the end of 2019. Although I still live there. Like I, particularly under the pandemic, I would bounce between San Francisco and there, but I stopped building and stopped, you know, getting calluses on my hands towards the end of 2019. But then I sold that. So then when the Apple thing hit, like, again, I don't know, I don't know quite how to stress it, but it was really me kind of turning over a new page in life and saying, look, the writer thing is definitely dead. I'm definitely going back to tech. Orcas Island, I mean, the idea was to be this, you know, eccentric, bohemian, you know, isolated writer,

that's not going to happen. I'm just going to join Apple and be, you know, a polite, loyal worker, be inside, inside them. And that's it. I'm just, and I've, I've got family in San Francisco, I've got a child that I have a relationship with. I'm just going to sell that it's over. I mean, it was, it was a great saga. It was an adventure, but it's, it's time to just put that behind me. And literally, literally the day that the deal closed, like when the broker texted me saying, oh, great, the wire is going to hit. Everything's great. We're all done, is when the current scandal actually erupted.

Okay, so what was the first reverberation of the scandal? How did it first land for you? Yeah, I mean, this is where we get a little bit into a legal minefield. I'm still under current Apple NDA, as any employee is at a tech company. And so things that happened internally at Apple when I was there, I really can't address. What I can say and what I have said publicly is that it was a snap decision. It happened very quickly. And it was from one moment to the next. And that's how it went down. The rest of it, I can't really comment on. But as far as what's publicly available, it's true to say that your hire came to the attention

of your fellow now Apple employees, and some petition was circulated. And something like 2,000 Apple employees either called for an investigation or called for your firing? Or what happened there? Yeah, I mean, I'm really quoting from what's publicly reported. The Verge did a whole big piece on it on Wednesday. So again, I'm not citing my experience. I'm really just quoting the public record. But yeah, apparently, according to that Verge reporting, yeah, there was a petition apparently circulated with a number of signatures that, again, cited and quoted some of the passages in the book, in my opinion, out of context, and made a lot of allegations there. And apparently, that's what was behind my firing.

So, and then Apple released a statement about your firing, which at least to my eye gave some top spin to it, which I got to think is defamatory in some sense. I mean, they, you know, it's clear you're being fired for what they now deem to be the bad optics of your book written several years ago, but the language they used to describe this made it sound like, you know, you had done something untoward as an employee at Apple, right? Like you had, I should have the language here. I could get it, but it's, do you know what I'm referring to? I do. I very much do. Yeah. The language they used, the statement they issued on, I believe it was Wednesday evening,

was a statement along the lines of, I forget exactly, but hateful behavior. The word behavior was definitely used because that's what stuck in my head, is not acceptable at Apple in the context of being asked about my situation. And I agree with you. I think it is defamatory because I vigorously allege that it is categorically false to suggest that my firing was in any way related to my behavior or performance at Apple. It absolutely was not. I spent, you know, three and a half weeks on Zoom calls with engineers, you know, doing the job of an engineer, and that's it. And so, yes, I very much disagree with that statement from Apple. And so, yes, I very much disagree with that statement from Apple. The big picture here is that, you know, you're now, you are sharing an experience with several people who could be named who have been, you know, fired or otherwise canceled

based on things they have written previously. And in your case, it's especially strange because, as we said, that's what you wrote, though, you know, I can actually see the basis for someone thinking, all right, this isn't a guy I want to spend a lot of time with, given the angle you took there. It's pretty obviously a persona. But the crucial thing to realize is that all of the liberal intelligentsia of the time, the distant epic of five years ago, got a chance to process this. And this was just a, and it was almost universally accepted as a valuable insight into what's going on and what it's like to work on the inside of the tech juggernaut. And we're clearly at a moment where this attitude of intolerance to anything remotely

edgy is clearly stifling self-expression in the present, and it will stifle it on a go-forward basis because everyone can draw the obvious lesson here. I mean, it's pretty clear that a writer like Philip Roth, you know, were he to still be alive, would be probably unpublishable now and even unhirable. I mean, it's just the distance between him as a person and the various awful protagonists he created. One can only speculate about what's the true worldview of Philip Roth, but it's easy to see that that kind of artistic expression, and granted, you were writing nonfiction, but still, there's a shocking liability to anything but the most anodyne kind of expression now.

And people will draw the obvious lesson. It's just it's not worth paying the price if you have aspirations to do anything else other than be an artist who's going to be vilified by half of society. How do you think about this in terms of the effect this kind of thing is likely to have on just people finding their own voice in any kind of creative field? Yeah, no, I agree. It is very stifling. I mean, it was funny. I was on with Kara Swisher and other reporters on Twitter spaces last night, and they actually had people up to ask me often very pointed and somewhat angry questions. And one of the questioners asked me a question of like, other reporters on Twitter spaces last night, and they actually had people up to ask me often very

pointed and, you know, somewhat angry questions. And, you know, one of the questions asked me a question of like, how do you defend what you said? In other words, like, do you believe what you wrote in that book? And my answer was, you know, I don't, I don't think that's the right question to ask. I mean, I agreed with her in the sense that like, if my book or that passage, for example, had been an op-ed column in a newspaper in which indeed I am saying Antonio Garcia Martinez believes that the world should be ordered this way, then I should be called to account for my beliefs and say, well, why do you want the world to look that way? Right. But what I was writing, a work of literary nonfiction, even though it's a memoir and even though in theory it's about real events, is not

a claim, is not a claim to truth. Right? Nor is it a normative claim about how the world should be. I mean, it's far from that, right? I mean, the example that comes to mind is Les Philip Roth, but somebody like, say, Tom Wolfe's electric Kool-Aid acid test, which for those who aren't familiar, it's a classic work of what's now called sort of gonzo journalism, in which the journalist kind of injects themselves in the narrative, and it's told in this very hyperbolic voice. I mean, it's clearly the sort of tone I was going for. And, you know, was Tom Wolfe asked at the time, by the way, the topic of the story is sort of the summer of love and hanging around with Ken Kesey and some of the literary scene, a lot of drugs, a lot of

irresponsible behavior. You know, would someone have asked Tom Wolfe at the time, well, do you support drug use? I mean, maybe he would have. I mean, certainly, you know, latter-day Puritans and Victorians and sort of deep social conservatives probably did object to the book for those reasons. But certainly nobody in the cultural world would have said, well, Tom Wolfe shouldn't have written in that tone, and he should have hedged every mention of every acid trip with a little like mini lecture on why drug use is bad. No one would have claimed that, right?

And yet somehow we've lost that. There is no space between a descriptive and literary approach to something and the normative description. Everyone has to be advocating for something all the time, and it must be of the utmost moral purity. That is the register in which almost everything is written now. And yes, I find it deeply stifling because, and I tweeted this, right? There have been ideologies in the past, among them communism and Nazism, that felt that all art must be in service to a political end, that art cannot exist for its own sake, to quote the sort of Oscar Wilde cliche. And I just don't believe that. I don't think art should always serve a political purpose, right? If anything, it should undermine the current politics, but reflexively.

I think we should probably describe the passage because I don't know what ideas is forming in the minds of our listeners who haven't read about this story yet. But I think in context, it's easily understood to be the voice of a kind of persona. So do you want to read it or summarize it or you want me to find it? It's funny. I told the story of the passage in Kara's thing. It was one of these areas. So I had a I had an editor, it just so happens a female editor. And she improved the book in a huge way. And I thank her so much because the book was a mess. But this is one place where for whatever

reason, I put my foot down and said, No, no, come on, we have to continue it. And she actually wasn't against it necessarily. She just thought that joke had sort of run too long and that it was time to wrap it up. Because I turned in 700 pages for what was supposed to be a 300-page beach read, and clearly it wasn't. So yeah, the context here, one of the sub-threads, and again, this is one of these things you don't realize until you write a book, is that you can't just write a kind of wonky take on, look, this is how ad tech and venture financing and IPOs work. That's not enough. If you want to cross into the mainstream, that's not enough. You've got to inject some personal story into it. And so rightly or wrongly, and I think in retrospect, I regret it,

I inject a lot of my personal life in it to kind of jazz it up. And I was literally, my life, to be honest, is really not that interesting or that edgy. So I was literally milking it for as much as I could. And one of the racy bits, I guess, is that indeed, I had a child with a woman I barely knew. We had just started dating. She got pregnant. She was going to have it. And we actually made a go of it. We moved in together. And at the time, I was completely in love. And on we go. You kind of roll with it. It's like, OK, I'm doing I'm doing all this risky startup stuff. And then on top of it, there's a kid. But I guess I was my mindset was just in that mode of accepting all risk.

And so this passage comes at the moment in which, you know, she says she's pregnant and I'm like mulling it over. And I'm like, well, yeah, I'm you know, I'm infatuated with this woman. Well, we'll try to make a go of it. And, you know, I had just come off like everybody in their 20s and 30s living in some coastal city on the whole online dating thing for better or worse. And so the statement is one of these flip saying that we've all said, and if someone's going to claim to me they haven't made a statement of the form, all men from bloody blah are bloody

blah. Everyone has said that who's been on the online dating trip. I just, I wrote it in prose in a slightly, yeah, admittedly offensive way. Okay, I'll just start from like the top of that column of text. She had wild green eyes with unnatural red spots in her irises when you pulled close, reminiscent of that Afghan girl from the National Geographic cover. Her personality was flinty and rough and as leathery as her skin. She had spent years between various jobs backpacking around the rougher parts of the world. She was an imposing, broad-shouldered presence, six feet tall and bare feet and towering over me in heels. Most women in the Bay are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness and generally full of shit.

I mean, that's it, I guess. Well, and so, yeah, that's basically it. Yeah. I mean, it goes it, I guess. So yeah, that's basically it. I mean, it goes on and on. There's an entire passage here. I don't want to bore your listeners, but that's basically it. But that's the thing that got you canceled or fired. So you're generalizing about most women in the Bay Area. And clearly, in this context, isn't the service of justifying your admiration for this one woman who's entirely different from the generalization? But again, the larger context is of a narrative voice that is just relentlessly taking down everything in sight, including yourself. Right.

I mean, you're also an object of derision in the book. And there's a liability to all this. For a journalist or a memoirist to emulate Tom Wolfe in gonzo mode or Hunter S. Thompson, I believe you've mentioned that you had him in mind as an exemplar. It's probably a bad idea in the same way that emulating Nietzsche is a bad idea for a philosopher. It's not that these guys were geniuses and can't be emulated, although Nietzsche certainly was a certain type of genius, but it's just that much of their rule-breaking comes off as silly and self-aggrandizing by turns, right? It's just, if someone's not going to like you on the basis of this book, if they're going to collapse you, the author, down to the persona you're presenting, it's that you seem too cynical and too

willing to break trust with everything. But what you can't honestly read from a passage like this is that this is a careful statement about what you believe women are like anywhere. And the connection that people at Apple, I'm sure, were making, and I believe I've seen some statements to this effect since, is that this passage is of a piece with, you know, claiming that women can't be, you know, good tech entrepreneurs or good software engineers, or it's the misreading of the James Damore memo. And that wasn't even what was in James Damore's memo when he was fired from Google. But that's how it got summarized for people as basically a misogynistic statement about the

limitations of women in tech. And I'll just point out a further irony here is that one of your brief colleagues at Apple, who I'm sure is still at Apple, is Dr. Dre, whose rap lyrics on the topic of women are quite a bit more pointed than anything in your book. And he hasn't been canceled yet, but I believe he's also trailing some credible allegations of violence against women. How has that played out in this aftermath? Yeah, as soon as this thing broke, so many people DM me with stuff about Dr. Dre. I'll admit I'm not a big rap fan or Dr. Dre fan,

so I had to go look it up. But I mean, his lyrics are hideous, let's just be clear. And as far as I understand, he's still currently employed at Apple. And indeed, I think, yeah, there was credible allegations of actual physical violence toward women when he was younger. So yeah, I agree there's an element of hypocrisy there. I would also stress, I think what you first mentioned, right, that if there's a tone and derision in my writing or in this writing, that derision is almost universal. And in fact, the ultimate butt of all the jokes, the fool in Chaos Monkeys, is me at the end, right? Like the persona I created that you can feel free to think he's an asshole, guess what? The asshole loses in the end, right? The moral justice of the universe is restored at the end of the book. That's what I think people aren't picking up. It's like, oh, he's this arrogant asshole. The character makes a fool of himself and loses almost everything by the end, again, but that would require actually reading the book, which I don't think many of my critics

actually have. So where do you go from here? And I guess we could just open this conversation to any thoughts you have about what it's going to take to turn the tide in tech and media and culture generally. Again, you are a single thread now of a quickly unraveling tapestry of what, you know, it's hard to know where to point the way back machine, but it seems like we're devolving with respect to our ability to have a sane conversation about moral and political norms here, where everything is being politicized and people's outrage has always turned up to 11. What's happening in your case and what do you think is and should happen in the culture

more widely? I think you're right, Sam. I mean, my story is nothing. It's one little thread. 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, along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes, NAMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app.

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