Making Sense with Sam Harris - #272 — On Disappointing My Audience

Episode Date: January 11, 2022

Sam discusses some of the topics he has and hasn't covered, to the disappointment of many Making Sense listeners. 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.

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, 2022. That sounds like the future, doesn't it? Weren't most of the science fiction movies of our childhoods placed in a time no later than this? When was the original Blade Runner? this. One was the original Blade Runner, like 2017, something like that. Anyway, this is the future. We're the people who lived to see this future, and it is dystopian in some ways, certainly, but you start the new year with the world that you have. I wanted to reflect on a couple of pieces of feedback I've gotten in various forms. It amounts to points on which many people said that I disappointed them.

So I guess the topic of this podcast is on disappointing one's audience. I don't consider these majority opinions in most cases, but there's a discernible signal of grief amid the satisfied noises of the rest of you. So I just want to touch on this stuff because it is interesting to figure out how to do this job, what to talk about, who to talk to. I'm not quite sure how to zero in on the problem here. The basic problem, as I see it, is that we are living through what is, at least in my lifetime, an unprecedented crisis of legitimacy across our institutions. We're living in a society that has been poisoned by misinformation and disinformation.

Perhaps I should look at this through the lens of the two topics which have been most provocative here, and that is all things related to Trump and the health of our democracy. You know, so I'm recording this right after January 6th. We just passed that anniversary. And the other topic is, of course, the COVID pandemic and vaccines and all the rest. And of course, people's views on these topics tend to be highly correlated. So the disappointment takes the form of, well, you used to be someone who would have hard conversations and would really never shy away from a hard conversation. You would debate more or less anything.

You would invite people who had attacked you onto your podcast and in several cases have scarcely endurable encounters with them. What changed? Why did your faith in the power of conversation so completely erode? And that's a good question. I see the apparent contradiction here. It's not really a contradiction. here. It's not really a contradiction. It's just a recalibration with respect to specific topics at specific moments in time. I do have faith in the power of conversation, otherwise I wouldn't be doing this. But the time course of resolving certain issues is, in many cases, much longer than we would like. And there are certain moments in history that really will not benefit from airing, quote, both sides on any given debate, especially when one of those sides is either obviously illegitimate or the probability of it being legitimate is so low

that it becomes irresponsible to have certain conversations at certain moments in history. So to take the two topics at hand, Trump and COVID, I consider it totally irresponsible to have gone down the rabbit hole of election fraud, both-side-ism, around the 2020 election. You know, in the immediate aftermath of the election, and in the ensuing months, when you could have bet the lives of your children that Trump and his enablers were lying about everything in

sight, trying to steal everything that wasn't nailed down, where all of their spurious claims were being rejected by courts, in many cases by judges who Trump himself had appointed, to have gone down the rabbit hole of questioning the election as though there were two equivalent sides to this, as though the Rudy Giuliani's of the world were serious and committed to anything like the truth or the health of our democracy. To have platformed any kind of conversation about that strikes me as totally irresponsible. We had a fire raging in our society, and our democracy was clearly in jeopardy. It was being actively put in jeopardy by Trump and much of the Republican Party. And to some significant

degree, I think that's still the case. Of course, all of this culminated in the events of the Republican Party. And to some significant degree, I think that's still the case. Of course, all of this culminated in the events of January 6th. Now, whether you think January 6th was an actual emergency of sorts, or you think it was just live-action role-play by goofballs or some kind of false flag operation, right, where you stand on that spectrum of sanity and madness will determine how you hear everything I'm saying. But given what I think is true, and had every reason to think was true back then, yeah, there were certain kinds of conversations I wasn't going to have. And so it is with COVID.

We've been living in the midst of a public health emergency of varying degrees for nearly two years. And that came crashing down on us in the midst of an information emergency and a collapse of public trust emergency that we've been living with longer than that. So, certain kinds of conversations strike me as irresponsible in this context. The whole universe of anti-vax whataboutism strikes me as irresponsible. anti-vax, whataboutism strikes me as irresponsible. Now, it's not that there's nothing to debate there. This has been an evolving situation from day one, right? There were things we didn't know in the first months of the pandemic, which we now have a very good handle on, right? And it was

appropriate to recalibrate our response to this and our beliefs about what was reasonable to do. So there has been a lot to debate, and I am the first to admit that the public health messaging and the posture of many of our institutions has earned all of the mistrust that they've received. It's just been awful. And there is a lot to debate. I mean, whether it's masking or school closures and lockdowns or vaccine mandates and the emphasis on vaccines over treatments and how we talk about natural immunity versus vaccines and boosters for kids versus boosters for people my age. I mean, the lab leak hypothesis. I mean, there's been a lot to talk about that is worth talking about in a way that is rational and open to argument and not captured by insane political trends.

The general trend has been mainstream institutions getting captured by far-left political ideology to a degree that is still denied by many mainstream figures, but that capture has produced this kind of death spiral of public trust in these institutions disproportionately on the right. So none of that has helped, and you've heard me talk about all of that ad nauseum on previous podcasts. But there is a lot that could and should be debated here in good faith about COVID and our public policies. But not everything here is debatable. And not every question can be raised in good faith. And more important, not everything can be debated responsibly in the middle of a pandemic.

Where you have thousands of people dying every day, and in many cases now, certainly since June of last year, dying quite unnecessarily. I don't know what the current tally is. Anyone who might be skeptical of this claim would be tempted to believe. I've seen figures as high as 200,000. But at minimum, given the difference that we know vaccines make, there are tens of thousands of people who did not need to die, who did die because they didn't get vaccinated. So the remedy for this standoff of sorts has not been for me to invite someone like Brett Weinstein onto my podcast

to debate these issues. I don't actually see that as the right thing to do at this moment. It's not to say that there can't be a post-mortem done on this at some point, but there are certain things that simply were never in doubt and only became clearer as time has moved on. I mean, again, to take both topics. What was never in doubt about Trump and the election in 2020 and the run-up to January 6th and the aftermath. If you want to disregard all the hyperbole that you might find in the mainstream media about all of that, all of the top spin that you might

condemn someone like Rachel Maddow for, all of the errors made on MSNBC and elsewhere and were never corrected, forget about all that. There's something that was never debatable because it all unfolded in plain sight. What was never debatable was that we had a sitting president who simply would not commit to a peaceful transfer of power in the event that he lost the election. That alone was so shocking, so unprecedented, so corrosive to our politics.

That's all you need to know that we were facing an absolute emergency. If you can't follow that part of the plot, I don't know what conversation there is to have on this topic. We had a sitting president who claimed to have won the election when votes were still being counted and called for the vote counting to stop. If you can't recognize how abysmal that situation is and how worthy of contempt Trump was and is for behaving that way. There is nothing to talk about, really, from my point of view. There is no extenuating circumstance that makes sense of that. And of course, that behavior was of a piece with everything he has done and we knew he would do and may yet do again, right? I mean, none of this was a surprise. What was so surprising was that so many people tolerated it, enabled it. And what soon became

clear was that Trump and his enablers were doing whatever they could to steal an election that they claimed had been stolen from them. And of course, this is a problem that now many people are worried about in 2024. Obviously, there's an investigation of January 6th, and there will be a lot of information forthcoming, but there is nothing that will be found that can change the character of what has already occurred. The lying about the election has never stopped in Trumpistan. And we know it is lying because it happened before the election. Trump claimed the election was illegitimate before it even occurred.

legitimate before it had even occurred. But again, everything for me is contained in his unwillingness to support the most basic principle of our democracy, which is the peaceful transfer of power. And we did not accomplish a peaceful transfer of power. And so on that score, the events of January 6th really are the most shocking thing to have happened in over 200 years in the United States. And with respect to COVID, yes, there's been a lot to debate. There's been a lot of uncertainty. There's been overreactions and underreactions and bad policy and calculated lies. And our institutions have, in certain cases, been reduced to rubble. But what has long been clear is that in a forced choice between catching COVID having been

vaccinated and catching COVID not having been vaccinated, your outcome is better, whatever your age cohort, if you've been vaccinated. Now, of course, the stratification of risk by age has always been highly relevant. It becomes absolutely clear the older you are. So what could be a very strident recommendation for a 70-year-old becomes more like a coin toss in certain cases for a five-year-old. Nevertheless, this has always been a simple choice. The moment the vaccines appeared, and certainly the moment their use got to scale, and we had tens of millions of people who had been vaccinated, then the difference between these two cohorts, vaccinated and unvaccinated, became crystal clear.

Your likelihood of severe disease or death is reduced by a factor of 10 or 20, depending on your age and other comorbidities. Well, then you'll say, well, what about the risk of the vaccines? We don't have long-term data on these mRNA vaccines. We don't have long-term data on what it's like to get COVID not having been vaccinated, apart from the short-term data of watching people die by the hundreds of thousands. Yes, the future is uncertain, but there is no good reason to be terrified of these vaccines. And we have an anti-vax cult working behind the scenes to amplify a very natural concern that people have,

that they not do themselves or their kids any harm of commission. You take a healthy person, you stick a needle in their arm, and you make them unhealthy. That's a catastrophe. That happens incredibly rarely. It's not that vaccines are a no-risk proposition. It's just that the risk is very small. And the comparative risk of having a bad outcome with COVID unvaccinated,

especially if you're an adult or you have some kind of comorbidities, is much worse. This has been clear now for nearly a year. Take another medical intervention. Take statins, you know, the class of drugs that many, many people take, tens of millions of people take in the U.S. alone, for high cholesterol, to mitigate the risk of heart disease and stroke. Now, I've tried to take statins several times. I have high cholesterol, and any sane doctor who looks at my lipid panel would say, hey, you should probably jump on statins.

Well, I've tried this, I think, three times and have gotten side effects each time. You know, and I think it's about five percent of people get these side effects. There's actually some research that suggests that some of the side effects are no worse than the side effects people get with placebos. But in my case, I think that it's probably not just based on my expectation of side effects, because I've gotten side effects that I didn't even know about and since looked up and found them on the list. So in any case, I believe the unacceptable side effects of statins for certain people are all too real. And I'm one of those people. are all too real. And I'm one of those people. Why have I not been tempted to join some group, if such a group exists, arguing that statins are the crime of the century, right? That we got tens of millions of people taking this unproven drug, which I know in my bones to be unhealthy,

right? I know that this can't be good for people. And there's research that shows that whatever it is, four or five percent of people get these terrible side effects. What the hell is going on here? Who can I get together with on social media to amplify these concerns? Well, if you're a grown-up, you realize that with any intervention there will be some percentage of people who have a bad reaction to it for reasons that are complex and that in the case of any one individual can be difficult or impossible to understand, but in the aggregate the risk can be assessed. So you know what kind of risk you're running when you take a drug or jump out of an

airplane or decide to do any other thing that millions of people are doing alongside you. And we know that compared to many other risks we run, vaccines and the mRNA vaccines for COVID are amazingly safe, especially given that in this case, you have a forced choice. You're going to get COVID, and you can get it vaccinated or unvaccinated. So my point here is not to re-litigate this topic, but just to give you some color as to why I can't avail myself of the remedy that many of you think is available to me, which is just to invite people onto this podcast to debate these issues. You know, on the election front, why not invite someone onto the podcast? Why not talk to Steve Bannon, right? Wouldn't that be the responsible thing to do? Well, what do I do when Bannon says, what about the 1,700 ballots in Maricopa County

that were found on a pallet in a parking lot? What about the seven poll workers who resigned in protest? I just made that up, and he could just make that up. And that's the kind of claim that can't possibly be run down in real time or in any acceptable time. If one wants to have a life. All of that is obviously bullshit. The general picture of the entire effort to establish massive election fraud that stole the election for Biden, all of it was obviously bullshit. There is no reason to speak to Steve Bannon

about any of that. All of this was thrown out of courts. All of it was resisted by the few Republican governors and election officials that had spines, right? And if it hadn't been resisted by them, and if Mike Pence had caved in to all the pressure he was getting to reject the ballots that came from these states, we would have found ourselves in a destabilizing constitutional crisis, right? So the fear is next time those few crucial people aren't going to be in place to do the right thing. But this is just not the kind of conversation that can be had. You can't debate spurious facts in that way. And what you then risk doing is giving people the sense that, oh, this is just really confusing. I don't know, Steve sounded like he had a lot of data that Sam wouldn't interact with. How many

ballots were on that pallet in the parking lot? And so it is on the topic of COVID and vaccines. The general shape of the thing is easy to discern, right? And again, I'm not discounting that there's a lot to debate. I see the problem with safetyism and the endless commitment to masking and all the rest, right? We have to figure out how to live with this virus that is now endemic. But part of what has made that so difficult is that we have an anti-vax cult addled by rampant misinformation that represents a third or so of our society. Anyway, all of this is just to say that I found myself in a difficult position here because having the conversation on the podcast has not seemed like a viable remedy. In fact, having the

conversation in private has not proven to be any kind of remedy in the cases where I've attempted it. So there really is no reason to believe that once the microphones get switched on, things are going to get any better. So to those of you who are disappointed that I haven't had those conversations here, I'm just giving you a window onto my thinking here. I've thought about it, and I've thought better of it on those two topics. And this relates to another social issue where I've expressed an opinion that has upset some of you and that's on the deplatforming of specific people on social media

when Trump got banned from Twitter I celebrated, in fact I had been asking Jack publicly and privately for months if not years to kick him off the platform and the same is true of Alex Jones. Some people think there's hypocrisy there on my side. I'm all about free speech, but when it comes to Trump and Alex Jones, I want to silence them. You're not understanding the situation. First of all, this isn't about free speech.

This is about the right of a private platform to decide what voices they want to give a megaphone to. If freedom is your concern, where's your concern for the private company that doesn't want to have the most odious liars to ever draw breath take up all the oxygen on their platform. If you're going to nationalize Twitter and turn it into an actual public square, well then, okay, but don't tell me you're a libertarian if you want that to happen. These are clear-cut cases for me. Whatever terms of service Twitter has and had, it was absolutely clear that Trump had violated them long before he was kicked off the platform. Talking about somebody who's making credible threats of nuclear war, that doesn't violate

your terms of service. In the case of Alex Jones, you had somebody who was claiming that the Sandy Hook parents, who had had their six-year-old kids butchered by a madman, were in fact crisis actors faking this atrocity so that they could advance the gun control agenda of the left. advance the gun control agenda of the left. And Jones unleashed his lunatic audience on these families. I mean, there are Sandy Hook parents who are still in hiding. There are families that have moved ten times since that tragedy in 2012. All because of Jones and the insane people who've been taken in by his, what is it? I honestly don't know. Mental illness or performance art, right? And every time Trump tweeted against a private citizen, he was consciously ruining this person's life, knowing what would happen, knowing they would get doxxed, knowing that

they would get endless death threats. You're telling me that a private company like Twitter needs to enable this behavior day after day after day, and that they're violating the principle of free speech when declining to enable it a day longer? Granted, there is a lot to debate around the power of big tech, but the idea that someone like Alex Jones has to be platformed anywhere makes no sense, and there's certainly no reason to invite him on a podcast. But I would be the first to admit that this is a very confusing time and a confusing situation, because, as I said, our distrust of mainstream institutions is totally warranted now in specific cases. And this ranges everywhere from our top scientific journals to our best newspapers to the government. But that doesn't mean that the contrarian opinion on any specific point

is generally right, because it isn't generally right. So we have to navigate this space of uncertain authority and the bad incentives that clearly derange our public conversation, right? The fact that certain things get ratings or clicks and that those messages get amplified, right? And as you know, I've done a fair amount to protect myself from bad incentives on this podcast. And if I'm alert to anything, it is to not getting captured by my audience, right? Whenever I were to find myself not wanting to say something for fear of how the audience will

respond, even though I think it's true and important, that's the thing I know I can't do. There's obviously a problem of audience capture in the podcasting and alternative media space. This is true whether one is getting support directly by subscription or donation, and it's also true if you're running ads. And in several cases, the evidence of audience capture is absolutely clear. There are people who've done 50 episodes, more or less in a row, on the same topic, as though they had lost interest in every other thing on earth. What's going on there? There is some training signal coming from the audience, and almost certainly a bad economic incentive, that is capturing that podcast host. So I'm not afraid to offend or disappoint my audience.

I've spent a fair amount of time criticizing wokeness and social justice hysteria, and when I've done that, I know I have offended and alienated some significant percentage of left-leaning people in my audience who just don't see the issue the way I do. And of course, everything I've said about Trump and the vaccine has offended people on the right who loved everything I said about wokeness. My only real commitment here is to say what is true and useful. It's that intersection of true and useful and interesting slash important. That's what I care about.

And there's definitely a trade-off with that last caveat. There are many things that are important that are not at all interesting. And this podcast has been devoted to several of them. But that's what I'm attempting to do. I have to assume that you're only listening because you care about what I think is true and useful and interesting or important. And if you don't care about that, well then you're in the wrong place. So perhaps that explains some of what I've done and not done over the last year or so. And if I sound especially somber on these points, it's because I think we really are living through a moment that is especially high stakes.

You know, it's not that I think COVID itself is so bad. In fact, with Omicron coming on, it seems like we're getting pretty lucky here, especially those of us who've been vaccinated and boosted. This is not terrifying. What is terrifying is how badly placed we seem to respond to challenges of this kind. We have civilizational problems to solve. This pandemic was, as I've said before, a dress rehearsal for something far worse that is bound to come, whether it's engineered deliberately or coughed up out of a bat, we know that this pandemic was about as benign as it can get. And at this point, I really am not especially hopeful that we would naturally solve all the coordination problems and problems of trust that we failed

to solve this time around in the face of something far more deadly. I mean, it's possible that if you made the pandemic 10 times or 30 times worse, well then the whole anti-vax delusion would be blown away on the first day. That's possible, certainly to be hoped for. But at this point, I think you'd have people Alex Jones-ing it right over the brink. It would be all conspiracy thinking all the time as the bodies piled up on the sidewalk. I think that's quite possible, and we have to do something about that in advance. It's not a problem we can solve in the middle of an emergency. So my concern is really not so much about COVID, but about our society. And this is where the pandemic and our politics directly interact. Some of you might have seen the most recent issue of The Atlantic

that had several articles in it worrying about what the Republican Party has been up to since the 2020 election. Barton Gellman wrote an article titled Trump's Next Coup Has Already Begun, and George Packer wrote one titled Are We Doomed? and George Packer wrote one titled, Are We Doomed? And to take Barton's summary of his contribution there, he claimed, quote, that January 6th was the initial milestone, not the last,

in the growth of the first violent mass movement in American politics since the 1920s, end quote. And his second point was that, quote, End quote. Now these, if you're not in the weeds on this topic, these can sound like fairly paranoid claims, but just ask yourself, what would have happened last time around if Mike Pence had gone along with the demands placed upon him, gone along with the demands placed upon him that he throw out the votes for Biden from all the contested states. We know we have a problem on our hands here, and if we don't fix our electoral machinery in the meantime, 2024 could be far worse than 2020. Anyway, I'm interested to get to the bottom of this. So at this point, I think I'm

going to do a podcast with Gelman and George Packer, and the current plan is to bring on David Frum and Anne Applebaum, both of whom are also Atlantic writers, with the goal of fully presenting the case here that there is something we need to do well in advance of 2024 to make sure that we don't have a slow-moving coup on our hands. Again, if you're out there in podcastistan thinking that there was no there there, that the Mueller report found nothing, that the Russiagate hoax was a hoax pure and simple, that Trump is just a crass businessman, but no more of a threat to our democracy than any other politician. If that's where you are, I don't know how you've been listening to me in recent years, but none of what I've just said makes any sense to you.

Back here on Earth, it's pretty clear we have barely weathered a conscious attack on our democracy, and the attack is ongoing. And no, this is not to exculpate everything Democrats and social justice maniacs have done in the meantime, and I've been as critical of them as anyone. in the meantime, and I've been as critical of them as anyone. But when you're talking about the lying and misinformation that could truly destroy our democracy, there is an asymmetric risk coming from the right and from Trump himself now. Again, I make no apologies for this opinion, which I can well defend, that Trump is the most dangerous cult leader on earth at this moment, and has been for several years. And he should be viewed as such,

and responded to in that way. He utterly desecrated the office of the presidency, and I think there's no respect due to him personally for having occupied that office. Anyway, that coming conversation I think will be a Zoom call or done on some other video platform initially for subscribers to the podcast, and then we'll put the audio on the podcast after that. That could be fun to do on video. What else here? On a very different point, but also a note of disappointment I detected in some of you, I want to think out loud for a moment on the topic of NFTs, which I broached on Twitter a few weeks ago, putting out a job listing for Waking Up. Waking Up is looking for a head of Web3 development. And let me find it here. I said on Twitter, attention all Web3 NFT maniacs.

And then I linked to this job posting at Waking Up. And the response was mixed at best. Many of you said, essentially, not you too, Sam. I essentially responded as though I had just announced that I was eager to perpetrate some kind of multi-level marketing scam on my audience. Let me take a moment to clarify a few things, because this is actually something I want to do, and I want to recruit some great person to help me do it. So this is my reiterating the job listing that can be found in that Twitter thread. So just to clarify for those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about. So NFTs, which are all the rage at the moment, are so-called non-fungible tokens. And without belaboring the point, I am convinced that this is a new technology that has and will

do some very interesting things. It has solved the problem of digital ownership and digital scarcity, which is to say you can have an asset that exists as a JPEG or in some other digital form, and you can really be the sole owner of it, even if copies of it proliferate online. And you can layer onto that asset all kinds of other properties that are interesting, whether they also exist in digital space or whether they have real world consequences, right? So you can have an NFT that is just a piece of artwork, but it can become your ticket to a live event or unlock some other opportunity or property in the real world. So I think that's very interesting, and I'm not at all cynical about the future there,

although it is impossible not to be cynical about some of what we're seeing in this space, right? There is a kind of tulip mania to some of it. You've got these collections of mediocre artwork where the cheapest instance now costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. In principle, none of that's new. I mean, that's true of art in general. You or significance is often in the eye of the beholder, and the fact that somebody can put a banana on the wall with duct tape and call it art, that precedes NFTs. But let me just float the first NFT idea we have here just to give you a sense of how I'm thinking about it. And again, my purpose here is to recruit somebody who really understands this space better than I do and understands the

possibilities, but who's aligned with my values here. So what's happening with these NFTs currently is you have people who are buying, you know, Bored Apes or CryptoPunks, you know, most famously, buying, you know, bored apes or crypto punks, you know, most famously, which are these cute little drawings, and they are trading in them. In many cases, they're holding them as their profile pictures, right? So if you own a bored ape that's worth two million dollars, chances are you're using that on social media as your profile picture. What's happening there? Well, people like these assets. They like the Bored Ape they bought, and they're putting it up there for that reason, presumably.

But they're also signaling that they're rich enough to have spent $2 million on a JPEG that is not dissimilar to the 9,999 other JPEGs in that collection. So it is a kind of social signaling of wealth and conspicuous consumption, but that's not fundamentally new, and I'm not especially judgmental of that. But I'm interested in flipping this whole thing and in doing something truly good in the world. So those of you who heard my previous podcast with Sam Bankman-Fried about effective altruism might remember my description of the Giving What We Can pledge. This is the pledge that Will McCaskill and Toby Ord created, where people pledged to give a minimum of 10% of their lifetime earnings to the most effective charities.

This is a pledge I took a couple years back, and Sam Bankman-Fried took it a few years before me, and about 7,000 people have taken it so far on the Giving What We Can website. What we're proposing to do at Waking Up is to create our version of the pledge. And we might add some other relevant wrinkle to it, but basically it'll be the same pledge. And we want to create NFTs based on the daily heads that have become this ever-present piece of artwork within the app and give them out to perhaps 10,000 people who have taken that pledge and consider what this will make possible. So first, you know, people have a nice piece of artwork to use as their profile pic in

the same way that they're doing with these other NFTs. And in fact, I'm already doing it on Twitter myself. I have a daily head as my Twitter avatar. So just imagine that's my NFT, right? Signifying that I've taken the waking up pledge. Imagine what happens once you've identified this community in this way. You've given them a way to identify themselves. It seems to me a very different kind of social signaling and status gets created here. And it's precisely the kind I would think we would want to incentivize. So we create these NFTs, we give them to the 7,000 people who've already taken the pledge over at Giving What We Can, we give them to a few thousand more who now take the pledge with us,

and then we go out into the world looking for people who want to celebrate these people along with us. So we could go to American Express and say, you've got this black card for people who just spend a lot of money. That's what you're rewarding here. Why not create a card for the people who've taken the Waking Up Pledge and give them access to your airport lounges? And we can go to the NFL and say, you know, why not reserve 50 seats at the Super Bowl for people who've taken the Waking Up Pledge? We'll give you access to this very high leverage,

very engaged community of people who have decided to do something quite good. And why don't you play this game with us? And then you can imagine that the value of these NFTs might grow and there could be some secondary sales because many of the people who have taken the pledge are not especially wealthy. Some are, but there may be people who have taken this pledge who are making $40,000 a year and just giving 10% of their money away every year. Well, if you're making $40,000 a year and all of a sudden the NFT that I gave you is worth $400,000, you might want to sell that NFT, right? And then in the sale, you know, something like 80% of that might go to you, but 20% would go back to charities that we've already identified as

some of the most effective in reducing human suffering and existential risk. It seems to me that there's a really interesting project here, which again, you're hearing all the rough edges here because we're still thinking it through. And I want to hire someone to help us think it through and to help create a community here that is fun and interesting and doing intrinsically good things. So if you're that sort of person, if you're living on the blockchain, if you know way more about what's possible here and what's coming than I do, we really want to hear from you over at Waking Up. Again, the link to the job description and application page is in my Twitter feed just a couple of weeks back. And if you're a corporation who would like to participate in this, again,

why wouldn't you want to reserve some seats in your football stadium for these sorts of people? We're talking about people who have decided to give a minimum of 10% of their earnings every year to the most effective charities. You don't think it would be good for your brand to be incentivizing their behavior and meeting these people? So if you're a company that wants to be involved in this effort, please reach out to us. I guess we'll create a dedicated email address for this. So let's call it pledge at wakingup.com. Any ideas you might have about how you could make this fun for people? We would love to hear about it. That's just the first idea in this space, but it's the kind of idea that this technology

has suddenly made possible. Everything I just said would make no sense without the blockchain and NFTs. It strikes me as a really promising and ethically fairly thrilling possibility, and it's one of the things that gets me excited about all of the chaos that we see around us, right? New things are being born moment by moment. And one of the purposes of what I'm doing here on the podcast is to figure out what to do with all of the opportunity we have to make our world better. Anyway, I'm looking forward to the next year with all of you, over here at Making Sense, over there at Waking Up, and over there in a third place with Ricky Gervais at Absolutely Mental.

We've got a third season we're going to release soon, and that's been a lot of fun to record. And somewhat belatedly here, wishing you all a happy and healthy new year. Thanks for listening. you