Making Sense with Sam Harris - #350 — Sharing Reality

Episode Date: January 23, 2024

Sam Harris speaks with Jonathan Rauch and Josh Szeps about the foundations of knowledge and the fragmentation of society. They discuss the state of the mainstream media, diversity of viewpoints, the "reality-based" community, what Covid did to our information landscape, the Overton window and the news value of controversial stories, the unique challenge of Trump and Trumpism, the dangers of a second Trump term, the problem of immigration and controlling the southern border of the U.S., 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.

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll also find our scholarship program, where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't afford one. We don't run ads on the podcast,

and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. I'm fighting my way through a respiratory virus here, so I will keep this short. Today I'm speaking with Jonathan Rauch and Josh Zeps. Jonathan is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. He is the author of eight books and many articles on public policy, culture, and government. He is a contributing writer for The Atlantic and a recipient of the 2005 National Magazine Award, which is the magazine industry's equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize. His latest book is The Constitution of Knowledge, A Defense of Truth, His latest book is The Constitution of Knowledge, A Defense of Truth, and that is one of the focuses of our conversation today.

Josh Zeps is an independent journalist. He was a founding host of HuffPost Live. He also hosted a national morning television show in Australia and a radio show on ABC Radio, and now he's full-time on his own platform, the wonderful podcast Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Zeps. Josh and I have collaborated in the past. We did some live events in Australia. And I wanted to bring him on to co-pilot this interview with me, with Jonathan.

As I said, we talk about Jonathan's book, The Constitution of Knowledge. We talk about the fragmentation of society, the state of the mainstream media, diversity of viewpoints, the threatened reality-based community, what the COVID pandemic did to our information landscape, the unique challenge of Trump and Trumpism, the dangers of a second Trump term, the problem of immigration and controlling the southern border of the U.S., and other topics. And now I bring you Jonathan Rauch and Josh Zeps. I am here with Jonathan Rauch and Josh Zeps. Jonathan, Josh, thanks for joining me. Thank you. Thanks so much.

So let me explain the structure here. I've invited Josh, who I think most of my audience will already know, to co-pilot this interview with me. This is just for the fun of it and also to get the most out of you, Jonathan. But let me just have you both introduce yourselves here. Jonathan, how do you describe what you do? We're going to talk mostly about your book, The Constitution of Knowledge, A Defense of Truth, which was a fantastic defense of truth as advertised, and also use it as a lens through which to look at some current events that I think and also use it as a lens through which to look at some current events that I think worry all of us. How do you summarize your career as a writer and journalist? Oh, well, that's exactly how I summarize it.

I'm a writer and journalist. I'm sometimes mistaken for an academic and called doctor, but my highest degree is a bachelor's degree in history. I started out actually in a newspaper, which is how people did start out back in the day, and have done magazine work and written books on a lot of subjects. But unlike some journalists, I'm comfortable in the world of theory. And so I do a lot of that. Yeah, you should have gotten a PhD for this book, your discussion of the foundation of knowledge and just the way you marry the principles that safeguard our scientific epistemology and political liberalism. It's just fantastic. So congratulations there. Well, coming from you, it means a lot.

Your work has been an inspiration and indeed is quoted multiple times in the book. Nice, nice. Well, Josh, remind people who you are. I hereby bestow upon Jonathan an honorary doctorate from the School of Uncomfortable Conversations. There you go, Jonathan. I'm an independent journalist. Yeah, I just won't ask you to perform any cardiology if we're on a plane and someone calls out for a doctor. Just don't make me write a speech. if we're on a plane and someone calls out for a doctor.

Just don't make me write a speech. I'm an independent journalist. I have just left the legacy media where I was hosting a daily talkback radio show on Australia's national public broadcaster for the past couple of years. Prior to that, I anchored a sort of morning television show in Australia, and I spent most of my professional life in New York City. You may detect from my accent that I'm not from there. I'm Australian. And in New York, I was a founding host and producer of HuffPost Live, which was this sort of big experiment to try to produce thousands of hours of live streaming, talk, television. And so I hosted

thousands of hours of content with interesting people there, and then decamped back to Australia when I had kids and got married a few years ago. And now I've gone independent after finding it sort of intolerable. I guess I was somewhat pushed out of legacy media in a story that's kind of parallel to Barry Weiss's or a story that has been replicated in many instances. People who don't feel like the legacy media is doing a terribly good job of encapsulating the full rambunctiousness and excitingness of all the conversations that we could be having find themselves excluded from the party. And at some point I just said, you know, stuff this.

So Uncomfortable Conversations is now my gig. Nice. Well, it's great to have you here. And you've got the truly professional radio voice that will keep us on the straight and narrow here. I've got a respiratory virus going on, so I happily will not catch my bug. Yeah, I definitely don't have that. If I may, I forgot to mention two institutional affiliations. One is I'm a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, and the second is I'm a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, and the second is I'm a contributing writer of The Atlantic.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, so I don't tend to do straightforward interviews. It really are conversations. And so Josh and I can be expected to take up a fair amount of time, but really we're trying to get the most out of you, Jonathan. Just to kind of open with my concerns here, I think many of us sense that the moral intelligence of the West appears to be somewhat exhausted. And we can see this both on the right and the left. I mean, the fact that on the populist right, people can't seem to see that we have any stake in, I'm speaking from more or less an American perspective here, people just can't seem to see that we have any stake in reducing the danger and the chaos that is happening outside our borders. They seem to think that

we should become a nuclear-armed Switzerland of some kind. And even a phrase like the rules-based international order is now sneered at as a piece of neoconservative or neoliberal cant. And on the populist left, we have people who can't seem to distinguish between civilization and barbarism, as we witnessed after October 7th. And they show no inclination or capacity to defend the former. And this relates to the topics you deal with in your book. This kind of unraveling relates to the foundations of our knowledge, our ability to have anything like a shared consensus about what's happening in the world. And it relates to the hope that we one day may live in a world where people everywhere can agree about the basic norms and values that allow for a truly

open-ended form of cooperation among 8 billion strangers. So I thought we could start with your book. And there's two phrases in your book that do a tremendous amount of work. So I'd like you to explain both of them and how they are connected. And the first is the title, the Constitution of Knowledge. And the second is the reality-based community. What do you mean by those phrases and how are they connected? So the Constitution of Knowledge is the system of norms and institutions

that we in liberal societies rely on to keep us anchored to some common version of reality. They don't require us to agree on everything. In fact, they require us to disagree because disagreement is where knowledge comes from. That's what allows us to check each other's errors, those different perspectives. But we do have to have a set of rules. those different perspectives, but we do have to have a set of rules. What I'm pushing back against there is the view that I started with 30 years ago in an earlier book, which is called Kindly Inquisitors, The New Attacks on Free Thought. And it's a good book, but it kind of starts and ends where most people start and end, which is the marketplace of ideas in John Stuart Mill, which is all you need is a free environment

and public criticism where people are allowed to say things to each other and correct each other and knowledge will appear as if by magic. That's not a terrible model. I love the marketplace of ideas metaphor. I use it and I am a fan of John Stuart Mill. But the part we forgot, partly because that system was so successful for so long, is it doesn't just happen. You need a lot of rules and a lot of structure to get people to disagree in ways that are productive. And that requires a lot of rules. It turns out they look very, very much like the

rules for the U.S. Constitution. For example, the U.S. Constitution pits ambition against ambition, as we know from the Federalist. Constitution of Knowledge pits bias against bias. They're both open-ended systems which never allow a final say or a final destination, and so forth. So that's the constitution of knowledge. So the constitution of knowledge doesn't govern everything we do in life. It doesn't decide what we can say at the dinner table, Thanksgiving. It doesn't apply in church. As you have tirelessly pointed out, most of the beliefs of most major religions would flunk the constitution of knowledge because they're not replicable.

The areas, the fields that do adhere to the constitution of knowledge are what I call the reality-based community. These are the spheres, mostly professionals, that do the work every day of developing what we think of as objective knowledge. And the big four there are academia, science, research, all of that. That's number one. Second is media, mainstream media, reality-based media. That's my world. I think probably that's your world, certainly Josh's world. The third is law. People forget that the idea of a fact comes not from science. It predates that. It comes from law because courts needed a count of the facts that people could agree on in order to settle cases. So they came up with these adversarial systems of fact-finding, evidence-based.

they came up with these adversarial systems of fact-finding, evidence-based. And the fourth is government. Our government, all liberal governments, are just shot through with institutions and rules that keep them tethered to reality. Everything from the Administrative Procedures Act to the many research agencies, the inspectors general, the justice department, which for example, has to be fact-based. If a government stops being fact-based, it becomes tyrannical. It's just that simple. It's fascinating, Jonathan. I mean, one thing that I pick up from what you're saying is that there is a gulf in our experience of how knowledge gets accumulated if we haven't worked in one of those environments that you just pointed to. When I'm talking to friends who have never worked in a newsroom or a science lab or

an academic institution or a court of law or the public service, for example, where they're not familiar with the processes that are in place to sort fact from nonsense, then I think there can be an assumption that the reason why we're losing our way and why there's so much bullshit, pardon the French, floating around at the moment is because bad actors just aren't doing a good enough job of being honest. And the problem, as you articulated, is actually thornier than that. It's not that there are bad people who are being dishonest. It's that we have systems in place that are ignorant of the countervailing systems that are required in order to filter the best ideas. And if you've worked in a newsroom and you've ever had an editor come to you and say, you don't have it yet. You

don't have that story yet. You've got the shape of the story, but I need two more sources and we need someone on the record about this. Then it's hard to understand the kind of framework of truth seeking that supports and buttresses ourselves. I mean, I speak from personal experience here because I'm intentionally stepping out of that environment and I'm requiring myself to erect this artifice of truth-seeking on my own and kind of build the plane while it's flying. And Sam has done essentially the same thing of holding oneself accountable. But what do you want to say to people who've never been in that environment and who just think, well, the problem is that people are being nasty and lying?

is that people are being nasty and lying. This is a bad subject for me because I get defensive. I am old media incarnate. I work for The Atlantic, which is what, 1857. I used to work for The Economist, 1848. And I am a believer that there is a reason for all of those rules and norms, those layers of editing and copy editing and fact-checking that go into a traditional media establishment. It's very expensive. It's very exacting. I just went through two days of fact-checking at The Atlantic. It's an exhausting process. And what's frustrating for me, and maybe for you guys too, I don't know, is people out there in the world understandably think it's just easy. You know, why don't we just write what's true and not write what's false? Why are we so biased?

Why do we have all these blind spots? Why did we miss, you know, the distress that was leading to the election of Donald Trump? Why are we too far left? Why are we too far right? And there are certainly valid criticisms. There needs to be, I think, more diversity, ideological, in newsrooms. But what we are tasked to do every day is really hard. Come up with some coherent, accurate account of reality in a complicated world on very, very tight deadlines.

You know, scientists get two years to do what we have to do in two hours. So I guess I'd be whining to say the rest of the world should be more appreciative, but the truth is that's how I feel. Well, as you pointed out, I think the phrase that you use in the book is that turbulence is a source of stability, both politically and epistemically. So it's the fact that political factions can oppose one another and government is divided, no one one another wrong based on their own biases. I mean, all of that works to the advantage of truth and liberty on the political side in the end, except when it doesn't. Except, I mean, there's only so much turbulence that the system can use to its advantage. And I think what many of us are now worried about, and you certainly appear worried in your book, is that the current state of media, and journalism in particular, and social media, and the way in which the layer of social media

is interacting and putting pressure on media, it's just made this, the information landscape, a kind of hallucination machine, right? It's no longer tracking truth, or it's no, I think your phrase is something like, there's no longer a positive epistemic valence to all this chaos, or it seems certainly reasonable to worry that there's not. And in the book, you talk about how fear of new media is really quite old. I mean, it's as old as writing, and it's certainly as old as the printing press, which quite infamously stoked the fires of the Inquisition and the wars of religion. The Malleus Maleficarum, which was that great witch-finding manual of the 15th century, was one of the first bestsellers. So I'm not sure

at what point our nostalgia for the past should be focused. I mean, I think you also go into some detail in the book that the early days of American journalism were pretty ugly and fake news was really the standard of the time. But at a certain point, that changed. And most of us, as you just suggested, are nostalgic for some moment in the past when journalism seemed to be run by at least a sufficient number of adults in the room. Do you think that was always an illusion? And if not, how do you judge the current state of journalism? Perhaps we should take social media as a separate piece. Yeah, I was going to say one has to disaggregate. So I'd be very interested in Josh's view. He's closer actually to the newsroom these days than I am. I'd say you have to disaggregate,

and that the core values of mainstream media, places like the network newscasts, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, LA Times, those places still have their values intact, and they're struggling to defend them economically. And there's a huge crisis, and this doesn't need any embellishment on this show, but there's a huge problem with the business model, which is checking reality is extremely expensive. People think, you know, Hunter Biden's laptop, that came in 10 days before the election. Why wasn't it checked? Well, it took a team of Washington reporters

the better part of a year to check a handful of the material. It's just very expensive and time-consuming to do this work. But there I think that's the issue. I don't think it's really, we've seen the kind of corruption of values in mainstream media on anything like the scale that we've seen it in parts of academia, which really has become very politicized.

Others may disagree. They may say that I'm, you know, kind of whitewashing mainstream media so we can have that conversation. Did you read Bennett's Economist piece on the post-mortem from his firing from the New York Times? Yes, I did. Yeah, okay.

Yeah, I just want to make sure that those facts were in evidence. John, I can hear the new media listener, the younger listener perhaps, saying to you mentally, I mean, okay, so maybe it takes a year to absolutely fact check every aspect of the Hunter Biden laptop story, but why is that the bar for me as a voter to find out about it? Why can't we just have different categories of truth claims? And okay, if the New York Times doesn't want to publish something until they've absolutely got something where they can take it to the bank, that's fine. But I want to live in a media universe where I have access to information that might be true and that might be relevant. And so there has to be a mechanism by which I can know about the Hunter Biden laptop story without it being hidden from me because my grand poobah overlords say that I'm too stupid to

be able to sort fact from fiction. And we don't necessarily want to yield that space to the Tim Poole's and Alex Joneses and Mike Cernoviches of the world. There needs to be some other mechanism by which we can ascertain things that may be true without requiring them to meet the standard of traditional media. how younger people will like it. But this is not a new problem. Journalists have been wrestling for over 100 years since the age of the yellow press and the gutter media with, what do you do with salacious gossip? And the old rule was, well, you just print it. Because why not? It's fun. People read it. They eat it up. And then we got a different kind of system that emerged. And we got defamation lawsuits. And we got schools of journalism and lots of rules that said, if it isn't true, don't print it. That's irresponsible.

And we wound up with kind of a multi-tiered system where you had highbrow journalists, places like the New York Times. And if you saw it there, it was very likely to be checked and true. You know, they got stuff wrong, of course, but pretty darn responsible. And then you had the tabloid media and the gutter press and the gossip mags and the gossip columnists, and that's where the other stuff circulated. So people knew about it, but there were these different sort of levels of gatekeeping and credentialing, and that seemed to work pretty stably for a while. The problem today, of course, is who makes those decisions and why. It's really tough. For example,

what would you do with the Steele dossier? So this is a pile of unverified gossip, and that's all it even claims to be. Some guy goes out and collects a lot of gossip and writes it down because that's what he's been hired to do. He's not even saying it's true. He's just saying he's heard it. And then this circulates and it seems like everyone around Washington has seen it or read it. I didn't, but apparently a lot of people did. And then no one's publishing it because it's against the policy of the New York Times and the Washington Post to publish salacious, unverified, possibly completely false gossip about anybody, including Donald Trump. So they're trying to do the responsible thing. But then BuzzFeed says, well, to heck with that.

Everyone's reading this. The public should be able to read it, too. They published it. I think that was the wrong decision. Maybe that's old-fashioned of me, but a lot of people disagree. Ben Smith clearly disagrees. And I don't think we'll ever have a pat answer to this question, but I will tell you that I think that not thinking that this is a difficult question and that absolutely everything alleged by anyone should

be immediately published and transmitted around the world is a good answer. I don't think that's a good answer. But I don't know, what do you think? I mean, you worked at ABC. I mean, the challenge is that once the BuzzFeed publishes the piece, then the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal have to report on the existence of the controversy about the publication of the piece. So there's this meta story about the story, which it sort of would be derelict not to talk about because everybody's talking about the fact that BuzzFeed has published this thing. So then you get this weird situation

where readers of the legacy media are saying, hang on, they're talking about how this other place has published this other thing, but I don't even know what the underlying story actually is. I mean, it's tricky and it complicates, you know, one thing that I'd love you to talk about, and Sam, forgive me if I'm sort of hijacking this, but I'm interested in, you talk about this funnel of knowledge that journalism is up to, and academia, and the other institutions that you're talking about, where you want as large as possible a

mouth of the funnel, where there is total free speech, and everyone can say whatever they want, and that goes into the funnel. Then the funnel starts cranking away and doing its job. At the bottom of the funnel, you have these pearls of wisdom, you have these Willy Wonka everlasting gobstoppers of truth spitting out the bottom of the machine. The problem at the moment, as I have seen it working in the legacy media, is that there are constraints on what is going into the top of the funnel that the people who are imposing the constraints aren't even aware of as constraints. They don't identify their worldview as being a worldview. They don't identify their opinions as being opinions. I had a run-in with management at one organization because we had a difference of opinion about gay pride. And John, you and I are both gay. We have our own differences of opinion, probably not with each other, but with the rest of the gay universe. The extent to which, you know, oiled up, muscled men sitting astride giant inflatable penises going along on a march is constructive or useful to

young people who are trying to sort out their sexuality. I was trying to articulate that. I'm glad you got that phrase out. I use that phrase once every podcast, so glad we got it at the top here. And my employer was fully 100% pro-Pride. In fact, was the official broadcaster of Pride. And I got into a run-in where they weren't allowing me to articulate this point of view because they said that hosts, on-air talent are not allowed to express opinions about controversial social or political or cultural events. Now, everybody else on the air was expressing their support for Pride, but that doesn't land as an opinion for them.

That's just common sense. That's just being on the right side of history. That's just not being nasty. So the funnel ends up being curtailed in ways that they don't even notice it being curtailed. They're like, Josh isn't allowed to have his crazy opinion because that's a crazy opinion, but our beliefs aren't opinions. Our beliefs are just the truth. Well, so you need three things to make the constitution of knowledge work, and you need all three. And the first and most obvious is free thought, free inquiry, marketplace of ideas, enough said.

The second is you need the discipline of fact. You need a lot of people who are willing to follow a lot of very difficult rules governing who is allowed and not allowed to claim this or that as fact and under what circumstances, when is an experiment considered replicated, when does a newsroom go with the story, under what circumstances does it correct it, and all that. Discipline of fact is super hard and requires years of training. But then there's a third, and that's diversity of viewpoint. If everyone in a room is coming from the same place ideologically and sharing the same assumptions epistemically, then no learning will take place because these people will not be able to see each other's mistakes.

The whole system works because diversity of viewpoint allows me to see your biases and you to see mine because we can't see our own. And yes, one of the problems that I worry about and I know you worry about in journalism, but especially in sectors of academia like the social sciences and humanities, is the lack of viewpoint diversity. And the first symptom of that is when everyone agrees that something which is in fact quite contentious, for example, that human sexes are on a spectrum, not binary, for example, when they see that as not even contestable, that's telling you there probably aren't enough voices in the room. But that's a solvable problem, right? That's not inherent to the model of journalism. That means that, you alluded to your newsroom earlier, I guess maybe I shouldn't call out any particular outlet, but the implication is that those people you were working with need to hire

some people from different educational backgrounds with different ideological priors for the sake just of professionalism, just of doing the job correctly. And yeah, we've fallen down on that. There has been an effort in American newsrooms to diversify intellectually, but we've got a long way to go. It's funny that you use the word diversify because diversity is the load star the goal of all of this but the diversity that they're looking for is a diversity of skin color and genitals not a diversity of thought or class or economic background editor at a a major magazine you you all heard of told me a couple years ago that he gets the resumes of which

are many come to him through a funnel of some sort. And he said he gets 25 or 50 versions of the same resume. And that's hard to change. Isn't there some explanation for a weird class filter in journalism in particular? Become a journalist is often the first rung on the ladder is sort of the unpaid or underpaid internship at some wonderful institution. And the only people who can do that are the people who are taking their summers between their years in an Ivy League institution, and it's all funded by their rich families and et cetera? Well, you're cutting close to the bone, Sam, because in 1981, I started my journalism career as a summer intern and was unpaid for that summer here in Washington, D.C., and I could afford to do that. And yes, shame on unpaid internships. I guess I'd be curious for your views on that. In some ways, we're better in that respect because there's so many more paths in now. There are all these 20-somethings that have substacks and podcasts

and get noticed through these alternative channels that don't require you to be well-heeled. I think the problem has more to do with the kinds of people who are attracted to journalism, and for that matter, anthropology, and some of the self-selection that's going on there. It's going to take positive effort to go out and look at state schools that you've never hired from, and where you're not getting referrals from professors and saying, okay, who here could be a journalist? Maybe someone with an unconventional background. When I entered journalism in, my first job was in North Carolina now 40 years ago, there

were still the last remnants of what we thought of as blue collar journalism. I don't know if you've heard that phrase. But journalists, reporters were not always people with Ivy League degrees or Swarthmore humanities backgrounds. They were just good writers who showed up and did the work. And there is this wonderful old reporter named Jesse Poindexter, covered the courts. He'd been covering the courts for like a generation. And he knew where every body in the county was buried, and he knew what was going on with every corrupt cop and judge. And he wrote like a generation. And he knew where everybody in the county was buried, and he knew what was going on with every corrupt cop and judge, and he wrote like a dream. But I can tell you, he was not

the product of Yale. And we were better for that. It seems to me there's a tension between this call for diversity and another point, which I think you make in your book, which is that at least at some layer of the liberal epistemic order relies on elite consensus, right? We need elites who are qualified to judge the truth claims in their area of specialization. We need institutions that create the norms that allow that machinery of truth testing and fallibilism to operate intergenerationally. And we need a population of, by definition, non-elites with respect to any specific area of specialization that trusts those institutions, trusts their products. It's not to say that they're not capable of error, but the error

correction within physics is going to come from physicists and people who have taken the time on the basis of whatever advantages they've had, but intellectually above all, quantitatively above all, to actually play that language game to the point of being able to produce some work product that the rest of us can rely upon. Again, to a first approximation, all the while knowing that,

again, you make this point beautifully in the book at some point, truth is not a destination, it's a direction. It's like a north on the compass. It's not that you arrive at the North Pole and you're done, it's just you have to navigate. So we need people who are adequate based on their expertise to provide a conversation about reality that is directionally correct. And you have another sentence in the book, which I underlined as really, it sums up more or less everything that concerns me intellectually, ethically,

politically, even spiritually. And it's such a simple sentence, but it's when I hit upon it, you should have seen my face. And the sentence is, there is only one reality-based community, right? And that is such a deep insight. It says everything about the situation we are in and the degree to which it's misconstrued in so many fashionable disciplines. And it says everything about the unity of knowledge and the possibility of consilience between disciplines, however disparate. And yet, I think we're now living in a world where, based on the algorithmic derangement of

more or less everybody, we're losing our connection to that even as an ideal. We're certainly losing our grip on a shared civic reality. And largely, I think social media is to blame, but I think alternative media is largely to blame. And what I continually call podcastistan, it's not functioning by the same norms and scruples of traditional journalism. People are just freewheeling in front of the microphone and platforming anyone who has an opinion. However, you know, and they're just, they're in no position to debunk the confabulation of maniacs in real time. And therefore this stuff just gets believed at scale. And so it does seem like a new moment

to me where you have, and we can talk about it through the lens of any specific problem. I think I'd like to talk about how you both view what COVID has done to us so we can get to that. And I think we should cover politics as well. But, you know, feel free to react to what I just said. So the two of you are at least as well positioned as I am to assess kind of how we're doing at scale on the big question of society's attachment to reality. the reality-based community, the legal professions, lots of academics who are not corrupted, lots of mainstream journalists, lots of lawyers, as we saw in the Trump administration, who really are hanging on and trying to defend the norms of the Constitution of Knowledge. Simple stuff, but important stuff, like you don't go into court and lie, and you get sanctioned if you do,

ask Sidney Powell. So there's still a lot of institutional integrity that is trying to defend itself. It often doesn't know how to defend itself. As exhibit A, I would submit three university presidents who bombed in Congress, who said the right thing about what their policies were, which is it depends on context to know if the speech is allowable, but did not know how to make the case behind that statement. So that's on us. It's on us liberals to do a better job of defending these principles and understanding these principles. And that's why I wrote the book. But then you have all that other stuff out there, which you allude to, Sam. And that's the big, bewildering, blooming, buzzing, chaotic, anarchic world of social media and blogs and the fact that anyone on Twitter can project a voice. And there you have a problem which is not new.

It's very old, but it's been amplified by these technologies, which there are a lot of ways to manipulate humans cognitively. Even, by the way, very smart humans, such as the three of us. We can be manipulated in all sorts of ways that our attention can be hijacked. That's what trolling does. You know, if I say enough terrible things about Sam Harris, he's going to have to respond or his reputation will be damaged. Or things like just repeating lies and so forth. Firehose of falsehood, disinformation campaigns. There are just all kinds of things you can do in an environment that's completely unregulated by institutional

norms. And people are doing them. This is not the first time this has happened. It takes a while for institutions to figure out rules of the road and how to renorm, and I'm not completely sure how that happens this time or whether it happens this time, but I agree with you that the environment in which those committed to the constitution of knowledge are swimming is, it's very challenging right now. I find it somewhat terrifying, the media landscape that we're, that I'm entering, I suppose, because John, it's not just that, it's not, the problem is not just the way that you articulate it, which is that there is an, you know, we're in an environment that's unregulated by institutional norms, by the kinds of productive fact-checking that you talk about in your book.

It's not an unregulated environment. It's an environment regulated by precisely the wrong incentives. Algorithms are encouraging us to produce content that maximizes people's time spent on apps. That means that they want us to engage. That means that they want us to like posts, share posts, comment on posts. And that is agnostic as to whether or not we're doing those things because they reinforce what we already believe or because they caricature and demonize things that we don't believe. But it has to be one or the other. If you're in the nuance game, if you're in the game of truth is not a destination, it is a process, then you are leaving a lot of listeners on the table

who you could be getting. I mean, Sam and I could both have bigger audiences. I don't know how you get a bigger audience than Sam's, but we could have a bigger audience if we decided to try to poke at elite consensus a bit more and be really edgy and follow these dissenting voices who are sticking it to the man and raising things that nobody else is brave enough to talk about. I mean, I think there are legitimate conversations and clearly Sam does as well that we need to be brave enough to talk about. You just alluded to there being two sexes, John, which is going to get us all fired and cancelled, obviously. There is a space in which there are blind spots that the legacy media has that we can step in and constructively fill, but the majority of what's going on online is being driven by... If you're a young journalist

starting out, just to come back to the question of an unpaid internship, for example, if you're a young journalist starting out, just to come back to the question of an unpaid internship, for example, if you're starting out on YouTube or Podcasterstan, the easiest thing to do is to try to point out how shady and suspicious elite institutions are, including the mainstream media, and to have on a bunch of people who are conspiracy theory adjacent. I mean, the last time, one of the few times that I've accidentally blown up the internet was I've done Joe Rogan's show seven times. And the last time I was on here and I got into a spat about vaccines and about whether vaccines cause myocarditis in certain populations at a rate that is higher than COVID does. And it was one of these just arcane moments that momentarily everybody looks at because there's a conflict about a subject where there hasn't been an honest reckoning in

podcaster stand. There's like these two rival points of view. One is the mainstream media and elite institutions are shutting us up, which to some extent is true because legacy media, when it feels threatened by alternative narratives like lockdowns are going too far, or there are problems with vaccines that aren't being properly articulated by public health bureaucrats, then the legacy media responds by circling the wagons and closing ranks and trying to insist that it has the one truth, which just makes people more suspicious and makes them go to

non-legacy independent media outlets that are then cashing in people's curiosity and desire for salacious conspiracy theories by feeding them nonsense. So you've got the constitution of knowledge funneling people towards their everlasting gobstopper of truth. And then you've got this reverse funnel, which is pushing people into a climate of bullshit. And the in-between space is one that we have to foster and water and tender and grow. And that garden is withering. And I'm not sure how to empower it without completely changing the economics of social media. Well, so Josh, why do you do it the way you're doing it if you could get more followers and make more money and be more famous by, I don't know, trolling Sam Harris and me.

Because I'm not a whore. And why not? I mean, there must be some incentives that are driving you to try to stick to norms. 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. The podcast is available to everyone

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