Making Sense with Sam Harris - #365 — Reality Check

Episode Date: May 1, 2024

Sam Harris begins by remembering his friendship with Dan Dennett. He then speaks with David Wallace-Wells about the shattering of our information landscape. They discuss the false picture of reality produced during Covid, the success of the vaccines, how various countries fared during the pandemic, our preparation for a future pandemic, how we normalize danger and death, the current global consensus on climate change, the amount of warming we can expect, the consequence of a 2-degree Celsius warming, the effects of air pollution, global vs local considerations, Greta Thunberg and climate catastrophism, growth vs degrowth, market forces, carbon taxes, the consequences of political stagnation, the US national debt, the best way to attack the candidacy of Donald Trump, 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.

Thank you. 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. Okay, well, my friend Dan Dennett died about 10 days ago. I was traveling, and then I got sick and couldn't record, so I'm just now getting an opportunity to say a few things about him. As I'm sure all of you know, Dan was an extraordinarily productive philosopher.

He really distinguished himself among philosophers by taking science seriously. This is evident throughout his books. But his book, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, in which he argues that Darwin's notion of natural selection was simply the best idea anyone has ever had, is really a wonderful bridge between philosophy and science. And it's among many that Dan built. One often hears philosophy as a discipline denigrated, especially by scientists and technologists. And there's even an implicit denigration in some of Dan's work,

and in some of mine as well. I think it's worth clarifying this. Dan often approached philosophy as a kind of handmaiden to science, and he was definitely not alone in doing this. On this view, the chief purpose of philosophy is to clear up conceptual confusion and to spot the many forms of learned error and well-trained ignorance that develop, even in science, so that we can get on with the work of actually understanding the world. The philosopher Bernard Williams once said that the problem with this approach to philosophy is that philosophy can't do what science does, that is, produce new knowledge.

So it gives the impression that philosophy is just what scientists sound like when they're off-duty. And I understand this criticism as well. It's a little hard to say what philosophy is, or should be, really. It's been many things historically. And I agree that as an academic discipline, It's been many things historically, and I agree that as an academic discipline, there are many backwaters and dry patches that one need not explore, or exploring them one shouldn't get stuck there. Generally, my view of philosophy is that it's not so much its own discipline at this point as it is clarity of thought with the special purpose of making sense of our lives and of our knowledge of the world. Its purpose isn't to do the work of science, or of history, or of journalism, or of any other field in which we produce knowledge. Its purpose is to think

clearly about what the discoveries in those fields mean, or might mean. The point of philosophy is to see how all the puzzle pieces fit together. I'm not sure that Dan would have agreed with that, but he certainly spent a lot of time working on the part of the puzzle that contains biology and psychology and cognitive science. I didn't get to spend that much time with Dan in person. We attended several conferences together over a couple of decades. Perhaps the first was the second Beyond Belief conference at the Salk Institute in 2007. We went to TED together and Ciudad de las Ideas in Mexico, where we participated in a weird debate, which pitted him and me and Christopher Hitchens against Rabbi Shmuley

Botiak, Robert Wright, Dinesh D'Souza, and Nassim Taleb, none of whom made a bit of sense. Really, if you want to see some brains totally misfire, watch what those guys had to say on that occasion. The podium was set in a mock boxing ring, and we were standing in front of 5,000 mostly religious and, I think, mostly bewildered Mexicans. Needless to say, it was an honor to share the stage with Dan and Hitch. Dan and I also went to various atheist and free thought conferences together. Actually, before Mexico, we taped a conversation with Hitch and Richard Dawkins in Hitch's apartment. That was before an atheist conference in D.C.

Video of that conversation is still available on YouTube. And the transcript got worked up into a book titled The Four Horsemen, to which the inimitable Stephen Fry wrote a preface. I think the last time I actually saw Dan might have been eight years ago at TED, and he was always great company. Beyond wanting to discuss serious ideas, he just loved life. He loved good food and wine and music and the beauty of nature. He was a big guy with a very big appetite for living, and it was infectious. However, like many of my professional friendships,

most of my relationship with Dan took place over email, and I spent the better part of a day and night last week rereading this correspondence, going back 20 years. It was frankly a little alarming to see how much I'd forgotten. And reading this had a strange effect because I realized at some point that it was not so much reminding me of Dan as it was allowing me to relive my primary experience of him. Because again, most of our relationship was a matter of exchanging these emails in the first place. So I read through hundreds of emails and relived a lot of fun and not so fun moments with Dan. I saw the moment Dan, Richard, and I consciously inducted Hitch into our circle. Apparently people had been

referring to the three of us as the three horsemen of the apocalypse, which I don't actually remember, and we decided that Hitch would be the perfect fourth, which of course he was. I saw the planning that went on for a wonderful dinner we had at Hitch's apartment in Washington, before which we recorded that two-hour conversation. I was amazed to see how excited Dan was to be doing this. He really was having a lot of fun. So reading this correspondence gave me a second helping of my friendship with Dan, and with many others, with Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins and Hitch. In many cases, there were several of us on various threads together.

I just came away so grateful to have had these guys in my corner. Looking back at all these exchanges, I can see that I was often tempted to be more pugnacious than would have been useful. And Dan especially came to my rescue. And I'd forgotten pretty much all of these interventions. Dan was in his mid to late 60s when we had most of our correspondence, and I was in my early 40s. As I said, there were often others on the thread, Richard and Steve, and sometimes our mutual agent, John Brockman. Richard and I tend to be pretty similar in wanting to say things as intemperately as we think them.

And Dan was always the voice of moderation. And there were definitely times when I needed to hear that voice. The encouragement and the criticism and the congratulations when things went well. All of these guys gave me a lot. And Dan gave me a lot. And I'd forgotten how much. gave me a lot, and I'd forgotten how much. As I said, most of our correspondence came earlier on during the Four Horsemen slash New Atheist period, where we had a bit of a good cop, bad cop routine going. Dan was the good cop, and Richard, Hitch, and I were the bad ones, and I think he liked it that way. Needless to say, he still caught a lot of our bad press. Most people treated us like a four-headed atheist. However, in truth, Dan's contributions to new atheism were different. In his book, Breaking the Spell, his purpose wasn't to prove religion wrong or to denounce its evils. Rather, he wanted to explain why so many people persist in defending

the indefensible. He argued that it wasn't that so many people sincerely believe in God, but rather they believed in belief, and even many atheists believed in belief. Now, Dan and I were both capable of overreacting to criticism and to what we perceive to be unfair attacks. As I review our emails, I see we each admonish the other to be more measured in our responses than we often managed in our first drafts. We would occasionally show each other essays and letters to the editor. Needless to say, all of this admonishment is somewhat adorable, Needless to say, all of this admonishment is somewhat adorable, given that when we fell out over free will, we gave each other both barrels, both in public and in private. And you can read the public version of that on my blog somewhere. I believe it's all there, including his initial review of my book, Free Will, to which I reacted badly.

It took us about two years to bury the hatchet, and you can hear how fully we did that in a conversation I recorded at the TED conference in 2016, which again I think might be the last time I ever saw Dan in person. And you can hear that conversation on episode 39 of this podcast. Dan and I didn't agree about free will. I'm not even sure we agreed about what we disagreed about, nor did we agree about other topics in the philosophy of mind, like the hard problem of consciousness. And like many of my smart friends, Dan had no interest in meditation, but we both loved reason and science and the other principles that produce real intellectual life and political freedom, and I will definitely miss Dan's voice. My heart goes out to Susan, his wife, and the rest of his family, and to his many friends and students who were much closer to him than

I was. I am very sorry for your loss. Okay. There are just a few things going on in the world at the moment. Campus protests, Iran. No doubt I will talk about all of that soon. Today I'm speaking with David Wallace-Wells. soon. Today I'm speaking with David Wallace-Wells. David is a best-selling science writer and essayist who focuses on climate change, technology, and the future of the planet and how we live on it. David has been a national fellow at the New America Foundation, a columnist and deputy editor at New York Magazine. Previously he was at the Paris Review, and now he is a regular columnist for the New York Times. He is also the author of a much-celebrated book on climate change

titled The Uninhabitable Earth. We covered a lot of ground here. We talk about the pollution of our information landscape, much of it through the lens of COVID. We discuss the false picture of reality that so many people acquired during COVID, how the various countries fared during the pandemic, our preparation for future pandemics, how we naturally normalize danger and death. Then we move on to climate change. We talk about the current global consensus, the amount of warming we can expect, the effects of air pollution quite apart from warming, global versus local considerations, Greta Thunberg and climate catastrophism, growth versus degrowth, the role of market forces, carbon taxes, the consequences of political

stagnation, the U.S. national debt, the best way to attack the candidacy of Donald Trump. I thought David had a very good idea on this front, as you'll hear, and we cover a few other topics. And now I bring you David Wallace-Wells. I am here with David Wallace-Wells. David, thanks for joining me. My pleasure. Great to be here. So how did you get into journalism? I associate you with New York Magazine and the New York Times. Are you currently affiliated with both, or is it just the New York Times? Just the Times, yeah. I write a weekly piece for the

opinion sections, basically a column that goes out as a newsletter. And I write a column for the magazine once a month and some features too. And I've been there for about almost two years now. Right. A long time before that at New York. And before that, a somewhat bumpier road. I worked at Slate. I worked in book publishing. I worked at the New York Sun, this neocon newspaper in New York. And yeah, just in the Paris Review as a deputy editor at the literary magazine for a while. Oh, cool. I like the Paris Review, especially those iconic interviews with writers. Yeah, they're incredible.

That was one of the best part of the job was I did one with William Gibson, but I edited a bunch of them. And they're also much more collaborative than you may think at the outset. So you're basically writing it with the writer who's being interviewed all the time. Nice. And how would you describe your political orientation? Yeah. You know, I, um, about 10 years ago, I was writing a profile of this, this guy, Ben Kunkel, who's a, was one of the founders of N plus one and is a pretty left-wing guy. And as it happens, also pretty concerned with the climate, which I became later on. And he asked me the same question during the, during the reporting. And I said, you know, I, I think I'd have to call myself a neoliberal. And he just like rolled out of his chair laughing, thinking like how ridiculous it could be for someone to call themselves a neoliberal. And he just like rolled out of his chair laughing, thinking like how ridiculous it could be for someone to call themselves a neoliberal. You know, I'm a child of the 90s.

I grew up in, I was born in 82 and grew up in New York in the 90s. And I think on some animal level, I processed all of the meta-narratives of that era quite deeply. So I was, you know, a sophisticated enough teenager to think that. So I was, you know, a sophisticated enough teenager to think that progress wasn't inevitable, you know, prosperity and justice weren't laws of the universe, but that over long enough timelines, we were kind of moving in the right direction and that the U.S. was part of that story. And I've had like a lot of people, a kind of a bumpier last decade or decade and a half where a lot of those assumptions seem much less safe to me to make and the world seems much messier and more complicated than I thought it was

both domestically and internationally and probably it's also meant that I've moved quite a bit to the left of where I was when I described myself as a neoliberal 10 or 12 years ago. But I also think of myself as someone who is pretty resistant to tribal thinking and team-based thinking about the world and spend a fair amount of time, I think, trying to interrogate anything I see in myself as a kind of doctrinaire position or perspective. And that means often getting irritated and frustrated with people who I think of as political allies, because I don't think they're being quite serious enough about, you know, asking themselves the hard questions. Hmm. Yeah. So I want to cover a bunch of topics here, which are, you know, on the surface, they seem unrelated, but they're all connected to what many of us perceive to be our degrading capacity to talk about problems and implement solutions.

There's a political dysfunction. There's a failure to converge in any kind of reasonable timeframe in a fact-based discussion on a statement of what's happening in the world. It's kind of a shared reality. So let's start with the information landscape, which you probably agree, many of us perceive it as just astonishingly polluted at this moment. And the one problem is that any attempt to clean it up is considered to be censorship by at least half of our society. I mean, now we're taking an American perspective here, although this is probably true across much of the world. And I wouldn't say that censorship is never a problem, but many people consider any effort to contain

is never a problem, but many people consider any effort to contain algorithmically amplified lies and however consequential as a step toward some kind of dystopia. And even to worry about misinformation and disinformation, as I've begun to do in these previous sentences, among Republicans, certainly, is just to be branded some kind of elitist stooge at this point, right? These are just not problems. So I'm just wondering how you view, I mean, there's the media and social media side of this, and then the political side, right? And the rise of populism, especially. How do you view the current moment and what's it like to navigate it as a journalist at the Times? I think it's a big mess. When my colleagues or, you know, people in the sort of mainstream establishment media talk about these issues, they often do talk about, you know,

disinformation and they're talking about the distortions of social media and the way that it inflames many of our sort of intuitive tribal feelings about the world and the state of the world. I tend to think that the changes that we've seen over the last five years are kind of bigger and more fundamental than that. I, you know, 20 years ago, people worried a lot about American culture trending in a, you know, years ago, people worried a lot about American culture trending in a, you know, kind of idiocracy, dystopia direction. We worried about the dumbing down of our population, of our culture. And, you know, I think there are certain ways in which that's undeniably unfolding. On the other hand, I think in the last five or 10 years, as this incredible explosion of pretty high-minded, years as this incredible explosion of pretty high-minded, pretty serious curiosity, you know,

in other parts of the new media landscape. So you can see certain algorithmic problems when you're looking at, you know, Twitter or TikTok. But when you look at what's happening on YouTube or in podcasts, it seems to me like we just have a huge new population of people who demographically and professionally a half generation ago would not have been really intellectuals now playing the role of intellectuals in public, but also many of them just processing news from the world on their own. And, you know, on some level that has to be progress and it has to be a good thing when i think about you know just imagining the equivalent like silicon valley elite from 20 years ago they were just not you know listening to three-hour podcasts about you know some 17th century event or like you know the path of the plague through europe, or whatever it is. It just was a very different kind of more business-centered culture,

and that's true of more traditional business centers too. And now I think almost everyone of some education and sort of status thinks of themselves as a thinker, and thinks of part of their job as figuring out the state of the world in the future. And that is, you know, like I said, you kind of have to count it as progress. On the other hand, it's meant that it's possible for many of us to treat those conversations, which are in many ways abstracted and separated from the way the real world is unfolding, as though those conversations are the real world and not to

confront ourselves or be confronted with contrary facts or contrary arguments. And so we have this combination of forces where we have many people thinking and talking in much more sophisticated and informed ways, but producing just an awful lot of, I think, pretty damaging narrativization and mischaracterization of all the shifts that we're living through. And, you know, it's maybe because of what I cover and what I write about. It's also because of, you know, the recent history that we've all lived through. But I think of this, I guess, primarily in terms of the pandemic, where it almost seemed like every month I was both arguing with journalists at places like the New York Times about how they were describing the pace of the pandemic and the course of the pandemic and what it sort of required of us, and also arguing with contrarians who seem

to be far too extreme in their rejection of establishment wisdom and establishment understanding. rejection of establishment wisdom and establishment understanding. And I don't know, given the information landscape that we've landed in now in 2024, against the political backdrop in which all of that's unfolding, whether we can get back to a place where, you know, we have to argue from real facts with one another. But it does seem like a quite, But it does seem like a quite, quite distressing situation where, you know, you have pretty prominent people with pretty large followings and whose followings have grown a lot over the last five years talking about the course of the pandemic, really, really, I think, overcorrecting for some of the real oversights and shortcomings of conventional public health messaging, but overcorrecting in ways that I think are, you know, have left us in a worse place. And, you know, we could talk about some of the particulars there, but in the big picture,

it's like half of states, I think, have passed laws restricting the ability of public health officials to impose any behavioral restrictions in the face of a future pandemic, independent of how transmissible or lethal that pandemic might be. You know, reasonable people can say, can take issue with the way that the American pandemic was handled. But like the idea that we should do absolutely nothing in the face of all possible future pandemic threats just seems to me to be just a horrible overcorrection and a real indictment of how, you know, how narrow minded, narrow mindedly we're all thinking about what we just went through and the lessons it really offers us. thinking about what we just went through and the lessons it really offers us. Yeah. Well, let's look at this through the lens of COVID because I think it was transformational on multiple fronts and, you know, I think diagnostic of much that ails us. I mean, you sound more sanguine about the signal that's in the noise than I feel on most days. I mean,

that's in the noise than I feel on most days. I mean, when thinking about what I continue to refer to as podcastistan and substakistan, the main places of alternative media where you can see the virtually complete erosion of trust in our institutions, more or less, the evidence of it just clocks in, you know, minute by minute, you know, in all of these conversations. And so that even, you know, the most esteemed journal on earth, which you work for, the New York Times, has very little

status out there in the wilds of podcasts and YouTube. And I mean, it's just, it's... Or it has negative status, right? It's the punching bag. Yeah. I mean, it really is, you know, it would be referred to as, you know, sneeringly as a source. I mean, just to tell you, so COVID is a good place to start because I think it is true to say that if you polled the audiences of the biggest podcasts, I mean, you start with Joe Rogan and work your way down, I think you would find a totally bewildering inversion of reality. And it would be believed with something like religious zeal, which is to say that, I obviously don't have these data, but if you could find me a casino where I could place this bet, I would wager a lot on it.

If you polled Rogan's audience, I think you would find that a majority believe that COVID was basically a non-issue. It was just, at the end of the day, not really much worse than the flu. And who knows really how many people died from it? I mean, surely the data are massively exaggerated. Lots of people died with COVID and not from COVID, including people getting hit by buses. Whereas many, many people, possibly many millions of people have been killed by the vaccines, right? I mean, the vaccines have been just a disaster, and one that was really just engineered to not only harm us in some strange way and produce windfall profits for the nefarious pharmaceutical companies, but really they were tools of social control, right? Somebody over in Davos just decided one day that they were going to figure out how to subvert democracies globally and get people to bend the knee to all kinds of Orwellian strictures that we acquiesce to perversely, just maddeningly, and to our shame. And what you need are the renegades like RFK Jr. to reboot the

system from someplace outside it where all establishments are distrusted eternally. We need the Snowdens of the world to leak everything and the Vivek Ramaswamis of the world to drive out the moneylenders. And this is just, it's just corruption, institutional corruption as far as the eye can see. And the whole COVID story, the lesson to learn from the pandemic is that it was just a colossal act of self-harm and nothing, literally nothing is as the New York Times would say it is, right? That I think is well over 50% of the audience believe something like that. I mean, feel free to react to that, but I just, and this is an audience that is, arguably this is an audience that is on any given day considerably bigger than

any other audience that you could name. These are podcast episodes where the numbers of listeners, you know, at the end of the week or at the end of the month exceed, you know, the finale of Game of Thrones, right? I mean, these are just enormous numbers of people listening to these long-form conversations. Yeah. And, you know, at a baseline, I would say I agree with just about everything you've said and your perspective on it all. And I think it's really, you know, damaging and worrisome. A few things to mention. One is, you know, a lot of these fears as they were expressed, especially early on in the pandemic about this sort of Orwellian takeover, really have not come to pass in

any meaningful way, which is to say, even taking seriously the possibility that somebody might have been trying to get you to take a vaccine for some nefarious future purpose, or they were trying to lock you in your home for some, you know, out of some sense of, you know, social control. All of that pressure disappeared relatively quickly. We are not living in the world that, you know, Naomi Wolf warned us about. We're not living in a world in which we're being pinned down and syringes forced into our arms every six months. We're not being tested as we walk out the door.

We're not being told that we can't leave our homes. We're not being told we can't go to school. The long-term vision that was offered as this kind of, this is a stepping stone, a global stepping stone to a kind of new totalitarian order, just has obviously not come to pass. There was a period of time in 2020 when our lives were restricted to some degree. But I think even in remembering that history, we often overstate how significant and how intrusive those restrictions really were and how politically divisive they were. If you look at the data, all through 2020, red states and blue states across the board imposed roughly the same

level of restrictions. They all closed schools at the same time. They all restricted social gatherings at the same time. They all issued mask advisories at the same time. By the fall of 2020, there was some difference starting to emerge between red states and blue states, but it was relatively small. And if you look at the mobility data that Google and others have assembled, people were still moving around at somewhere between 90 and 98% of what they'd been doing before the pandemic. We remember that time now, so many of us, as a period of intense government-directed lockdown. And mostly, it wasn't that. Mostly, it was a culture of fear, partly cultivated by public officials, I think for good reason, but partly cultivated by them,

but also embodied and instantiated by individuals who were largely scared. And I think in retrospect, we've made this collective mistake. And this is the big point I want to make is this is not just like an information problem about what Joe Rogan says about the pandemic. It's a problem at the level of the consumer, too. So many people have revised their own memories of the pandemic or have a distorted memory of that period and think of it as a much more aggressive, much longer lasting, much more restrictive regime than we really had, I think, to sort of pin the blame for all of the disruption on someone else, as opposed to really reckoning with what it meant that given the facts, and we all basically did know the facts, we did know roughly what the fatality rate was, we did know what the age skew of the disease was, all of those things were publicly available in the winter of 2020. You know, as early as the first data coming out of China, all of that has been really quite remarkably vindicated in the years since.

Responding to that set of facts and that set of data, most of us had a really quite panicked response. Even if we knew that, you know, I'm 41 years old, even if I was, you know, whenever 37 when the pandemic hit, even if I knew that the risk of dying given an infection was incredibly low for a healthy 37-year-old male, I was still scared to get the disease. And part of that was because I was spending time with my father-in-law, who was immunocompromised and older, but part of it was just pure pandemic fear. I think a huge amount of what we remember as the emotional, social, and political disruptions of 2020 are or were projections of that fear, which we don't want to acknowledge and we want to blame someone else for. And so we've kind of collectively decided, and again, this is not just in Substakistan, it's among good liberals I know in Brooklyn, we decided that we went too far.

And that if we had the chance to do it again, we would do things differently. We'd be much more open and much more voluntary. And, you know, that is, I think, a bad lesson to take going forward, especially if we're going to apply it to potential future pandemics that could be considerably worse. But it's also just at the level of truth-telling, delusional. But the audience I'm talking about, for the most part, didn't feel that same fear. I mean, they were not afraid of the disease, or they were not as afraid of the disease as you were in Brooklyn or wherever you were. But they were quite afraid, and remain so, of the vaccines. quite afraid and remain so of the vaccines. That was the thing that really spooked them,

the idea that these novel vaccines who are doing who knows what to your DNA, which now may have yet killed millions, even tens of millions, and that information is being suppressed by the powers that be. I mean, that's where this has gone for that audience. I think that's absolutely true. But I think it also tells you something about the timeline, which is to say that the real partisan gaps opened up with behavior and response to the disease, not in 2020, but in 2021. You started to see them in the fall of 2020, but then they really opened up with the arrival of vaccines. And then there was another bump when there was a consideration.

They were never really implemented, but a consideration of vaccine mandates later on in 2021. And I agree that that is the thing that now dominates. It's the sort of it's the looking glass through which our memory of or the prism through which our memory of the of the pandemic has been has been distorted. And I think it's I think it's I mean, from my perspective, the vaccines are and were a miracle. We could have actually gotten them a lot faster, but even getting them within 10 months or 11 months counts as one of the great achievements in human history. arrived, they, you know, if they were taken in great enough numbers, they essentially eliminated the pandemic in one go. In the UK, for instance, they had much worse, two big initial waves that were much worse than we had in the US. And they got the vaccines and basically haven't had anything comparable since. The US is a little bit of a murkier picture because we had, you know, less successful vaccine uptake. And yeah, to your point, it's just, you know, it's just if we if we can tell ourselves stories that involve something like 10, 15, 20 million vaccine deaths, if we can even entertain that idea without feeling like the world is contradicting us, we're in a really bad place. And that's the place that

we're in right now. And I think some of the natural features of COVID played a role here. I think that it's significant that the fatality rate was something like 1% at the population level. It's changes based on the demographic structure of the population, but something like 1%, which means that even if you knew 100 people who got sick, probably you may only know one or two people or even zero people who actually died from it. And it allows you, especially as a survivor on the other side of the pandemic, to look back and think it was not that big a deal. But of course, we know. We know not just from official COVID deaths and death certificates. We know from the excess mortality studies that the U.S. has lost something like 1.1, 1.2 million people that we would not have

lost in the absence of the pandemic. We know that it's almost entirely driven by COVID-19 because the waves of those excess deaths matches perfectly the waves of infection as they pass through the country, as they pass through states, as they pass through local communities. There's no reason that if the problem were lockdowns, that we would be having huge surges when there was a wave of infections and not a week later when people were still locked in their homes, but the number of infections were lower. It's just indisputable that this was a major disease. It was primarily punishing us because of how novel it was, how inexperienced our immune systems were. But, you know, it proved at the global scale to be incredibly punishing.

Best estimates are something like 25 or 30 million people died. And best estimates are that those vaccines, as they rolled out, saved several multiples of that number of lives, which means this is really one of the great medical, biomedical, and political and social interventions in the history of the world. And exactly why the people who turned against it turned against it is an incredibly complicated, deep question. I'm sure you have lots of thoughts, but I would just start by saying, you know, as a counterfactual, it's interesting to consider the possibility that the vaccines were approved before the election, before, you know, before the Biden-Trump election. You know, there's some reporting, I think, plausible that the approval was delayed out of fear that it would be used in a political way, but probably the original timeline would have meant the vaccines were given approval just before the election. It's possible, given the margins of that election, that Donald Trump might have benefited, you know, to a re-election on the basis of those approvals. And then how the country, particularly the sort of, you know, I don't know exactly how you want to characterize

on the political spectrum what you're calling sub-Stakistan. It's, you know, it's some mix of center-right and fringe, including, and and you know, and some just fringe independent of particular political ideologies. But exactly how those people would have responded to the vaccine if Donald Trump was president and his people were designing the rollout is, I think it's a really important and interesting counterfactual history to consider. I think it's quite possible that we'd be living in a much less pandemic divided nation than we are now. But that's not to say that there's much that we could be living in a much less pandemic-divided nation than we are now. But that's not to say that there's much that we could do now or even in retrospect,

if we could take a time machine back in time to really change the course of that, or that we might want to. I mean, would it have been worth a second Trump term to have, you know, support for vaccines among Republicans at, you know, 75 instead of 55 percent. I don't know. Yeah. Although the few times that Trump has tried to take credit for the vaccine in front of a loving audience, he was instantly rebuked by that audience. Which is even more remarkable because he is such a tribune of the whole movement that almost anything he says becomes a cause for them. And the fact that they can follow him almost

anywhere, but not to the vaccines is really quite remarkable. On the other hand, I would just say as a baseline, important to keep in mind, 95% of American seniors got at least one shot by the end of 2021. And it's probably higher than that, but the CDC actually stopped counting at 95% because they don't want to like over promise. And they think that the data might get a little unreliable at that level, but it surpassed the threshold of 95% of American seniors. The risk of this disease was concentrated in seniors in a quite dramatic way. The age skew is, you know, for an 80 year old,old, it's like a thousand times more deadly than for an eight-year-old. And so like in a certain logical way, those are the people that we needed to get.

And we got almost all of them in the calendar year in which we began rolling out vaccines. And so we can compare ourselves to other countries in terms of vaccination uptake, especially among the middle-aged. We fell way behind, which is why when Delta came, so many more Americans died than in other countries. But on some level, like our first job here was to protect the elderly. And even in spite of the partisan dynamics, even in spite of the vaccine skepticism, we got the vast, vast, vast majority of the most vulnerable people, some protection on a relatively fast timeline. And so one of the things that we're talking about, I think, at least I'm talking about, is the way in which these questions and these debates almost separate from the facts on the ground, not just in terms of do we acknowledge how many people died of COVID,

do we acknowledge how many people took vaccines, but how many of the people who are expressing vaccine skepticism now took the vaccines? The data suggests quite a large share. And, you know, and are we treating the distortions of our discourse, the sort of ugliness of our public discourse around these issues as a substitute for the data that we know we have about who actually got the shots? And I'm just as appalled and horrified and scared about what the state of, you know, scientific discourse and public trust is as you are. But I also think there's some reasons to think that when you look at the actual, you know, behavioral data, not just with vaccines, but how much people are moving around, how much social distancing people were doing at various points of the pandemic, there was actually less division and less hostility to

behaviors that we could take to protect ourselves and protect those around us than it seems on the sort of narrative surface. Hmm. And do we still think the punchline was that something like 1.2 million Americans died unnecessarily or that we wouldn't have died from COVID, something like 300,000 more died than needed to die based on vaccine hesitancy, and something like three to four million lives were saved in the end by the vaccine. Do those numbers square with what you think you know? Yeah, the first number is the one that I think is a little complicated to assess. It's like, how do we think about that death toll? How much of that was avoidable? What other countries do we compare ourselves to? In the heat of the spring and summer of 2020, a lot of people were willing to say that the entire pandemic was Trump's fault and that every American death was on his desk and on his responsibility. Joe Biden said,

any president who's presided over a couple of hundred thousand American deaths does not deserve to be president. And Joe Biden has now presided over about 750,000 American deaths. So I think a lot of those narratives that we told ourselves at the outset of the pandemic were politically naive, epidemiologically naive. And it means that many of the deaths that we saw were probably on some level unavoidable. We shouldn't look at the scale of COVID death and say all of that is a sign of our national failing. The question of exactly what share of that 1.2 million was avoidable, I think people are going to be debating for generations. My own sense is, yeah, probably something like the share that you suggested, maybe a little bit more,

if it's maybe 500,000 of the 1.2 million could have been avoided. But hardly any country in the world really thrived and succeeded in ultimately containing the disease, even until the arrival of vaccines. Those countries which were celebrated in 2020 as being the most successful at limiting the spread of the disease, they ended up in a better place than the U.S. did or the U.K. did, but they didn't end up in a place that, you know, they had defeated the pandemic. Everybody suffered. And one of the things that's most remarkable to me about that is that you see, you know, political blowback even for those leaders in those countries who did quite well. So, Justin Ardern in New Zealand, you know, had to resign. I mean, not just because of her COVID

policies, but, you know, she was incredibly popular in 2020. And then by 2022 was incredibly unpopular in that country. There was a political backlash against Xi Jinping in China that was powered in part by the COVID lockdowns there, just from an epidemiological level, like China did well in containing the virus but there was he he suffered a huge backlash there you know and across across the world canada did relatively well but trudeau has suffered you know it's there's almost nobody who came out a hero at the level of national leader almost anywhere in the world whether they were somebody who suffered through a brutal pandemic or someone who managed a relatively easy one no matter what level

of suffering or what kind of suffering countries went through, almost all of them looked at their leaders and said, like, we don't like this guy's running things. And I think that gets back to something I was saying earlier, which is the way in which we're trying to make sense of the disruptions and suffering that we all went through over the last couple of years, in part by pinning blame on someone, some discrete authority, partly out of hopes that we could get them out of office or kick them out of power, or at least learn our lesson so that in the future we wouldn't listen to people like them. And, you know, I think the universality of that feeling across the world shows that it doesn't say all that much about how individual leaders manage things. It says a lot more about how hard it is to live through a pandemic, how much we don't

actually want to do that, and how much we want to pretend that it was possible to avoid. What about the response of Sweden, which was much maligned at the time as being reckless and then much celebrated as being, at worst, equivalent to what we did? What we did, I mean, they did not lock down in the way that we did. And as far as excess mortality viewed from this distance of hindsight, what do we think about Sweden? Well, I would say for sure the initial criticism was overstated. It turns out that even in 2020, before the arrival of vaccines, Sweden died a lot less than the United States did. And I think that is a really important distinction to make in thinking about all of these questions. It's like, how did we do before the vaccines and how did we do after the vaccines? Because in the big sweep of the pandemic, the most important factor in determining a country's outcomes was how many people got sick before they were vaccinated and how many people got sick after they were vaccinated.

and how many people got sick after they were vaccinated. And in 2020, Sweden did considerably worse than its neighbors, which are its natural comparisons by every measure of COVID and excess mortality. So I think 10 times as many Swedes died as Norwegians, something like that level compared to Denmark. And Finland and Iceland are also much better. After the arrival of vaccines, you know, things leveled out so that depending on the database that you look at, the ones I trust, they're still a little behind those countries. They're still doing a little bit worse than their peers, but it's in the same rough band. There are other analyses, including ones that the Swedish government has put together that suggest that they actually outperformed their neighbors. But like I said, I think the

better models there suggest something like slightly below the performance of their peers. But there are a lot of complications and caveats that are important to acknowledge when telling the story. One is the one that I mentioned that, you know, you really do need to divide the experience before vaccines from the experience after. Because if you get the whole population vaccinated on day one, and the pandemic on for several years, that's going to make a big difference. Another is that Sweden talked about its pandemic response as hands-off. And it was in some ways. Most of their guidance was offered as guidance. But some schools did shut down in Sweden. Some stores did shut down. There were travel restrictions. People did move around a lot less. Much of that was voluntary in the sense that the police weren't going around ticketing people when they left their homes in the same way that they were in other parts of Europe. But they also weren't doing that much in the United States. There are isolated incidents here and there of people getting ticketed for being in parks or beaches. There was a period of time in the late spring of 2020 when in some U.S. states and municipalities, there was some sort of surveillance of that kind. But by and large, we did the same thing. We told people that they shouldn't move around much or socialize, and then we didn't do much to enforce those rules. When you look at some of the data that's been examined by the Oxford Blavatnik School of Government, they've done an international comparative study of COVID mitigation measures. And they look at,

I think it's like eight or 10 different categories of restrictions. Sweden is not unusually open in the spring and summer of 2020. It's a little bit more open than some of its European neighbors. It's about as open as the U.S. is. And so their experience there was less confrontational. It was less patronizing in certain ways than the U.S. was. But at the level of individual behavior and how it was guided and policed, I think there's actually considerably less difference between the two countries than we've told ourselves there was. And they had other natural advantages that, you know, they don't have a ton of people coming in and out of the country in the same way that the U.S. at the level that the U.S. does. They have high levels

of social trust. All those things played a role too. But I think in the big picture, you'd have to say Sweden did not have the disaster that was predicted at the time, but it is also not necessarily a model for how a country like the U.S. could operate in part because we're not so far from them and their policies as some of the Sweden advocates want to make us believe. And in part because the U.S. is just a different and more complicated country to manage than Sweden is. And in thinking about the comparison of the U.S. and Sweden, I just want to raise one particular anecdote,

which I think is really illustrative, and that is that in May of 2020, in May, Anthony Fauci was interviewed on CNN by Chris Cuomo, and Chris Cuomo said, you're losing the argument. People are getting tired. They're sick of staying at home. They're not going to do this much longer. What do you say to them? And Fauci said, you're right. We are. We can't do this indefinitely. And everybody ultimately has to decide for themselves when they return to their normal life and what level of risk they're comfortable with. And this is not in 2022. It's not even in 2021 after the vaccines. It's in like month three of the pandemic. I think, you know, fewer than 100,000 Americans had died at that point. And you have the person who is the face of the quote unquote lockdown saying very publicly, this is all voluntary. And I know that I'm not

going to convince everyone. Now, we all took messages from Fauci later on as more hard line and more, you know, more confrontational than that. Absolutely. And he was not always that deferential to the judgment of individuals. But it's a reminder that a huge amount of this pandemic timeline that we remember as, you know, authoritarian dictatorial lockdowns directed from the top by Tony Fauci, it just wasn't that way. You know, I hear Bill Maher talking about a two-year lockdown. It's like he didn't miss recording a single show. And yes, he did it for a while without an audience, but that's a way of keeping one another safe and adjusting to an epidemiological environment that's threatening. And maybe we

wouldn't want to do it in exactly the same way the next time. We can talk about those lessons. We can talk about what we might have learned or what we could do better. But I think as just a baseline, we should remember that the country as a whole navigated this pandemic as libertarians, not as figures in an Orwellian nightmare. And many of us chose to stay at home and live in fear. And some people still are staying at home and living in fear. And some of them even have good reason to. We made decisions on our own We processed information on our own And then we got really angry Because we weren't happy With the world that we were living in Not because someone like Anthony Fauci

Or Donald Trump Who was the president at the time Was coming around to our houses Locking thousands of people up You know, nailing doors shut Like they did in China Nothing like that happened here And we may feel that our

lives were really restricted and limited. In many ways, they were. But to your point earlier, it was not an Orwellian nightmare in the same way that I think many of us kind of falsely now remember it to be. Do you think we learned anything from the pandemic that would allow us to respond better next time? Or do you think it actually degraded our capacity to respond next time? My fear is that... 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 through our scholarship program. So if you can't afford a subscription,

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