Making Sense with Sam Harris - #386 — Information & Social Order

Episode Date: October 7, 2024

Sam Harris speaks with Yuval Noah Harari about his new book, Nexus, and its application to current crises. They discuss humanity’s capacity for self-destruction, democracy and dictatorship as information networks, the “naive view of information,” the advantages of fiction over truth, trust in institutions, self-correction in a democracy, truth vs. power, truth vs. order, the suicide of conservatism, fixing social media, algorithms as editorial choices, efficiency vs. inefficiency, threats to democracy, the authoritarian character of Trump’s candidacy, the need for patriotism and nationalism, Israeli politics, the peaceful transfer of power, Putin and the war in Ukraine, the vulnerability of world order, the killing of Hassan Nasrallah, antisemitism and anti-colonialism, religious fanaticism among Israelis, the status of Arabs in Israeli society, biblical and post-biblical Judaism, whether a wider war in the Middle East is necessary, the danger of spirituality without ethics, 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. Okay, well, I'm about to go on a trip overseas, so I'm recording this housekeeping about a week in advance of dropping this episode. This is just to say that if anything extraordinarily important has happened in the world that you would expect me to comment on here, I do not currently know about it, and no doubt we'll talk about it after I get back. Today I spoke to Yuval Noah Harari, who's been on the podcast before. Yuval is a celebrated historian and author. He is almost certainly the most popular historian on earth at the moment. He has written Sapiens and Homo Deus, and his latest book is Nexus, A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI. And in the first part

of the conversation, we talk about the book, and then we use it as a lens through which to look at current events, of which there are far too many. On the day we recorded this, Israel had just bombed Beirut in an operation that successfully killed the leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah. And based on much of the media coverage, you could be forgiven for thinking that this was a pure act of aggression on the part of Israel. There was almost no mention of the fact that Hezbollah has been launching rockets by the thousands, unprovoked, into civilian centers in Israel since October 8th at the behest of Iran and in solidarity with Hamas. Also, no mention of the fact that Hezbollah's main contribution to human culture has been the perfection of the modern tactic of suicide bombing, which they have used not only against Jews in Israel, but also against

Americans. They've even bombed Jewish centers in Argentina. This is a global terrorist organization. But judging from the obituaries of Nasrallah, you would think Hezbollah was an entirely legitimate resistance group attempting to throw off some colonialist power. Needless to say, there was almost no mention of the fact that Nasrallah and Hezbollah helped Bashar al-Assad kill hundreds of thousands of Muslims in Syria. The editors over the New York Times and The Guardian and the BBC seem to think that their readers don't care much about these Muslim deaths. And they're probably right. Reading this coverage, you're likely to form the impression that Nasrallah himself was quite a grandfatherly

figure with a winning smile. He is described as charismatic and revered and is a great organizer and an astute strategist and pragmatic and idolized by his followers. The New York Times in their obituary makes it seem like he was a man of peace, committed to a two-state solution, when in fact he was a religious lunatic running one of the world's most lethal terrorist organizations, and he had an immense amount of innocent blood on his hands. Anyway, Yuval and I wade into this ethical morass, and generally we talk about the consequences of having an information landscape that is so skewed. We talk a lot about the connection between information and social order. We discuss how democracies and dictatorships are different information networks representing points on a continuum. We talk about the tension between

truth and order, and the need to have institutions that self-correct for both. The advantages of fiction over truth, what Yuval calls the naive view of information, social media and the breakdown in democracy, what advice Yuval would give to Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, the rise of populism and the breakdown of trust in institutions. Mark Zuckerberg, the rise of populism and the breakdown of trust in institutions, inefficiency as an occasional feature rather than a bug of information networks, the banning of counterfeit humans. And then we take the framework that Yuval has built and use it to talk about the U.S. election and Trump and the war in Ukraine and why so many Americans seem confused about the ethics and politics there.

And then Yuval and I have a very interesting exchange about the state of politics in Israel, the contributions of Jewish religious fanaticism, the ongoing war with Hamas and Hezbollah, potential war with Iran, whether a two-state solution is even conceivable at this point, potential war with Iran, whether a two-state solution is even conceivable at this point, and other topics. And now I bring you Yuval Noah Harari. Yuval Noah Harari, thanks for joining me again. It's good to be here again, you know, in a real space together. Yeah, You are my first interview in this studio, which is auspicious because we share so many

interests. We have struggled for years to talk about meditation, and you think we might get there this time. I'm skeptical. I'm determined at least to say at least something about meditation this time. Yeah. Well, there's so much going on in the world that it's always a challenge to get to that topic. We can always connect it.

I mean, we can talk about Nasrallah and meditation. I think there are many links there worth exploring. As counterintuitive as that sounds. Yeah. If meditation is not related to the world and to reality, it's worthless. That's true. Yeah, I guess I, well, I feel like I'm perhaps selling our audience short in thinking that they don't have the bandwidth to think about it, given all the chaos and given your expertise that is so relevant to so much of the chaos.

You just mentioned Nasrallah. So at the time we're recording this, it was just announced that Israel killed Hassan Nasrallah, who was the head of Hezbollah, which we'll talk about. So I want to focus what you've done in your recent book, Nexus, which is wonderful, and here. And perhaps you could say how this relates to your two other big books, Sapiens and Homo Deus. How do you view the project that you've... So it starts basically where Sapiens and Homo Deus. How do you view the project that you've... So it starts basically where Sapiens and Homo Deus ended. In Sapiens, I covered how this insignificant ape from a corner of Africa took over the world. And in Homo Deus, I explored what

could be the potential future of us and of our products and creations here on Earth. And Nexus starts with a key question about both the past and the future, which is, if humans are so wise, why are we so stupid? Like, you know, we've reached the moon and we split the atom and we can decipher DNA, reach the moon and we split the atom and we can decipher DNA. But we are on the verge of destroying ourselves in so many different ways. It could be ecological catastrophe. It could be a world war, a nuclear war. We are producing the most powerful technology in history, AI, which might quite easily get out of our control and enslave or destroy us. And we know all that, and yet we keep doing it.

So what's happening? And so many mythologies and theologies throughout history said that the blame is that something is wrong in human nature, that we are flowed, deeply flowed. And I don't think that this is wrong in human nature, that we are flowed, deeply flowed. And I don't think that this is the right answer. I think that the problem is not in our nature. The problem is in our information. If you give good people bad information, they make bad decisions. It's as simple as that. And so then the question becomes, why are we flooded with bad information? Why is it that after thousands of years of history, of developing, you know, sophisticated

networks of information and communication, our information is not getting any better? I mean, at the present moment, you can say that humans have the best, the most sophisticated information technology in history, and we are losing the ability to even talk with each other and to listen and to hold a reasonable conversation. So what's happening? That's the key question of Nexus. And it explores the history of information and of information networks. It takes another look at history, but from the viewpoint not of humanity, but of information. And for instance, I look at, or Nexus looks at the history of democracies and dictatorships, not as we usually think about them as different ethical systems that believe in

different ideals, but as different information networks, how information flows differently in a democracy, in a dictatorship. In a dictatorship, you know, there is one hub where all the decisions are being made. So all the information flows to and from that single center. And democracy is a distributed information system in which decisions are being made in many different places, and much of the information never passes through the center. Like if you think about the United States, so you have the center in Washington, but so many decisions are made elsewhere, like here in Hollywood, in Los Angeles, and most information never passes

through the center. And you can think about the historical struggle between democracy and dictatorship in terms of different models of information flows. Yeah, I want to pass over that ground again, because what you're saying is pretty counterintuitive and it's very interesting. So because people think about democracy and dictatorship as this kind of binary that are just categorically distinct, and you're placing them on a continuum of information flow. Yeah. Yeah.

And I mean, so let's add here this, what you call the naive view of information flow. Yeah. Yeah. And, and there, I mean, so let's add here this, what, what you call the naive view of information, because it's, there's a sense that more information is an intrinsic good, right? And then we're getting this now with the people who are running our, our social media regimes. It's just the idea that if you could just let all ideas collide and remove every point of friction from the flow of information and amplify anything, however, a market or the dynamics of any internet business chooses to amplify it, it's just the principle. People have these phrases in their minds, sunlight is the best disinfectant, right? So let's just expose everything and we're going to be fine, right? And any effort to steer this information flow is by its very nature sinister. It is edging us toward the totalitarian side of this information continuum.

So how do you react to that? This is so naive. This is so disconnected from reality, from history. You think that you flood the world with information and the truth will just rise to the surface? It won't. It will sink to the bottom. Information isn't truth. Most information is junk. It's like thinking that more food is always good for you. The more you eat, the more healthy you will be.

That's the same thing. No. I mean, yes, you need some food to survive. But if you just keep eating, it will not be good for you, especially if you keep eating junk food. And the world basically needs an information diet. And, you know, the truth is a subset of information and a very small subset. Because the truth, first of all, it's very costly. If you want to write or to produce a truthful account of something, of the Roman Empire, of the economic crisis, whatever, you need to invest a lot of time and effort and money in looking for evidence and fact-checking and analyzing. Like, I don't know, if you want to

know something that happened in the Roman Empire. So, you know, historians, they go to university to study for at least 10 years before they become professional historians. You learn Latin and Greek and how to read ancient handwriting and how to do these archaeological excavations. And even if you found a document from the Roman Empire and you know Latin and you can read it, maybe it's just propaganda. Just because Caesar says that the

enemy had 100,000 soldiers, it doesn't mean they actually had 100,000 soldiers. So how do you evaluate information? So the truth is very costly. Fiction, on the other hand, is very cheap. You just write the first things that comes to your mind. The truth is also very complicated, or often it's complicated because reality is complicated. Whereas fiction, you can make it as simple as you would like it to be. And people tend to prefer, in most cases, simplicity over complexity. So this is another disadvantage. So you're pointing out there an asymmetrical relationship between truth and fiction, which redounds to the advantage of fiction in this friction-free environment. And with the third advantage of fiction, that the truth is sometimes, not always, but the truth is sometimes painful. You know, from the personal relationships that we often don't want to know the truth about how we treat the other people in our lives. This is why we need to go to therapy for many years to acknowledge the reality, you know, all the way to entire nations or entire cultures.

If you run for elections in the US or in Israel or anywhere else, and you just tell people the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, I mean, an Israeli politician who would just tell the truth about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not likely to gain many votes that way. You need at least some dose of fiction, of mythology to make it more attractive, more pleasant for the voters. Well, it's already so unpleasant. I shudder to think what the truth is, but we'll get there. So the truth is it's costly. It's complicated. It's sometimes painful. Fiction is cheap. It's simple. You can make it as attractive as you'd like it to be. So in a completely free market of information, truth will lose.

You have to tilt the balance in favor of truth by building institutions like courts, like newspapers, like universities, like research centers that make the effort to produce and to protect the truth. And when people attack these institutions, they often claim that they are liberating people from the yoke of these elite institutions and conspiracy and so forth. But no, when you destroy all trust in these institutions, you're paving the way for dictatorship. Society needs institutions. And democracy works on trust. But if you destroy all trust, the only alternative left to hold society together is with terror, which is what dictatorships do. So this is the game of many would-be dictators. They systematically destroy all trust in the institutions that are our main access to truth and knowledge. And then when all these institutions are gone, then the only alternative left is a dictatorship. So what would you say to someone who says that

the institutions have proven themselves to be untrustworthy, right? So we have the capture of the most elite academic institutions, certainly in the United States, by a kind of woke moral panic, right? You have Hamas supporters, not only among the students, but among the faculty. I'll be happy to talk about that, and I have a lot of criticism of my own kind of disciplines and institutions that I'm sometimes, you know, you hear things from people who went to study history for 10 years, and then they come up with the most simplistic views of reality. So let's stay at the 30,000 foot level. The experts in many institutions have heaped shame upon their own heads in recent years. But the reaction is not to destroy the institutions.

I mean, this is why we need two things. First of all, we need several institutions, not just one, so they keep each other in check. I mean, the basic assumption is humans are fallible. Institutions are composed of humans, so all institutions are fallible. They can make mistakes. They can be captured.

They can be corrupted. And therefore, you need several institutions to keep each other in check. So if one institution is really corrupted, you can go to the courts or you can expose it in newspapers or in other media or whatever. And secondly, every institution needs a self-correcting mechanism. This is the sign of a good institution, that it has mechanisms inside the institution to identify and correct its own mistakes. This is, again, a key difference between democracy and dictatorship. Dictatorship has no self-correcting institution. There is no mechanism in Russia that can expose and correct Putin's mistakes. But democracy is all about self-correction.

The basic mechanism of elections is that every four years or so, you can say, oh, we made a mistake. Let's try something else. But of course, every mechanism like this is itself fallible. Elections can be rigged. We just had elections in Venezuela, and the Venezuelan people said, okay, we made a mistake with Chavez and Maduro, let's try something else. But because Maduro is in power, he rigged the election. He said, no, no, no, I won. And this is also, of course, very, very relevant to what's happening in the upcoming election in the United States, because the greatest danger for a democracy, in a democracy, you

give power to someone for four years on condition that they give it back. And there is always the danger, what if they don't give it back? So giving power to somebody that you have good reasons to suspect that he will not give it back, very dangerous. So again, elections are not enough. You also need free media. You also need free courts. You also need free courts.

Now people ask, okay, so what if all these institutions are corrupted? Then bad luck. I mean, nothing is perfect. If all the institutions of your society has been corrupted and taken over and all the self-correcting mechanisms are disrupted, dysfunctional, very bad news. Society collapses. Hopefully, we don, very bad news. Society collapses. Hopefully, we don't reach that point. And it's very important to try. And the solution is not to lose trust.

One of the key problems I see today in the world is that you have an extremely cynical view of humans and of human societies spreading both on the right but also on the left. This is something that the extreme left and the extreme right agree about. They have an extremely cynical view

of humans and of reality. They say that the only reality is power, that all social interactions, all human interactions are actually power struggles, that all human institutions are just conspiracies to gain power, that journalists, scientists, historians, judges, politicians, these are just conspiracies to gain power. Whenever somebody tells you something, you shouldn't ask, is it true? Because nobody cares about the truth. This is naive.

They would tell you, no, this is a power play. Who benefits. Who benefits. Whose privileges are being served? Whose interests are being served? This is something you hear from Marxists and from Trumpists. This is something that Donald Trump agreed with Karl Marx, at least on that, that everything is just a power struggle. And if you think like that, all trust collapses, and the only thing that is left standing, that can remain standing, is a dictatorship,

which indeed assumes that everything is just power. Now, the important thing to realize is this is not just extremely cynical. This is just wrong. People are not these power crazy demons that care only about power. Even powerful people really care about the truth, at least some of them. Well, even I would just add, I totally agree with you, but I would add as a footnote to that cynicism, even if the cynical take were true, people's incentives are not perfectly aligned. So even in a rivalry of people seeking power, the kinds of conspiracies and collaborations and Orwellian star chambers rarely exist the way populists imagine, right?

I mean, it's just, you can't get, you take- You take Elon Musk and Donald Trump, you know, two people with a very high opinion of themselves and with not necessarily the same goals in life and in the world, even if they can ally themselves for some time around a certain common interest, in the long run, it will be very, very difficult to keep this alliance. Yeah, to say nothing of the people who are not aligned with them. There's a fascinating tension between the self-correcting mechanism that would deliver truth and the self-correcting mechanisms that would deliver order. There's this tradeoff between truth and order that you describe in the book. Yeah. Let's cycle on that for a minute.

Okay. That's very important because if we think about human societies really as information networks, so the question is, what do these networks produce? And to function, they need to produce two different things, not just one. They need to produce both truth and order. A system that just ignores the truth completely will collapse. It will sooner or later encounter reality and will collapse. It will sooner or later encounter reality and will collapse. But also, a system which is only interested in the truth will not be able to maintain order, because it's easier to maintain order with fiction and with fantasy and with mass delusions.

So we just spoke about the tension between truth and fiction as though fiction were by definition invidious and something to be canceled. What you're saying now is that we need certain fiction. It can't be purely truth-seeking, right? Fiction is very efficient in creating order. And the main thing is that it's complicated to maintain a human society. It's complicated because you need to balance two things that are pulling in different directions. You need to balance truth with order. There's lots of trade-offs.

Yes. And I'll give one example of how it works. Think, for instance, that you want to produce an atom bomb. So let's say that you are, that you want to produce an atom bomb. So let's say that you are Iran and you want to produce an atom bomb. You need to know some facts about the world. It's essential. If you just ignore the facts of nuclear physics, you will not be able to produce an atom bomb. It's as simple as that. On the other hand, to produce an atom bomb, just knowing the facts of physics is not enough. You need millions of people to cooperate on the project.

If you have a single physicist, she is the most brilliant physicist in history, and she knows that E equals mc2 and all the secrets of quantum mechanics and whatever, she cannot produce an atom bomb by herself, working in her garage or something. You need people to mine uranium, you know, thousands of kilometers away.

You need engineers and workers to build the nuclear reactor. You need people to produce food so that all these workers and physicists have something to eat. How do you get millions of people to cooperate on the project? If you just

tell them the facts of physics, E equals mc squared, now get on with it. It doesn't work. So what? So just because E equals mc squared, we should now work on building this atom bomb? No. This is where ideology and mythology and fictions come into the picture. You usually convince millions of people to work on a project together by telling them some ideology or some mythology. And here, the facts don't matter so much. If you try to build a very powerful ideology and you ignore the facts, your ideology is still likely to explode with a very, very big bang. And in most cases in history, the people who are experts in nuclear physics, for instance, get their orders from the people who are experts in Shiite theology or in Jewish theology or in communist ideology or in Nazi ideology. It's the people who are experts in the truth usually get orders from the people who are experts in order.

And this is something that very often scientists and engineers don't understand. That they work, I don't know, on AI and they think that the scientists and the engineers will decide what to do with it. But no, once you produce this very powerful technology, because you know the facts about the world, then you will get the people who are experts in mythology and theology coming in and telling you, thank you very much for producing this very powerful technology. Now we will decide what to do with it. technology, now we will decide what to do with it. Is there a truly benign and wise version of this? Because what you seem to be describing is yet another reason for cynicism and distrust. So this is important. Now, it's very hard to create large-scale societies without any fictions. Even money is a fiction. Think, you know, think about what is

the last thing that still holds American society together? What is the last thing that Republicans and Democrats still agree on? It's the dollar. And even this is under attack, you know, from cryptocurrencies and so forth. But almost the last story that still holds the place together is that everybody agrees on the value of a dollar, which is just a fiction. I think we hit this in a previous conversation. There's something a little confusing about your use of the word fiction here, because fiction, in any kind of context where we're talking about the truth, sounds intrinsically pejorative, right?

So like there's truth and then there's fiction. It's not pejorative. You're talking about conventions, something that's conventionally constructed or socially constructed. Something that comes out of the human imagination and not from reality. I mean, the value of the dollar is purely an imaginary reality. Exactly, yeah. The paper notes and most dollars are not even paper. They're just digital tokens in computers.

They have no objective value. They have value only in our imagination. In this sense, the dollar is a fiction. It's a socially constructed reality. Yes. And now the big question comes, so is everything just a conspiracy? Is everything just a fiction? And the key thing is that fictions can be extremely valuable and positive, provided you acknowledge they are fictions. I don't think that the dollar is a bad thing.

I don't think that the fictions holding society thing. I don't think that the fictions holding society together are a bad thing, as long as you acknowledge the reality that this is a man-made, imaginary thing. And this is important because then you can correct it. Then you can make amendments in it. Let's compare two texts that are foundation texts for holding human society together, the Ten Commandments and the U.S. Constitution. I have a preference. Both are fictional in the sense that they came out of the human imagination. But one text refuses to acknowledge this reality, and the other text is fully honest about it.

So the Ten Commandments, they start with I am your Lord God. This text, it claims to be written by God, not by any human, which is why it contains no mechanism for correcting its errors. And if some of our listeners are outraged, errors in the Ten Commandments? What could possibly be wrong with don't kill and don't steal? I don't think I have those listeners, Yvon, you give me too much credit. Yes, but maybe for the one or two

are still left out there. Notice if you read, for instance, the Tenth Commandment, that it endorses slavery. Right. The Tenth Commandment says that you should not covet your neighbor's house or field or slaves, which implies that God is perfectly okay with people holding slaves. It's just God doesn't

like it when you covet the slaves of your neighbors. No, these are his slaves. Don't covet them. Now, because the text doesn't recognize that this is the creation of the human imagination, there is no 11th commandment, which says, well, if you discover something wrong in the previous 10 commandments, by a two-third majority, you can vote on changing commandment number 10. No mechanism. So we still have the same text from the Iron Age until today.

Now, the U.S. Constitution, it's also a foundational text which gives instructions for people to how to manage their society. It also came out of the human imagination. It's not an objective reality. It's also, in this sense, a fiction. But it is honest. It starts with an objective reality. It's also, in this sense, a fiction. But it is honest.

It starts with we, the people. We, the people, wrote this text. And because we are fallible human beings, maybe we made some mistakes, like endorsing slavery. So we also include in this text a mechanism to amend it, to identify and correct its own mistakes. It's not easy, but it can be done, and it has been done. So fictions can be extremely valuable. We need them. We cannot have a large-scale society without them, but they should be honest about their own fictional nature, which gives us the ability to identify and correct our mistakes or the mistakes of our ancestors.

But there's something intrinsically conservative about this picture, because admitting that something is a fiction or a convention is not to say that you should want to revise it impetuously. Absolutely not. It's very good that very few people try to rethink the convention about whether to drive on the left side or the right side of the road on a daily basis, right? I mean, it's clearly arbitrary, but it's crucially important that we all, once we've decided, that we not keep rethinking it. And there are many things like that.

And so this distrust in institutions, what has grown so corrosive is the sense that the appropriate response to each of the errors, however embarrassing they have been of late, is to break fully with the institutions and in some sense reinvent civilization on your own. You find some place to stand where you can reboot from. And that actually seems to be, I mean, obviously there's a populist version of this, which we can talk about. I think actually seems to be, I mean, obviously there's a populist version of this, which we can talk about. I think we should talk about populism. But this message seems to be coming from on high.

I mean, you mentioned Donald Trump and Elon Musk as prime offenders. They're prime offenders on this very point. They sow distrust in our institutions on such a fundamental level and at such scale. It's coming from the right and from the left. It's the populist position. It's the Marxist position. Let's destroy the old world and create a new world in its place. This is in the international, in the heim, how do you call it, of communism. And it's also on the populist right.

And as a historian, I tend to be conservative in the deep sense of the word, in the Burkean sense of the word. I mean, what you saw recently all over the world is the suicide of conservative parties that they abandoned the conservative values

and became revolutionary parties. Like the Republican Party today in the United States is a revolutionary party. Revolutionary in the sense... It's a personality cult, yeah. Not just that. It says that, you know, all the institutions are rotten.

They cannot be reformed. We just need to destroy all of it and start again. Which, I mean, people can say this is true, this is false. Let's leave that aside. But just look at the structure of it. This is what revolutionary parties look like. They say things are so corrupted, things are so out of order, that the only thing left to do is to destroy all the existing institutions and start

from scratch, which was the Leninist position, the Bolshevik position, a hundred years ago, and now it's the position of many so-called conservative parties. The traditional insight of conservatism is that, yes, institutions are flawed, institutions can be corrupted, but it takes generations to build a functioning society, a functioning institution. Humans don't really have the capacity to understand the full complexity of reality, and to invent a perfect society from scratch. It just can't be done. Every time we try to do it, it leads to disaster. Even worse than the things that we try to correct. You cannot create a perfect society.

So move more slowly, be more respectful of the existing institutions and traditions. They need correction. They need amendment. They need improvement. But just destroying them completely and starting from scratch, I mean, you have hundreds of years of kind of previous corrections from real things that happened in history that are baked into the system. from real things that happened in history that are baked into the system,

be very careful before you throw all of it out and try to start from scratch. Okay, so what do we do about social media, given that picture? What advice do you have for correcting the obvious pathology we see here? If you could give advice to Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, what would you have them do? One thing, two things. Corporations should be liable for the actions of their algorithms. And only humans have freedom of speech. Bots and algorithms do not have freedom of speech. And they should never masquerade as humans. So these are the two main things that are needed to correct social media.

So they're publishers. These platforms should be viewed as publishers. Absolutely. And their algorithm, the tuning of the algorithm is an editorial choice. Absolutely. This is strange to think about it, but one of the first jobs that was fully automated was not taxi drivers. It was not textile workers. It was not textile workers.

It was editors, news editors. It's amazing to think about it. It was automated. The job that once belonged to Lenin and Mussolini is now being done by algorithms. I mean, Lenin, before he was Soviet dictator, he was editor of a newspaper, Iskra. And Mussolini also, he rose to power from being editor of the newspaper Avanti. So this was like the promotion scale, the promotion ladder, editor of a newspaper, dictator of the country. And this is for a good reason. The editors of news, they sit at one of

the most important junctions in society. They shape the conversation. They decide what people would be aware of, what people would be discussing. And this is one of the most important positions in society. And now it's been taken over by algorithms. Because again, in Iskra, it was Lenin who decided what would be the top story of the day, what would be the main headline. And on Facebook, it's an algorithm deciding what is at the top of your feedback, of your news feed. But both of those sound bad. So if you're going to give people a choice between Lenin and an algorithm, they're going

to take the algorithm. So the thing is that not in a dictatorship, in a democracy, newspapers and other news outlets are liable for their decisions. Like if the editor of the New York Times decides to publish some conspiracy theory or fake news at the front page of the New York Times, he cannot hide or she cannot hide behind the argument. But free speech, there are some people who believe it's true. So I put it on the front page of The New York Times. No, your job as editor is not just to put something random there or something that would please people.

Your job is to fact check and to take responsibility for these decisions and to make sure that if you publish something on the front page of the New York Times, you better be sure that this is accurate and this is responsible. And if you don't know how to do it, then you're in the wrong job. And again, I will tell to Facebook, to Twitter, to TikTok, be very, very careful before you censor human users. I mean, if a human user decided to publish even a lie, even a fake news, even a conspiracy theory, I would be extremely careful before I shut down their account or send those in. But if my algorithm as the corporation then decides to promote this particular piece of fake news

or this particular conspiracy theory, this is on me. This is on the company, not on the user. The promotion. It's the amplification, not the fact that it exists on the network in the first place. Absolutely. They can't possibly prevent, and they have billions of pieces of content arriving every day, right? So they can't guarantee that there'll be no malicious lies or even child pornography on their network.

And it's the same way that, you know, people send letters to the New York Times every day. So it's not the position of the job of the New York Times to send them. But don't publish them on your front page unless you're sure that you did, you know. And sometimes, okay, sometimes you can make mistakes. you're sure that you did, you know, and sometimes, okay, sometimes you can make mistakes, but still your job is to fact check and to think about the implications of this story and then take a very responsible decision about what you choose to promote. The other thing is that social media should reserve freedom of speech to human beings, not to bots and to algorithms. And in particular, we should ban fake humans, counterfeit humans. If a bot pretends to

be a human, we should know about it. Like if you see that some story on Twitter gains a lot of traction, a lot of traffic, And you think to yourself, oh, lots of humans are interested in this story. This must be important. I also want to know what everybody's talking about. And you also start, you click on it, you also start commenting on it. But actually, the entities that at least originally pushed this story to the top of the conversation, they were not humans. They were bots working in the service of Putin or whoever. This is wrong. We should not have fake humans shaping the human conversation. You know, democracy is a conversation. shaping the human conversation.

You know, democracy is a conversation. Imagine it as a group of people standing in a circle talking with each other. Suddenly, a group of robots join the circle and talk very loudly, very persuasively. They pretend to be humans, and you don't know. You can't tell who are the humans

and who are the robots. The conversation breaks down. To be clear, you're not tell who are the humans and who are the robots. So the conversation breaks down. To be clear, you're not against bots of various kinds. You just think they should be declared as bots. Absolutely. Again, if you have a medical bot and you want to consult with that bot about some medical condition, I mean, soon we'll have AI doctors with capabilities far beyond human doctors. I'm not against that.

They can improve healthcare dramatically. They can help provide better healthcare for billions of people. But when I talk with a non-human entity, I want to know that this is a non-human entity, that I'm not talking with a human being. They are welcome to join the conversation on condition that they don't masquerade as humans. What you're arguing for, essentially, and I think this is a phrase you use in the book, that what we need are benevolent networks that have a fiduciary responsibility to their users. Yeah, it's a very old principle. I mean, we don't need to invent anything new in this respect. Like if you think about your doctor or your therapist or your accountant or your lawyer, for centuries,

we already had these regulations and understanding that they have access to extremely private information, to potentially explosive information about us that could maybe ruin our life. And they have a fiduciary duty to use that information only for our interests, except in very extreme circumstances when there is a crime or something. But our doctor, for instance, cannot take my personal information and sell it to third parties for profits. And the same principle should hold with our relationship with the high-tech giants. I mean, they should have the same responsibilities. How do you think about this trade-off between efficiency and inefficiency?

Inefficiency sounds like it's a bug, but as you point out in the book, there are places where it's a feature because it's a bulwark against totalitarianism. And yet we want a certain kind of efficiency so as to be able to find malicious actors and terrorists, etc. So how do you view that in a reasonably well-functioning democracy that has institutions that are error-correcting both with respect to truth and with respect to order? How would you, if you could get your hands on the dial of efficiency, how would you tune it? I mean, that's the democratic conversation. We avoid the extremes and find the middle path, and you're bound to make mistakes, so keep correcting your mistakes.

It's not like there is a magic bullet that solves it once and for all. So what is the right level of surveillance? What is the right level of immigration? This is what we have the democratic debate for. If you go for an extreme position that, you know, humans have a right to immigrate to anywhere they like in as huge as numbers as they like, this is completely unfeasible. Open borders. So again, how many immigrants a country wants to absorb and under what conditions, let's discuss. Different people have different views. I don't think that people who want a more strict immigration policy, this immediately turns them into fascists and Nazis.

And similarly, people who want more lenient immigration policies, less restrictive, that doesn't turn them immediately into traitors who want to destroy the country. Let's have a conversation and try this policy and try that policy. It should not be a kind of all-out war between good and evil. And the same goes for the level of surveillance and the same goes for the level, again, of free speech. I mean, in all these cases, we need to find the middle path, and it's difficult, and we need to start with the assumption

that we are not infallible, and that other people might have good ideas about these questions. Okay, so let's take this general framework that you've sketched in your book and look at a few current events. I mean, there really is too much to talk about, but we have the U.S. election, we have the ongoing war in Ukraine, we have the ongoing war between Israel now on at least two fronts, Israel and her enemies. Let's start with the U.S. election. How do you view our circumstance here? I mean, we really are the poster child for

a lot of the dysfunction you described more generically in your book. I mean, there's just a pervasive sense that I think social media doesn't fully explain it, but it certainly has amplified the problem. There's a pervasive sense that we've lost the capacity to speak to one another about rather fundamental issues. And we're just hurtling towards some political catastrophe here. So we have an election, which, however it goes, it's quite plausible to imagine that half the country won't believe the results, right, given what has happened in recent years. So how do we pull back from the brink here? So historically, there are two big dangers for the survival of democracies. And you can see both of them now in the U.S.

One big danger is what we discussed earlier. Democracy is this system when you give power to a person, to a party, to try out some policies on condition that they give the power to a person, to a party, to try out some policies, on condition that they give the power. 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, please request a free account on the website. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free

and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at samharris.org.