Making Sense with Sam Harris - #45 — Ask Me Anything 5

Episode Date: September 13, 2016

Sam Harris answers questions from listeners about how 9/11 changed his life, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, free will, why he podcasts, Milo and the alt-Right, identity politics, Clinton vs. Trump, vegetarianism, and the Hannibal Buress episode. 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.

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So I put out a call for questions for this podcast on social media and got literally thousands. That level of response is just amazing. Needless to say, I will only be able to answer the tiniest fraction of them. All I can say is that I hope people don't get discouraged by this. Please just keep asking your questions whenever I put out a call for an AMA and Ask Me Anything podcast, and eventually your question or something similar will get addressed. In fact, I often get many questions on the same topic, and rather than answer any specific one, I just fuse a bunch of them together, which I've done here in many cases. There were many questions about meditation practice that strike me as too esoteric for the podcast. I don't want to assume an interest in meditation that is deeper or broader than it actually is.

So those are the kinds of questions I'll deal with in my meditation app that is still being born. Many of you have asked about an ETA on the app. Where the hell is it? Apologies again, this is coming more slowly than I expected, but it really is coming. And in addition to guided meditations, the app will have short talks on relevant topics. So there'll be an expanding curriculum of meditations and lessons that I'm really looking forward to building. But the platform has to be working first, and it is coming along. I'm hoping to start a beta test in the next couple of weeks, and I know I said that a couple of months ago, but sometimes things take as long as they take. In fact, they always do. I'm not sure

how big the beta test will be. I'll probably limit it to 100 people or so. But I will keep you all posted. And once I have something to share on that front, I will not be shy about it. Because I'm very excited about this. I'm hoping all of you will find this very useful. Also, Richard Dawkins and I are doing two events in Los Angeles on November 1st and 2nd. Just to clarify how this came about, Richard was doing a speaking tour and was inviting people to be in dialogue with him in various cities. And I agreed to do LA and that event sold out almost immediately. So we decided to add an extra night. I don't know if there'll still be tickets for the second night when this podcast airs, but you could check the Center for Inquiry website for that.

But many, many of you have asked whether we could do this event in a city closer to you. Unfortunately, that's not going to happen. Richard had this speaking tour already set up, and I'm really just joining it at the last minute for this one stop. All proceeds from these events go to support the Center for Inquiry and Richard's Foundation. And I think one or both of these events will be videotaped. And whether or not they are, I'm hoping to release the audio from one or both events on the podcast

or a compilation of the best parts. So you will get to hear these conversations in some form. I am confident. Needless to say, I'm looking forward to sharing the stage with Richard again. It has been several years since that happened, so it does not happen enough. And as the date approaches, I might ask all of you to suggest topics we should talk about, and I will do that by the usual channels. Today also happens to be the 15th anniversary of September 11th, and that's always a heavy day, and also seems like the wrong day to talk about some of the things I am talking about. Most of

the questions that came in were not cognizant of the anniversary, nor was I in soliciting them, so talking about Brazilian jiu-jitsu and free will and my collision with Hannibal Buress doesn't quite seem thematically correct for the day, but this is the day that's given to me to get this podcast done and questions hit topics of that sort. So I will do my best here. One question I noticed on Twitter, I think it was Twitter last night, one of you asked, 15 years ago today, how did you think you would spend the next 15 years? That's pretty interesting for me to think about, because what I've done for the last 15 years really has been defined by September 11th to, I think, an unusual degree. I was in the middle of my PhD at UCLA at the time,

and just getting into my research, and then just found myself writing The End of Faith. And that book was not going to be denied. It led to me being more or less AWOL from my PhD for four years or so. And things would be different. It's kind of easy to answer that question looking at the books. I think I could really see myself having written Waking Up, Free Will, and Lying, and The Moral Landscape. And in most respects, those would have been the same books. But certainly The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation and Islam and the Future of Tolerance and everything I've had to think and say about organized religion, that probably wasn't in the cards. As I've said before,

I never even thought of myself as an atheist. I was an atheist, but my life was not organized in defiance of religion in any way. So that's obviously a major disruption of what I would have otherwise done. And in some sense, I feel like I am just getting back to the things that really interest me very slowly over the course of decades. But the kinds of conversations I've been having on this podcast with physicists and philosophers and diverse intellectuals that don't necessarily take me toward the topic of theocracy and irrational religious beliefs, those are conversations in which I certainly recognize my former self, and it makes me very happy to get a chance to have those conversations. So yeah, I'm kind of clawing my way back to my core interests. Things are different, but I think my life course is still recognizable. I don't know that I was

planning at any point to be an academic scientist. I went into neuroscience, as I've said before, mostly because I wanted to think about the mind and write about it. And it was very much in the spirit of being a neurophilosopher. And while I'm still doing some research in neuroscience, we have a paper now that is struggling to be born. It is a tiny percentage of what I'm doing. Most of what I'm doing has the character of moral philosophy and the philosophy of mind, which was always a conscious motive of mine. So that really isn't a derailment, but you never know. I suddenly found myself wandering for about four years outside the guidance and at some moments outside the patience of my PhD advisor, Mark Cohen, who knows what would have happened if I actually stayed in the lab at that point, because he certainly had a

lot to teach. Anyway, I feel like my interests are now more or less all within reach, but my frequent return to the topic of religion and the topic of Islam and jihadism in particular, that is really a feature of my life that was just stamped into me on this day 15 years ago. I think many of us share this feeling. It's a little embarrassing to put it this way somehow, but September 11th, But September 11th, 2001 was the first moment I realized viscerally, emotionally, not just intellectually, that we were living in history. Right? I mean, history is just mayhem. You know, read the books.

Things go wrong, really wrong for societies and whole civilizations. Whole civilizations disappear, right? That's history and we're in it. And I never got that. I never got how fragile civilization was. And the sense of that that was kindled after September 11th has remained quite vivid for me. And there are some moments that are not business as usual, and we can really screw this up. So that was among the many things I learned on that day, and those insights and a spirit of urgency that I had never really had before continue to inform my work. And now on to topics that may seem disconcerting in their irrelevance to the lessons of that day. Let's jump into the questions and see how far we get. I got many questions about the state of my Brazilian jiu-jitsu practice. Do I still train? What belt do I have? Why do I think the sport is so addictive? Well, I do still train, but far more

sporadically than I'd like. And this is mostly due to my being unlucky and acquiring some recurring injuries that I have to keep taking time off the mat for. I've been training now for nearly five years, but I've had to take many long breaks, sometimes for months at a time. So I don't actually know how much training I've actually done in that time. In the first six months, I really went crazy and trained hard three or four days a week. And I got my blue belt after about six or eight months. And that was just, it was really a great period of training. And then I started to get injured in ways that worried me and in particular, my hip and my neck. So I backed off for long stretches. And then when I was feeling better, I backed off for long stretches. And then when I was feeling better, I'd go back on the mat and re-injure myself. So I am still a lowly blue belt. And if I can't shake these injuries,

I might always be a blue belt. I would absolutely love to train more and learn more of the art, but it won't really be worth it if I'm hobbling around with a cane or can't turn my head. So I am pushing forward, but at an old man's pace. But I did train today, and that was great. To someone who hasn't trained, it surely sounds crazy that someone like me, or really anyone, would be willing to court injury like this for a sport that just looks like two people wrestling in pajamas. Jiu-jitsu really is one of those things that you can't appreciate what's going on until you do it. And most other sports aren't like that. I mean, if you see a great skier or a gymnast or a diver, it's pretty easy to see

what the thrill is or what it would be if you could do those things well. But what could be the satisfaction of being able to hold someone down on the ground and not let him up? It's a bit inscrutable if you're just looking from the outside. I wrote a blog post when I started BJJ entitled The Pleasures of Drowning. I guess I'll read you a few passages of that. At the beginning I wrote, training in BJJ offers a powerful lens through which to examine some primary human concerns, At the beginning, I wrote, And then I goence to tradition, as well as by a natural desire to avoid injury during the course of training. It is in fact possible to master an ancient fighting system and to attract students who will spend years trying to emulate your skills without ever discovering that you

have no ability to defend yourself in the real world. Delusions of martial prowess have much in common with religious faith. A crucial difference, however, is that while people of faith can always rationalize apparent contradictions between their beliefs and the data of their senses, an inability to fight is very easy to detect and, once revealed, very difficult to explain away. End quote. And then I link in that blog post to some amazing videos, which you really have to see to believe. This fake martial artist who has clearly been faking his art so long that he came to believe that he had magic powers. You see him knocking his students down without touching them, right, at distances of 20 feet. And who knows how they came to collaborate in this collective delusion. These fake martial

arts are really one of the strangest phenomena on earth. But it's pretty clear that the master of this art, who you see in the video, came to believe that he actually had these magic powers, because he then issued a challenge to the martial arts community that he would fight any man intrepid enough to step into the ring with him. And he got fairly lucky, all things considered, because the first guy who showed up was a totally ordinary martial artist, not some killer from the UFC. I mean, he could have gotten boss rooting in his prime, but he got just some guy, right? But still, you can see the result. It's about as clear a disconfirmation of a person's delusion as you will ever witness in your life. Now, the amazing thing about any grappling art is that you can train it at something close to full force without risking

too much injury. Of course, people do get injured, as I just described, but it's not like training a striking art like boxing or kickboxing, a hundred percent. To get hit in the head again and again is to get brain damage. And I did some of that as a teenager, and I now regret it. So with jujitsu, you can really test to see whether something works, and there's really no luck involved. If you get on the mat with someone who's much better than you at jujitsu, it's like playing someone who's much better at chess, right? You will lose. You will lose 100% of the time, and in ways that you will find astonishing. It really is like chess, if each of the pieces could be moved 20 different ways. There are over a thousand techniques at this

point. It's just an amazingly deep game. Here's a little more of what I wrote in The Pleasures of Drowning. I can now attest that the experience of grappling with an expert is akin to falling into deep water without knowing how to swim. You will make a furious effort to stay afloat, and you will fail. Once you learn how to swim, however, it becomes difficult to see what the problem is. Why can't a drowning man just relax and tread water? The same inscrutable difference between lethal ignorance and life-saving knowledge can be found on the mat. To train in BJJ is to continually drown, or rather to be drowned, in sudden and ingenious ways, and to be taught, again and again, how to swim. Whether you're an

expert in a striking-based art, boxing, karate, taekwondo, or just naturally tough, a return to childlike humility awaits you. Simply step onto the mat with a BJJ black belt. There are few experiences as startling as being effortlessly controlled by someone your size or smaller, and despite your full resistance placed in a chokehold or an arm lock or some other submission. A few minutes of this and whatever your previous training, your incompetence will become so glaring and intolerable that you will want to learn whatever this person has to teach. Empowerment begins only moments later when you are shown how to escape the various traps that were set for you, and to set them yourself. Each increment of knowledge imparted in this way is so satisfying, and one's ignorance at every

stage so consequential, that the process of learning BJJ can become remarkably addictive. I've never experienced anything quite like it. End quote. And it's really true. The reinforcement seems to be on the most addictive Pavlovian scale. You find yourself being killed, which is to say, put in a position where the other person could choke you to death if he wanted to, or break your limbs and then choke you to death. But he doesn't, obviously. And then you're shown what happened. And you're shown how to do it yourself and how to keep it from being done to you. And this whole cycle takes like 20 minutes. So every time you train, you experience this amazing encounter with your own ignorance.

Ignorance that would, in fact, have killed you had that been a real fight. And then it gets remedied with knowledge. And the knowledge comes in the form of moves that you can actually do, right? You're not being shown how to do a backflip on a balance beam that will take you years to perfect. We're talking about gross motor moves that you can actually do correctly after very little practice. And again, until you've experienced this, you really can't believe the difference between knowledge and ignorance in this domain. It is every bit as decisive as the difference between not knowing how to swim and being totally safe in the water. If someone doesn't

know how to swim and falls in the deep end of the pool, he's going to die quickly. And it makes no sense, right? I mean, if you know how to swim, you look at this and think, he's moving his arms and legs furiously, right? In fact, he's probably expending as much energy as Michael Phelps in the pool, and yet it makes no difference. When you train in jujitsu, you get to be that drowning man, and then you get to stop being him again and again and again. So it's like chess, where you die and get resurrected. And it's much more complicated than chess, because there are literally at this point over a thousand different moves. And some of these moves are so brilliant that they effectively cancel the differences between people that would ordinarily be decisive in a fight, like size and strength and speed.

That's not to say these physical attributes don't matter at all. They do. and speed. That's not to say these physical attributes don't matter at all. They do. If you're big and strong and fast, you always have an advantage in a fight. But jiu-jitsu makes such brilliant use of physics, the principles of leverage and position, that it really is not an exaggeration to say that a smaller, weaker person can totally dominate a larger one who has less training. And it's astonishing to be on the receiving end of that. And it's also amazing to be able to do it to others once you have been trained. And again, the training is such that you can do it in a way that you know you're not just

fooling yourself, right? You're not pretending to do moves and having your training partner pretend to be affected by them, which happens in so many traditional martial arts. You know, I pretend to poke you in the eye or hit you in the throat, and you pretend to be affected by it. And then I pretend to do the next move, and then we train this sequence where each of us is compliant with the other to one or another degree, and it becomes a kind of pantomime of violence. That's not what happens in a real grappling art. And it's not what happens in a real striking art. But in a real striking art, when you're training full force, you're getting hit in the head hard over and over again, and kicked in the stomach. And it's, you know, it's not good for you. But you can get injured in BJJ. So all I can say is if you do get into it,

JJ. So all I can say is if you do get into it, do it wisely. So anyway, that's the state of my training and the state of my enthusiasm. I am an addict, and I'm trying to maintain my addiction at a level that is compatible with, if not full health, an ambulatory lifestyle. There were many questions on free will. People are still fascinated and confused about it. And the podcast I did with Dan Dennett in a bar failed to change that. So people want more on that topic in a variety of ways. Let's see here. Well, I've argued that there's no such thing as free will. So what is there? Well, there's luck, both good and bad, as well as what we make of it. Actually, that's not quite true. What you make of your luck is also just more luck. Once again, you didn't pick your parents. You didn't

pick the society into which you were born. There's not a cell in your body or brain that you created, nor is there a single influence coming from the outside world that you brought into being. And yet everything you think and do arises from this ocean of prior causes. So what you do with your luck and the tools with which you do it, even down to the level of the effort and discipline you manage to summon in each moment, is more in the way of luck. Now, most people resist this idea, seemingly at any intellectual cost, for reasons that I can't understand. Because this single insight is the antidote to arrogance and hatred, and a profound basis for compassion for others who are less lucky than you are.

But before we get into the ethics, we need to clear away some more confusion. I once met a rabbi who seemed to understand my views about free will the moment I expressed them. And he conceded that the notion of free will made no sense in a naturalistic world, only to then claim that we were therefore lucky to live in a world fashioned by a just and loving God, who has given each of us a soul endowed with free will. Hence the possibility of sin and our victory at overcoming it. And hence the reality of God's justice if we fail.

Of course, this equation wouldn't apply to children born with congenital diseases, who in most cases didn't even have brains with which to sin before they reaped more than their fair share of justice. But nor does it apply to anyone else when you really think about it. But I knew not to take this line with the rabbi, because he was just the sort of man who would say that God's will is a mystery, as though merely reiterating this platitude could render an all-knowing and all-powerful God also good, in the face of all the needless misery and death we see all around us. The topic of our conversation was free will, and whether or not a soul could

confer it. So I did my best to stay on point. I asked the rabbi how much credit he wanted to take for the fact that he hadn't been given the soul of a psychopath. He was aware, of course, that some people have such souls. I suggested that he and I were both very lucky not to have been so endowed. But the rabbi just waved this question away and declared that there was nothing I could say on the topic that could change his mind. Because you see, the workings of the human soul are, wait for it, a mystery. I suppose I should have seen that coming. Now this is where a wiser man than I would see life as a comedy and enjoy a good laugh.

I'll admit that these encounters sometimes bring out the nihilist in me. A claim this empty, expressed with such evident self-satisfaction, causes some part of me, some small part that other parts are struggling even now to expunge, to hope that a distant asteroid will just be nudged out of its orbit and set on a

collision course with Earth. The fact that this educated man, with a large congregation, who was in a position to lead others, intellectually and ethically, could present such an ugly tangle of ignorance and superstition to the world, as though it were some marvelous puzzle of his own invention that no mortal could solve, actually made me furious. Now, he must have mistaken the look on my face for a blow landed in debate, because his eyes now acquired a triumphant gleam. And he then claimed that without free will, there could be no such thing as reason, because people would be doomed to think whatever they would based on the laws of physics. Indeed, the very effort I was making to reason with him now proved that I too believe in free will. In fact, if you search YouTube, you can find Noam Chomsky saying the same thing in response

to a question after one of his lectures. This is a very common claim. It is also ridiculous. But the rabbi paused dramatically at this point to let the meaning of his words sink in. And here you should picture a peacock, plumage spread in full, wearing a yarmulke. a peacock, plumage spread in full, wearing a yarmulke. So now please consider what this rabbi wouldn't. Your thoughts and choices arise out of each present state of the universe, which includes your brain and your soul, if such a thing exists, along with all of its influences, whether random or not. Your thoughts, intentions, and choices are part of this causal framework. So your thoughts, intentions, and choices matter because whether they are the product of a brain or a soul, they're often the proximate cause of your actions. And yet they are

caused in turn by events that you did not bring into being. Reasoning is possible, not because you're free to think however you want, but because you are not free. Reason makes slaves of us all. This is why the rabbi's point and Chomsky's point make no sense. It matters that two plus two equals four, and it matters that you understand this. Are you free not to understand it? No. Not if you do, in fact, understand it. Are you free to understand it if you don't understand it? Again, no. Whether you understand or not isn't under your control. But the difference matters, absolutely. Anyone who believes that 2 plus 2 equals 5 will find no end to his troubles,

because the world will oppose him at every point, beginning with his own fingers. You are part of reality, whatever it is altogether. Where is the freedom in this? Your beliefs about the world are formed in a perfect crucible of prior causes. If I say something now that changes your mind, it will be through no free will of your own. And if you're left feeling merely doubt or confusion, or you come away convinced that I'm a lunatic, you won't have chosen those responses either. So freedom never enters into it.

The universe is pulling your strings. But our beliefs about the world matter because there's an enormous difference between knowledge and delusion. The physicist David Deutsch, who I had on my podcast, has argued that knowledge can produce any change in the universe compatible with its laws, because if a change can't be accomplished with sufficient knowledge, this could only mean that some law of nature prevents it. Now, you can be forgiven for thinking that this reasoning sounds circular, but I'm convinced it isn't. You should listen to that podcast with David if you want to explore this point further,

because I thought it was a great conversation. It was podcast 22, entitled Surviving the Cosmos. Now, according to Deutsch, given the right knowledge, you could take any arbitrary region of space, sweep together its stray hydrogen atoms, transmute them into heavier elements through the process of nuclear fusion, use these elements to assemble the smallest possible machine capable of building all other machines, and then produce intelligent creatures vastly more capable and sensitive than ourselves, and then produce intelligent creatures vastly more capable and sensitive than ourselves, atom by atom. All that is lacking is an understanding of how to do these things at every stage along the way. Which is to say, all that is lacking is knowledge.

So knowledge literally is power. And what we do as a species on the basis of our ignorance might very well destroy us. So the stakes couldn't be higher. A friend of mine once met a group of villagers in India who had made a daily habit of drinking small quantities of a toxic fluid that they discovered in an abandoned generator. It was, after all, beigely juice, electric juice. They thought, how could a substance so integral to the workings of a dynamo do anything but increase a person's potency?

Of course, my friend tried to reason with these people, but he was rebuffed as an ignoramus and a tender-footed colonialist. He didn't stay long enough to witness the aftermath. And of course, there's no shortage of such examples. The Chinese still imagine that rhino horn confers similar advantages. Presumably this belief has less dire consequences for their own health, but it remains quite fatal to the rhinos. With or without free will, beliefs have consequences. And part of living an examined life is putting one's beliefs in order, and one's beliefs about free will are no exception.

What is the difference between Eckhart Tolle and Osho? According to Dan Harris's book, you seem to give credence to the idea that Tolle might actually have had a true spiritual experience, while Osho is your go-to example for a fake guru, and yet their books and ideas seem almost identical. Well, they're identical apart from the nitrous oxide and the blowjobs every 45 minutes and the guns. I would say that Osho and Eckhart Tolle are pretty similar. I've gotten a fair amount of grief for a few critical things I've said about Osho. Osho, for those of you who don't recall, was also known as Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh, the man who had the 94 Rolls Royces, I think, had a compound up in Oregon. Well, on Osho, no matter how much benefit you've derived from Osho's teachings,

I hear from many people who have. It seems to me that there's no honest account of his career that doesn't show him to be a cautionary tale. I mean, you know, many gurus have clearly gotten drunk on the power of being perceived as an infallible teacher, surrounded by devotees. Osho is a clear case of someone who did. And there have been many books written about how crazy things got for him in the end. I've read at least two of those. The Rolls Royces alone make him look like a schmuck. But I've always said that I thought Osho was very smart and had many useful and true things to say about the mind and about the practice of meditation. And I don't doubt that he himself had very interesting experiences in meditation, but he was clearly flawed.

Now, I know much less about Tolle. I've never met him. I never met Osho either, but I know much less about Tolle's scene. I don't know of any scandals associated with his work. For those of you who don't know Tolle, he's a Westerner who claims to have had a kind of spontaneous enlightenment experience, which he describes in a book that became a huge bestseller entitled The Power of Now. that became a huge bestseller entitled The Power of Now. And he was on Oprah and he wrote a new age book that became very visible and from which many people have derived or claim to have derived a lot of benefit. So I don't know any scandals associated with him. The worst I could say about him is that he occasionally says things that are scientifically confused, but the experiential claims I've heard him make seem fine to me. I haven't read all of his books or really any one of his books in its entirety, but I've read enough. But this is true

of many of Osho's experiential claims. There's the experience, and then there's what you take the experience to mean. You can have an experience of self-transcendence, of losing your sense of self, so that there's only consciousness and its contents. And then there's what you decide to say or not say about the universe as a result. Now, I don't think you can say anything about the universe on the basis of that experience. But other people, like Deepak Chopra, think you can say that consciousness preceded the Big Bang, and therefore is not a biological phenomenon. And many gurus, most probably, have fallen on the Chopra side of that schism. But almost none of these people have been scientists, and many haven't even been educated by today's standards. But that doesn't mean they don't have anything to teach.

And that doesn't mean that Osho didn't have anything to teach. But the problem with Osho is that if you happen to have been an attractive woman, and especially one with large breasts, happened to have been an attractive woman, and especially one with large breasts, what he had to teach, rather often, entailed you taking your clothes off. So if you think this makes Osho look fully enlightened, you may have a deeper understanding of these matters than I do. Next question. Why podcast rather than just spend the time writing? And why ask for listener support rather than read ads like most podcasters do? Okay, well, I write because I love books, and I think that certain things can only be said well when written. But I'm under no illusions about how many people actually read books at this point. Most of the people I meet who say that my

work has made a real difference in their lives have never read any of my books. And I reach more people in the first week after I release a podcast than will buy my next book over the course of several years. And we're not talking about a six-minute interview on television. We're talking about you guys listening for one or two or three hours. So the podcast gives me all the time I need to say something. And it also allows me to be in dialogue with other people who are much more knowledgeable than I am on any given topic, like David Deutsch, who I just mentioned. So since communication is my goal, it's very tempting to keep putting my time into this medium.

Now, the problem, of course, is that this is a free medium, which people expect to remain free. And like everything else that's free online, most podcasts are paid for by ads. But I've decided that I don't want to put ads on my podcast for a variety of reasons. The main one is that all I have is my credibility. And there are very few things that I could advertise on this podcast that I can honestly say that I use and love and that you should buy. Also, I see what advertising has done to digital media in general. The desperation for clicks that is the lifeblood of ad revenue

has not been good for us or for the work that people are producing. So this podcast is an experiment, and I don't know what will ultimately come of it. I really want this to work, and it seems like it should work. The podcast is invariably what people request I do more of, and there's a lot of engagement here. Many of you have been writing to suggest new topics and interviews you think I should do. I even run into people in public who are listening to the podcast the moment they run into me, and they just flash me their phones. So it feels like a very good thing to be doing. But there is this impressive gulf between what we say we value

and what we're willing to support. Only about 1% of listeners actually fund the podcast. So there is this free rider situation with about 99% of the audience. Now again, this is totally understandable because everyone expects podcasts to be free. We've trained ourselves to expect this. And it is free. And it's good that it's free because people can discover whether or not they like what I'm doing here without any investment. So it is free, but you can support it if you want to. Now, obviously the difference between 1% support and 10% support is enormous. It's tenfold. The truth is I'd love to get more ambitious and creative in this medium. I could travel to do important interviews face-to-face,

interviews that will only happen if I show up in person. I don't know where this could go. And it actually wouldn't take that much to bring things to the next level. If only 10% of listeners gave $2 a podcast, that would be a total game changer. Suddenly that would be a media company. So if you do want to help fund the podcast, you can do it through my website at samharris.org forward slash support. And those of you who are part of the 1% who are already supporting it, you people are awesome. You have been making this happen. Next question. What's your opinion of Milo Yiannopoulos and the alt-right? All right, well, I can't say that I followed what Milo has said and written very closely.

I've watched a few interviews with him, and I know about his lifetime ban from Twitter. Obviously, I agree with him about a few things, and I disagree with him about others. The points of disagreement are probably unsurprising. He's a huge Trump supporter. He's religious and given to defending a belief in God in terms that are no more impressive than ones you've heard a thousand times before. And I find in someone who is obviously smart and very articulate, these arguments are even more annoying. So our minds don't quite meet there. My basic gripe with Milo, and again, this is based only on a few interviews and a couple of his articles, is that he strikes me as fairly insincere. I mean, he appears to be trolling all of humanity at this point and having a lot of fun

doing it. And half of what he says about social justice warriors and political correctness and Islamophobia is very incisive and amusing. But he seems to approach everything as a performance, and this leaves me wondering what he actually believes. So I don't see him as a natural ally for what I'm doing. But I do think he's gotten screwed by the media. His ban from Twitter is ridiculous, given that Twitter doesn't ban jihadists with any reliability. There's definitely a liberal media bias that is cutting against people like Milo, which he and his fans are appropriately outraged about. And as for the alt-right, for which Milo is the poster boy, I'm not sure I can say anything about it that is fair or useful. It seems to contain some smart people who are outraged by

outrageous things, as Milo seems to be, at least some of the time. And it contains real racist nitwits and everything in between. It's a bit like the Black Lives Matter movement in that respect, which is to say a totally mixed bag. And the net result of which is divisive, in my view. As far as I can tell, becoming a part of a movement doesn't help anybody think clearly. So I distrust identity politics of all kinds. I think we should talk about specific issues, whether it's trade or guns or, or foreign interventions, or abortion, or anything else.

And we should reason honestly about them. And I'm not the first person to notice that it's pretty strange that knowing a person's position on any one of these issues generally allows you to predict his position on the others. This shouldn't happen. Some of these issues are totally unrelated. Why should a person's attitude toward guns be predictive of his views on climate change or immigration or abortion? And yet it almost certainly is in our society. That's a sign that

people are joining tribes and movements, right? It's not the sign of clear thinking. If you're reasoning honestly about facts, then the color of your skin is irrelevant. The religion of your parents is irrelevant. Whether you're gay or straight is irrelevant. Your identity is irrelevant. In fact, if you're talking about reality, its character can't be predicated on who you happen to be. That's what it means to be talking about reality. And this also applies to the reality of human experience and human suffering. For instance, if vaccines don't cause autism, if that is just a fact, and that's what the best science suggests at this point, well then when arguing against this view, you need data or a new analysis of existing data. You need an argument.

And the nature of any argument is that its validity doesn't depend on who you are. That's why a good argument should be accepted by others, right? No matter who they are. So in the case of vaccines causing autism, you don't get to say, as a parent of a child with autism, I believe X, Y, and Z. Whatever is true about the biological basis of autism can't depend on who you are. And who you are in this case is probably adding a level of emotional engagement with the issue, which would be totally understandable, but would also be unlikely to lead you to think about it more clearly. The facts are whatever they are. And it's not an accident that being disinterested, And it's not an accident that being disinterested, not uninterested, but disinterested, that is not being emotionally engaged, usually improves a person's ability to reason about the facts.

When talking about violence in our society, again, the facts are whatever they are. How many people got shot? How many died? What was the color of their skin? Who shot them? What was the color of their skin? Getting a handle on these facts doesn't require one to say, as a black man, I know x, y, and z. The color of your skin simply isn't relevant information. When talking about the data, that is what is happening throughout a whole society, your life experience isn't relevant information. And the fact that you think it might be is a problem. And as you'll hear in a minute, it's a problem I recently ran into on another podcast. Now, this isn't to say that a person's life experience is never relevant to a conversation.

Of course it is. And it can be used to establish certain kinds of facts. I mean, if someone says to you, Catholics don't believe in hell, it's perfectly valid to retort, actually, my mom is a Catholic, and she believes in hell. Of course, there's a larger question of what the Catholic doctrine actually is.

But if a person is making a statement about a certain group of people, and you are a member of the group, you might very well be in a position to falsify his claim on the basis of your experience. But a person's identity and life experience often aren't relevant when talking about facts. And they're usually invoked in ways that are clearly fallacious. And many people seem to be making a political religion out of ignoring this difference. So I urge you not to be one of those people, whether you're on the left or on the right. Now, there were several other questions here asking me to describe my political beliefs.

Now, it's hard to do in a way that won't give people false assumptions. I'm definitely left of center on most issues. I think we want a social safety net below which we don't want anyone to fall. But I think we should use government and its legal machinery rather sparingly. The problem with having too many laws is that to enforce them, you need to back them up with the threat of violence. If you're going to criminalize drug use, for instance, you've decided that you're willing to send people to kick in your neighbor's door with guns drawn and haul him off to jail for doing something as innocuous as smoking pot. Not only is this unethical, it's dangerous for everyone involved.

And it's a patently insane use of resources. So I'm basically a libertarian in feeling that peaceful, honest people have the right to be left alone. And I do think government should get out of our lives. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs

and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org.