Making Sense with Sam Harris - Ask Me Anything #17

Episode Date: August 8, 2021

In this episode of the podcast, Sam takes your questions. He begins by addressing the blowback that followed his previous podcast on “vaccine hesitancy” with Eric Topol. And then he answers the following questions: How can I inoculate my biracial children against identity politics? In what way is journalism broken, and how can we fix it? Have you read the research suggesting that the effects of microdosing psychedelics are indistinguishable from taking placebos? Can you comment on the degree to which Leftist political ideas have captured the Buddhist community? What should Democrats do to prevent a resurgence of Trumpism? What are the ingredients for a good life? Is it ever ethical for governments to lie to their citizens? If the present moment is all that matters, how can we plan for the future? 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.

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Okay. Okay, I should start with an addendum to the last podcast on vaccines and vaccine hesitancy that I did with Eric Topol. Some of the responses I received to that have been astoundingly stupid. I guess that's not a total surprise. I don't feel like dealing with too many specifics here. One criticism I do take to heart, if only because it came in one form from my wife, is that despite my saying that I wanted to remain non-judgmental and try to produce a document that the vaccine-averse could actually receive without feeling denigrated in any way, I didn't try hard enough. And certainly my guest, Eric, didn't try hard enough. There I would have to say we are guilty as charged. And in truth, I'm not even sure it's the right target.

I mean, there is something patronizing about the claim that in order to reach the vaccine hesitant, you have to walk on eggshells so as to not make them feel judged. Nevertheless, I do see the depressing results of the last podcast all around me. Those who were disposed to agree with me absolutely loved it and were grateful, and those who are worried about the COVID vaccines and taken in by what they've heard on

Brett Weinstein's podcast or Tucker Carlson or wherever thought Eric and I were totally clueless about the state of the conversation that's happening over there. I don't actually know what the solution is here because some people asked, why not just have Brett on the podcast to talk about all this? But I think that would be a bad idea.

Not because I don't think there are adequate answers to the kinds of points he would raise, but like so many debates on fairly fringe topics, you know, classic conspiracy theories, religious fundamentalism, many points can't be addressed in real time. Many anomalies can't be fully explained, right? And it can give a sense of uncertainty that is truly unwarranted. So there are many cases where merely having the

conversation can be misleading for many, many people. And in this case, in the middle of a public health crisis, I think it is irresponsible to run this just-asking-questions routine in public. That really is my objection to what Brett is doing. It's just too easy for even smart people to come away from a discussion on these topics confused and by default disposed to not do anything, which is to say, not get vaccinated. There's so many things at play here. There's the fact that sticking a needle in your arm really seems like something intrusive, right? People are afraid of needles. They find the whole thing unpleasant. They certainly find it unpleasant to have someone do it to their kids, right? And it's interesting to consider how the debate here would be different if the vaccine were delivered as a chewable gummy

or as a nasal spray, right? I think that would feel different to many people. a nasal spray, right? I think that would feel different to many people. But the default is to feel that getting vaccinated or getting your kids vaccinated is an act of commission, which entails greater ethical concern and responsibility than an act of omission, right? Not doing something. Not doing something is who can fault you for just sitting on your hands? Well, in this case, you become part of a petri dish, potentially, breeding new variants of this virus. And you're a free rider on herd immunity, if it were ever achieved. And I think it is appropriate to judge people for taking that position. It is not merely a choice you're making for yourself.

Even choosing not to wear a seatbelt isn't merely a choice you're making for yourself. There you don't have the problem of epidemiology, but if you are not wearing a seatbelt and you're thrown from your car in an accident and horribly injured, society pays the costs of that. Your medical bills raise the costs of insurance for everyone. And if you're uninsured, society bears those costs, right? And society's bearing the costs of people who land in ICUs with severe complications from COVID when it wasn't necessary at this point. I think it's

totally appropriate to put the onus on the vaccine hesitant here, unless, of course, they have really compelling reasons not to want to get vaccinated. And there's some people who do. There's the very people for whom herd immunity is such an important variable, the people who are immunocompromised in various ways, or who have terrible reactions to vaccines. There are people like this who can't get vaccinated, and those are precisely the people one is thinking about when championing the virtues of herd immunity. So it's hard to get past the sense that

what is happening among the vaccine-hesitant is, given the state of our current information, a failed commitment to the common good. You are helping prolong a problem that need not be prolonged. We know these vaccines work, and we know they are safe enough at this point, certainly compared to the problem of getting COVID without the benefit of getting vaccinated. And if I didn't believe we knew this, then there might be something to debate. But just I'm not going to have a podcast where someone's haranguing me about thermites and the melting point of steel. I'm not going to have a debate about these vaccines in the absence of truly compelling evidence. And to give you a sense of how weak the evidence is out there,

when I saw Brett's response to my podcast, one of the things he and his wife Heather did on their podcast is single out for distinction a wonderful thread on Twitter by someone named Alexandros Marinos, who dissected my podcast with Eric Topol minute by minute, and Brett and Heather recommended that people study this thread as a demolition of that episode. Again, there's no reason to go into the details here, but so much of this was so obviously missing the point and silly. But I'll just flag one thing that should alert Brett and Heather to how far into the precincts of paranoia they've wandered.

At one point, Alexandros references my claim that we could take the worst fears of the vaccine hesitant at face value and it would still be rational to get vaccinated. The worst fears being that the VAERS database is reporting real numbers of deaths associated with the vaccine, suggesting that as many as 12,000 people may have died outright from it. And Alexandros admonishes me to be more careful than that,

because actually, because of the UI and UX concerns of this database, people fear that the problem may be tenfold greater than reported. So now I'm being asked to imagine that 120,000 people in the U.S. have died outright by being vaccinated. No one died in the clinical trials, but 120,000 people may have died in the last few months, and no one is really noticing, apparently. Right? I mean, what's happening here? Are ICUs filling up with people who were just vaccinated? Is that

what I'm asked to believe? Are these people dying in their homes and no one knows about it? There's absolutely no reason to believe anything like that. Okay, so if you are in a social context where those fears seem plausible to you, you have been lured into some kind of information backwater that is not good for your mind, and it's certainly not good for our collective well-being. Actually, there was another thread that's even more to the point, which Brett also singled out as absolutely indispensable for our understanding of what's going on among the vaccine-hesitant. And this comes from someone named Konstantin Kissin. It's a very long thread, but the first tweet reads,

You're struggling to understand why some people are vaccine-hesitant. The Let Me Help You mega-thread. Imagine you're a normal person. The year is 2016. Rightly or wrongly, you believe most of what you see in the media. You believe polls are broadly reflective of public opinion. You believe doctors and scientists are trustworthy and independent. You're a decent, reasonable person who follows the rules and trusts authority. And then he goes through all of the insults to this naive way of thinking that have occurred in the last five years or so. He talks about Brexit, election of Trump,

and the claim that Russians were involved in getting him elected, the Steele dossier, the Jussie Smollett hoax, the Covington Catholic high school affair, the capitulation of various institutions, medical and otherwise, to wokeism, all the epidemiologists who shrieked about COVID when people on the far right were protesting. But the moment the protests for George Floyd erupted, they not only didn't judge the protesters, but asserted that protesting was itself a contribution to public health. All of these insults to reasonableness and instances of public hypocrisy and just the full litany here.

So he runs through all of this as an explanation for why the vaccine-hesitant now no longer trust authority of any kind. The government, scientists, scientific journals, public health officials. As though this explains it all. I would quibble with a couple of things Constantine said in his litany of abuse, but the general shape of it is something I totally accept. Yes, there has been an impressive breakdown in our institutions, and in particular the media, and the way in which politics has deranged our public conversation more or less on every topic. But the one thing that this analysis

does not explain is the thinking of those of us who have still followed the plot, those of us who experienced all of these insults to our intelligence and yet still managed to understand that Trump really was a threat to our democracy. And if the sight of a U.S. president not committing to a peaceful transfer of power doesn't convince you on that point, nothing will. And in the case of COVID, despite all of the failures of clear thinking and clear public health messaging, many of us still understand that the vaccines are incredibly effective, and all things considered, it is far wiser to be vaccinated at this point than to be running the risk of getting COVID without having

been vaccinated. It's possible to keep the big picture in view. Here's the big picture. The failings of our institutions need not lead to a total breakdown of trust in our institutions. It is possible to exaggerate how much our institutions have failed. And that is what is most objectionable and so dysfunctional about what Brett is doing with his podcast. This just-asking-questions routine is corrosive of public trust at a time where the failure of trust translates into disease and death, an unnecessary risk of disease and death for others, right? We're in the middle of a pandemic. There is no compelling reason at this point to be worried about these vaccines. There is a compelling reason to be worried about just letting this pandemic burn through the unvaccinated population, right? We should be spreading these vaccines to the entire world at this point.

these vaccines to the entire world at this point. And we need institutions, right? We need to repair our institutions. We need to criticize them for their failures. But the idea that we can navigate a global public health emergency by podcast and substack newsletter is patently ridiculous. We need a functioning CDC and FDA and WHO. We need medical journals that are credible. And it's this breakdown in legitimacy, or perceived legitimacy, that is proving so dysfunctional. So my issue with what Brett is doing is that he's doing it in public. Fine, if you're uncomfortable getting vaccinated, you want to make that private decision for yourself and your family. Well, fine, I don't agree with it, but that is very different than making it a public cause to convince as many people as possible that they should be

worried about these vaccines. There is no compelling reason at this moment to be worried about these vaccines, and yet you're devoting podcast after podcast to spreading that fear, again, in the middle of a pandemic. That's the part that doesn't make any sense. That's the part that seems unethical and irresponsible. Of course it's possible to worry about the long-term safety implications of these vaccines or of any other new medical intervention for which long-term safety data are unavailable. I'm not saying it's crazy to worry about these things. I'm saying that all things considered, it's not reasonable. And it's not reasonable to stoke those fears in

millions of people. We have a forced choice. You can get exposed to COVID without having been vaccinated or after having been vaccinated. That's the choice. Of course, Brett thinks there's a third choice. You can be exposed while taking ivermectin prophylactically, but he admits that ivermectin is not widely available, that most people can't get their hands on it. So this isn't an option for his audience, for the most part, even if he could justify it for himself, which again, I don't think he can really do. So this really is the crux of the matter, which I would put directly to Brett. What public good is being served by spreading fear of the COVID vaccines to millions of people who have no rational alternative, really, but to be vaccinated. We have every reason to believe that the long-term implications of getting COVID

without having been vaccinated are worse. Take the concerns about election fraud that are endemic on the political right at the moment. Now, is it completely insane to be concerned about election fraud? No, election fraud is certainly a possibility that we should be worried about. We should guard against it. We're absolutely right to want to be confident in the results of our elections.

And if there's new technology that we introduce that turns out to be hackable, all of that is a concern. So you're not crazy to be thinking about election integrity. And happily, many smart people on both sides of the aisle have thought a lot about it. It turns out that there's no significant evidence of election fraud. But should we be on guard against this? Of course. But what we have among Republicans at the moment is the

utterly delusional claim that the 2020 election was stolen. And this has become a crystal of doubt around which an insane personality cult has formed. So the merely asking questions routine is in bad faith, or it's totally oblivious to the corrosive effects of asking certain questions again and again. and Phoenix that went missing, when it's impossible to respond to a claim like that. You platform a claim like that that you can't possibly respond to. I don't know if it's made up. I don't know how many journalists it would take to track it down. But I know that in the general picture of things, the incentives are such that the claim is guaranteed to be spurious. We're talking about an election which, in the irrelevant case, was governed by Republican election officials. And there were Republican judges who heard these challenges and threw them out.

The incentives were never there to produce a massive fraud. All of this is virtually guaranteed to be bullshit. Now, is it conceivable that some facts will come to light so that I'll have to recant this statement? Sure, it's conceivable. And it's conceivable that in some years we'll discover that mRNA vaccines were more dangerous than we thought, and that ivermectin is a far more potent prophylactic against COVID than we have any right to believe now. But the question is, what is it rational to believe and do now, given the information we have? Anyway, as I said, I don't actually think there's much to say on this topic. I do think it is quite straightforward. We have enough information

to know what happens to people, generally speaking, when they get these vaccines, and the differential outcomes for the vaccinated and unvaccinated who get COVID. That part really isn't debatable anymore. So if we want to get society back to something like normal, globally speaking, I think we have an ethical obligation to help get the world vaccinated against this disease. And it's worth considering what the world will look like if we get a variant that is far more deadly than those currently circulating. How will the just-asking-questions routine look in the case of something that's killing 5 or 10 or 15 or 20 percent of those it infects, hopefully we'll never experience such a thing. But under those conditions, to get a vaccine that

works and not to use it, and to argue against its use, should be unthinkable. And I'm not so sure it is at this point. Again, I think we're in the presence of something like a religious or pseudo-religious phenomenon. People are just not thinking clearly, and mere contrarianism is becoming part of their identities. And there's something pornographic about all this. This reflexive distrust of institutional authority is like the pornography of doubt. People are infatuated with this stuff. And there's a zealotry around it.

And the quality of the thinking is so bad in so many cases. Given my experience on other topics, it's impossible to shake the feeling of familiarity here. This is what it's like to argue about religion or the 9-11 truth conspiracy. And on those fronts, I've learned to pick my battles because getting into the trenches is so unrewarding. COVID aside, we have a much larger problem on our hands. But we have to figure out how to solve this riddle of how do we improve our institutions

and trust them when we should, all the while recognizing they've become less worthy of that trust. It's like we have to repair an airplane as it's flying, right? And not do anything so stupid or iconoclastic that it just falls out of the sky. And that's what I perceive Brett and his audience to be doing.

We're just asking questions. We're just doubting everything. We're just being scientific skeptics. Show us the data. I'll believe it when you show it to me. Oh, but what about this little wrinkle over here? You know the jet fuel only burns at 1500 degrees Fahrenheit and the melting point of steel is 2500 degrees Fahrenheit and you mean to tell me that those planes brought down those buildings? Have you heard of thermite? I've got a 90-page master's thesis I want you to read on the thermite hypothesis. Can you set a day aside for that? That's where we are, and it matters that people like Brett are choosing to contribute to that side of the conversation. to contribute to that side of the conversation. Okay. And now getting to your questions.

Hi, Sam. My name is Walt Dalkash and I live in Dublin, Ireland. My question for you is, how can I inoculate my biracial children against the identity politics ideology they are bound to encounter at school and university? Okay. Well, Walt, this is a question that is on the minds of many of us these days. 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, NAMAs, 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.