Making Sense with Sam Harris - Ask Me Anything #18

Episode Date: September 20, 2021

Questions answered: Why won’t you discuss COVID vaccines and Ivermectin with Bret Weinstein on the podcast? What do you think about the recent prosecution of a 100-year-old Nazi in Germany? How can we understand voluntary behavior without free will? Does aid to the developing world do more harm than good? Have your views about the risk of artificial general intelligence changed in recent years? What did you think of Simon Biles’s decision to drop out of the Olympics? How should Facebook and other social media platforms deal with the tradeoff between misinformation and censorship? Why are people so resistant to changing their beliefs? 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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I've been thinking more and more about what we're doing here, about what I'm doing personally, and about how that fits into the various trends we're seeing in our intellectual and ethical and political lives. The circumstance we find ourselves in is increasingly strange. Don't you think? It's half psychological experiment and half Ponzi scheme. What are we doing here? I generally think about civilization as a machine for engineering and safeguarding certain experiences. And it seems to me that it has barely started running in earnest. I mean, we've had a few thousand years of real culture,

and a few hundred years of anything like scientific rationality, and then merely a few decades of leveraging all this with information technology. Maybe there's a hardware and software analogy here. Perhaps civilization is the hardware layer and culture is the software. We have the things we actually build, the roads and bridges and the hospitals, the factories, the internet. And then we have the reasons why we built these things. And the insights and ideas that make them possible. And the stories we tell ourselves.

And our expectations of one another. Our hopes for the future. The norms we adhere to. And demand that others adhere to. Whether we can consciously specify those norms or not. Much of culture is implicit, but we need to make it more and more explicit when things begin to break down, when our efforts to cooperate with one another are failing, and failing at great cost to everyone involved. On one level, it's a miracle that anything works at all.

And things really do work to an impressive degree. Most planes do not crash. Rather often, you call the police and they come and either prevent or solve a crime. And everyone's grateful. And no one appears racist. Journalists often put their biases aside and get their facts straight. Tomorrow some drug company will develop a new medication, and regulators will help to standardize its usage. And it will actually improve people's

quality of life without imposing unacceptable costs elsewhere. It's against a background of success, and successes that we increasingly take for granted that our failures are so noticeable but I know I'm not alone in feeling that we've had more than our fair share of failures

of late and of course we can't get off the ride there's no break to pull we are condemned to create and proliferate culture. Memes upon memes upon memes. We bend light and sound for the purposes of entertainment. We create corporations and economic relationships that leverage mutual advantage and yet seem to presuppose endless growth. And it's very hard to envision where all of this frantic activity is headed. I mean, clearly we have to navigate between a crisis of

overpopulation, where we suffer some kind of global collapse and famine, and underpopulation, where we have multitudes of senescent men and women wandering the streets in diapers with no one to care for them. And we half expect technology to save us or to ruin everything. I mean, are the robots coming to our rescue or are they coming to kill us? It's hard to know from here. In the meantime, as we stagger around with our smartphones, the need for meaning is becoming more and more pressing. What should we be doing with our time on earth? Needless to say, the ancient answers to this question aren't working. In fact, they're becoming increasingly dangerous. One answer to the crisis of meaning is tribalism. And tribalism has many forms, from caring just a little too much about soccer or college basketball, to the fully weaponized

hysteria and cultishness that has subsumed our politics. All tribalism now tends toward theocracy, whether it's religious or not. It develops a taste for the irrational. Rather often you have to profess to believe the unbelievable as a profession of in-group loyalty. And then the ideologies proliferate, and they erect taboos and blasphemy tests that are non-negotiable. And then even otherwise smart and decent people increasingly adopt the ethics of the crowd, and they scapegoat others, and they find they rather like to watch a human sacrifice, whether real or metaphorical. Of course, we now see this dynamic in the form of identity politics everywhere. There's not even a pretense of an argument that the world can be made better for everyone.

And the media and academia and other institutions have been captured by all this clamor. And these new norms of intolerance in the name of tolerance are making honest conversation more and more difficult and even dangerous. Because if you say anything that calls this modern catechism into question, if, for instance, you wonder whether systemic racism is really as bad as advertised by those who might be shrieking about it in Portland in front of a vacant storefront, or whether the cops are really killing disproportionate numbers of young black men at this moment in history, or whether Islam really is as peaceful and compatible with modernity as Methodism is, say.

Or whether there's an element of social contagion behind the increase in transgenderism among teenagers, specifically teenage girls. Or if the pervasive social inequality we see in our society has anything to do with certain cultural norms actually

being better than others, or more terrifying still, whether there are genetic differences among individuals or even between groups that might be involved here. Well, if you even entertain any of those ideas, well, then you're a Nazi fit only to be destroyed. And this increasing commitment to moralizing and politicizing everything is becoming authoritarian. It is stifling dissent. It is punishing thought crime. And it has provoked an exodus of smart people from mainstream institutions.

And so we now have podcasts and sub-stack newsletters proliferating by the hour. But as I've said several times of late, this shattering of institutions is increasingly dysfunctional. Not everything in our society can be accomplished by outsiders and iconoclasts. I mean, imagine if we no longer trusted mainstream sources of airplane parts, and every pilot was left to their own initiative to find spare engine parts from non-traditional sources.

That would be madness. You're going to get your spare plane parts on Etsy. But something analogous is happening in information space. When people are deciding what to believe, actually trying to figure out what is factually true about COVID, for instance, or China, or climate change, people no longer trust the mainstream media, or academia, or the government to deliver anything like the unvarnished truth. And this is largely due to how captured these institutions are

by left-wing social justice hysteria. And to make matters even more confusing, there are Nazis in our society. And there are people who are Nazi-adjacent. And some of these people have had an inordinate influence over right-wing politics, undermining our basic commitment to democracy. There are many people on the right who, by tendency or design, seem to want an authoritarianism of their own. So we're being pushed and pulled by turns to some kind of precipice. And the question is, how can we step back? Reality doesn't care about the color of your skin, or your biological sex, or the gender with which you identify, or the religion into which you were born, or the cult toward which you were lured from some shopping mall.

And if we play our cards right, the future won't care about those things either. But the question is, how do we get to that future with our world intact? I mean, when will we realize that we're all on the same team and that we've been celebrating one own goal after the next? And how will we realize it? What is the mechanism that will force us to converge on a common picture of reality, and a common set of primary values? Anyway, trying to figure this stuff out remains the purpose of this podcast, and as always, it's a privilege to have anyone listening at all. And now for today's

questions. Hi, Sam. My name is Corey. I live in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. My question for you is more of a vote than a question. I'd really love to hear you discuss the Eric Topol podcast with Brett Weinstein on a future podcast. I know that you have considered that and kind of rule it out at this point, but love for you to reconsider. My sense is that there is a lot more common ground to land on than disagreement. And each of you, I think, could actually learn from the other about their own sense of reality surrounding the COVID issues. their own sense of reality surrounding the COVID issues. I think we're all a bit confused,

and we would all learn from the two of you learning from each other. Thank you. Hey, Corey. Thanks for the question. Yeah, this is a hard one for me, actually. I get that it seems crazy not to just flip on the microphone and talk to the guy. Or talk to him and Heather, who's also been his partner in crime. It's hard to put this in a way that doesn't sound like a personal attack. attack, but the reason why I don't want to do a podcast with Brett and Heather is the same as why I wouldn't do a podcast with a 9-11 truth conspiracy theorist or Alex Jones or anyone in that world. Because there's a basic asymmetry which is very hard to overcome. It's so much easier to make a mess than to clean it up.

It's so much easier to light several small fires than to put them out. It's like a 10 to 1 advantage. To put it that way, it sounds like my concern is not losing a debate, and that's absolutely not my concern. If you're going to view this as a debate, it's one almost immediately. But I worry about what people take from the encounter, and I just don't want to do additional harm to our public conversation about what is in fact an important public health concern and a growing political one.

First, the asymmetry. The reason why there's such an asymmetry here is that it is just impossible to debunk most things in real time. And even if the point being made is in fact spurious, it won't seem spurious to 99% of an audience, right? So the person on the conspiracy theory side of things can say, well, what about the 14 CDC officials who resigned last week and wouldn't give reasons when asked? What do you make of that? Right now, there's probably nothing to be made of that, right? I didn't even hear about it. And the truth is, I just made that up. But when delivered in the context of a, quote, debate about these things with someone whose whole angle is there's conspiracy everywhere,

it can seem like, oh, you didn't know about that. Well, that's clearly a problem. You should look into that. What about the paper that just came out of Micronesia that showed ivermectin was 100% effective? I didn't see that paper out of Micronesia. Oh, you didn't? Well, okay, you should really do your homework. It's possible to just scatter a lot of dust in the eyes and ears of the audience and make it seem like there's so many anomalies out there. There's so many things that need to be explained. And if you're not going to explain those things, if you're not going to connect this particular pattern of dots, well then you're just not doing the work. And that need not necessarily be done in bad faith. Of course it can be,

right? It's a tactic. But that's not what I'm alleging Brett and Heather would do. I'm just saying that's the way they think now. It's such a scattershot approach to this. There's so little quality control around the kind of information they're putting forward. And it takes such an effort

to chase it all down and debunk it. And anything that shows up that's new in the conversation can't be tracked down in real time. So I don't have much hope that a conversation would wind up producing a document that would be good for the world. The truth is, I'm not the best person to have the conversation either. It would be good to have an immunologist or a virologist or someone who's much closer to this type of research who could really get into the weeds with them more. And the truth is, they're obviously the wrong people to be doing what they're doing, and it shows, but it's not obvious to their audience.

Apparently, it's not obvious to their audience. Apparently it's not obvious to them. So I would welcome an encounter between them and somebody who's truly professionally qualified to talk about all the details. And perhaps that will happen. I mean, in fact, I just reached out to Joe Rogan, telling him what I thought of his latest podcast with Brett and Heather, and recommended that he figure out how to unring that bell. And maybe he will bring Brett and Heather on with someone like Eric Topol, or someone even closer to the topic at hand. And that could be useful, but even then, I think that in front of Rogan's audience, it's questionable whether that will actually work

for the reasons already given. It's just so easy to be misleading. And again, I'm not suggesting bad faith on their part. I think they probably really believe everything they're saying. But there is just an asymmetry here in how difficult it is to close every loophole to conspiracy and the influx of the incredible as they get opened in the conversation. I'll give you one example of the kind of thing I found implausible in Brett and Heather's last appearance with Joe Rogan. And this is the kind of thing that they too should find implausible in Brett and Heather's last appearance with Joe Rogan. And this is the kind of thing that they too should find implausible, that the moment these words escape their mouths, and it's still mysterious to me why this isn't happening. But for instance, they were talking

about the evolutionary logic of immune escape, right? So we get vaccines, and the moment tens of millions of people start getting vaccinated, that begins to select for variants that can evade the vaccine, right? So it's a fool's errand to be thinking that you're going to get out of this pandemic by vaccinating everyone, because you're just going to create more transmissible and possibly even more dangerous variants. Now, there's a lot wrong with this from a public health point of view and from an evolutionary point of view, right? I mean, from an evolutionary point of view, it's just half the story, right? Yes, the immunity conferred through vaccination can select for variants that can defeat the vaccine, but the immunity conferred by having caught COVID and recovered also selects for variants that can escape that immunity, right? So vaccination is on

all fours with natural immunity there. Think of how worried we need to be about a variant that can defeat natural immunity. Also, that's an argument against all vaccination, right? Because no vaccines, to my knowledge, are 100% effective, right? Regardless regardless of exposure, regardless of possible genetic changes in a virus. And I believe that the mRNA vaccines for COVID are among the most effective vaccines we have. We're just in the middle of a pandemic, which is an extreme circumstance. I'm not quite sure how our measles vaccines would be performing if we were in the middle of a measles pandemic. If everywhere you went you were confronted by somebody who had

measles, I don't know how often measles mutates, but I think we'd probably find that there's some breakthrough infection. So if you follow his argument, you seem to land in a true anti-vax position, right? Don't vaccinate against anything because you're selecting for dangerous variants. And again, ignoring the fact that natural immunity is also doing that. And it's curious that Brett and Heather are not seeing that because, again, they run everything through the logic of evolution. There's another glaring error here, you know, to suggest that our current problem with variants has anything to do with vaccination seems a little bonkers, because the biggest problem, the Delta variant, emerged in

India and became prevalent there under conditions where exactly no one was vaccinated. We know that the emergence of Delta has nothing to do with our vaccination regime. The whole thrust of their comments there is confused, right? And once again, the subtext to everything they're saying, no matter how reasonable and attentive to caveats they can seem, and I will grant you, they can seem incredibly reasonable. They do not seem like Alex Jones, and this is why what they're doing is so insidious. But the basic message, the basic implication of everything they say, and the apparent reason behind everything they're

saying, is the belief that these COVID vaccines are dangerous, and you should be worried about them. You should be profoundly hesitant to take them. These are not normal vaccines. And in fact, the pushing of these vaccines on the public is colossally unethical. That is what they are messaging, right? They've said as much explicitly on their own podcast. I think Brett called it the greatest crime of the century or something insane like that. I should get the actual language. All right, hold on. Okay, now I've taken a few minutes and found the transcript of Brett's confabulation on this topic. He's talking about the absolute scandal of the suppression of the life-saving knowledge of ivermectin and the pushing of the vaccines

on his own podcast, where he's talking to a Dr. Corey. The podcast itself is titled The Crime of the Century, and they're going back and forth about how nefarious the machinations must be to have produced this policy. Dr. Corey says, all the pipeline molecules, the stuff that's coming that they want to bring to market, are also there, right? And then Brett says, which have had a tremendous investment made in them. The thing I think we're almost certain to get wrong is that, as outsiders, we have no idea what these conversations sound like on the inside.

There's a temptation to imagine that people are somehow sitting around comfortable with the fact that their behavior is going to cause hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of deaths, that it may stick humanity with a relationship with a pathogen that it will not be able to shake because it will prevent us from taking the appropriate action until it's too late. We imagine that people are saying these things out loud, when I'm sure that there are some sociopaths in the system who are probably capable of having those discussions, but there aren't enough sociopaths to account for this behavior. There is some way that people who are

doing a harm great enough, I've called it the crime of the century, and I realize the century is young, but this is going to be hard to top. It's going to be hard to top. There is some way that people who are engaged in something worthy of acclaim, like the crime of the century, are comfortable with what they're doing, or worse, are convinced it's the right thing, that somehow the greater good is being served. worse, are convinced it's the right thing, that somehow the greater good is being served. Okay, here you have it in fairly crystalline form, the conspiratorial thinking, the outrageous claims about death and destruction due to these vaccines, and the suppression of ivermectin for purely mercenary reasons.

The problem, of course, is that there's no reason to think this is true. There is no reason to think that ivermectin is a surrogate for getting vaccinated. And there's no reason to think that people should be terrified of getting these vaccines. And that is the message that Brett is spreading hour by hour by hour. Whereas the truth is, we have a head-to-head comparison between three cohorts of people, tens of millions, hundreds of millions in some cases, those who have been vaccinated, those who have caught COVID without being vaccinated,

those who have caught COVID without being vaccinated, those who have caught COVID having been vaccinated, and we know the outcomes. We know them well enough to know that you're far better off being vaccinated and eventually catching COVID, as you will, than catching it without having been vaccinated. Catching COVID is not a strategy for becoming immune to COVID. It's just catching COVID, right? And those who survive will have some natural immunity. The jury's no longer out on that score. Now, it may be true that in certain populations, it is rational to worry that the potential side effects of vaccination are greater than the risk of COVID. For instance, I believe there are some data about teenage boys having a higher risk of

myocarditis than teenage girls, certainly. I think it's a tenfold difference. And the risk may be high enough that it is in fact greater than their risk of becoming severely ill with COVID. The data I saw suggested it was kind of a coin toss there, but slightly in favor of not getting vaccinated. If those data hold up, well then, yes, it may be rational to decide that 12-year-old boys shouldn't be vaccinated. But the general picture here is fairly well established. We know catching COVID is worse in almost every case that has thus far been tried than getting vaccinated for COVID. And from what I've seen recently, the data in favor of ivermectin seems increasingly dubious. So parsing all this should be left to the professionals, right? Again, I come back to my basic mystification around what Brett and Heather are

doing. Why do this publicly? If you're going to make the personal choice not to get vaccinated based on your scrutiny of the data, great, make that choice. But why spend the better part of a year convincing people that they shouldn't get vaccinated? You can say that's not what you're doing, but that is in fact what you're doing. And that's what seems so irresponsible. The U.S. is now one of the least vaccinated countries in the developed world. We got these life-saving vaccines before everyone, and now we're the 37th most vaccinated country. We're behind the UAE and Portugal and Singapore and Spain and Spain, and Denmark, and Uruguay, Chile, Belgium, Ireland, Canada, Bahrain, the UK, Mongolia. We're behind Mongolia, Norway, Italy, France, the Netherlands, Germany. We're behind Mauritius and Cyprus, but we're also behind Cambodia, Lithuania, Malaysia, the Czech Republic,

Greece. It makes no sense, right? And it's because of misinformation and the way it's interacting with our hyper-partisan political landscape. That's why we're here. And there's no question that three hours of the Brett and Heather show on Joe Rogan is having an effect. And that'll sound as censorious as it does. I just think it's irresponsible, and I'm not quite sure how to grab hold of this increasingly unbalanced object so as to set it right. But perhaps Rogan will do something to unring that bell. Okay, next question. Hi, Sam.

My name is Brian, and I live in Paris, Ontario. My question for you is... 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.