Making Sense with Sam Harris - Making Sense of Encounters With Violence | Episode 4 of The Essential Sam Harris

Episode Date: January 26, 2023

This episode centers around the specter of violence and surfaces some of Sam’s most controversial positions and difficult conversations. We begin with author and former FBI hostage negotiator Chris Voss, who delivers some potentially life-saving aspects of “tactical empathy,” which can also be applied to less extreme circumstances. Author and security expert Gavin de Becker then lays out his thesis from The Gift of Fear, which recasts this unfairly maligned emotion as an important attention-demanding, evolved signal. We then spend time with Sam’s position on “profiling” and the moral and political complexities woven into it. This careful consideration leads to a conversation with author and firearms instructor Scotty Reitz, as they paint a stark picture of certain extremes of violence and consider what responsible gun ownership might look like. Sam then answers questions directly on his often criticized and often misunderstood position on gun ownership before we turn to author and former Navy Seal Jocko Willink to apply pressure on the philosophical stance of pacifism. We conclude with the philosopher Tamler Sommers, who ponders the idea of “honor” in society and inspects how third-party delegation of violence might generate an illusive sense of justice.   About the Series Filmmaker Jay Shapiro has produced The Essential Sam Harris, a new series of audio documentaries exploring the major topics that Sam has focused on over the course of his career. Each episode weaves together original analysis, critical perspective, and novel thought experiments with some of the most compelling exchanges from the Making Sense archive. Whether you are new to a particular topic, or think you have your mind made up about it, we think you’ll find this series fascinating.  

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. 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. Welcome to The Essential Sam Harris. This is Making Sense of Encounters with Violence. The goal of this series is to organize, compile, and juxtapose conversations hosted by Sam Harris into specific areas of interest. This is an ongoing effort to construct a coherent overview of Sam's perspectives and arguments,

the various explorations and approaches to the topic, the relevant agreements and disagreements, and the pushbacks and evolving thoughts which his guests have advanced. The purpose of these compilations is not to provide a complete picture of any issue, but to entice you to go deeper into these subjects. Along the way, we'll point you to the full episodes with each featured guest, and at the conclusion, we'll offer some reading, listening, and watching suggestions, which range from fun and light to densely academic. One note to keep in mind for this series. Sam has long argued for a unity of knowledge where the barriers between fields of study are viewed as largely unhelpful artifacts of unnecessarily

partitioned thought. The pursuit of wisdom and reason in one area of study naturally bleeds into, and greatly affects, others. You'll hear plenty of crossover into other topics as these dives into the archives unfold. And your thinking about a particular topic may shift as you realize its contingent relationships with others. In this topic, you'll hear the natural overlap with theories of free will, political philosophy, the foundations of morality, and more. So, get ready. Let's make sense of encounters with violence. Violence is an area of interest for Sam from several perspectives, and in this compilation, we're going to explore two main tracks.

The first track will be personal contact with violence. This will look at the areas of self-defense, surviving a hostage situation, personal participation in war, and Sam's involvement with the practice of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. We will then transition to the second track the more philosophical and political considerations of violence in general. This will take a look at Sam's critique of pacifism

along with the controversial topics of profiling, torture, and gun ownership. controversial topics of profiling, torture, and gun ownership. This section will lean heavily on Sam's strongly consequentialist moral framework. We recommend listening to our compilation on the foundations of morality to fully dissect just how Sam reaches his politically relevant advocacy. Some of this compilation will be difficult to hear, Some of this compilation will be difficult to hear, and much of it presents harrowing scenarios and situations. But thinkers like Sam often intentionally wander to these dark edges of possibility and behavior, not just out of a penchant for the macabre or for the public shock value,

but to hopefully make genuine and important philosophical and psychological discoveries that have many implications for all aspects of life. Moral philosophers are fond of imagining wild, hellish scenarios that sometimes seem to spring from the mind of a troubled writer of horror films. Their imaginings fill the pages of textbooks with long, obscure titles, as well as philosophy seminars inside university walls the world over.

While detailing these thought experiments, they claim to be exploring the boundaries of moral frameworks and unearthing the decisive exceptions to previously upheld philosophies. Often, the scenarios are dismissed as too unrealistic and impossible to be relevant. I mean, you'll never really be in the dispatcher's room when an out-of-control trolley barrels towards various people tied to the tracks, right? Well, many of Sam's guests on Making Sense come from intellectual circles like philosophy and psychology, and they regularly explore these kinds

of fanciful thought experiments. But this group doesn't constitute Sam's complete list of guests. Some of the most important and challenging episodes of Making Sense come from Sam's engagement with people like Chris Voss, the man in our first clip. Voss sports a thick, tough-guy, Midwestern accent that sounds like it comes straight from central casting, like it belongs to a hard-boiled FBI hostage negotiator. And in fact, that's exactly what Chris Voss is. He's actually lived through some of these philosophers' wildest thought experiments.

Throughout his 28-year career, Voss has negotiated a variety of hostage situations, from bank heists to international kidnappings and everything in between. He's also been tapped by the corporate world to apply his insights and teach the skill of deal-making. He co-wrote a book called Never Split the Difference, Negotiating Like Your Life Depended on It, which brought those same lessons into the home, to the familiar, small stakes, commonplace negotiations that happen every day in families and relationships. His conversation with Sam spanned the entire range of considerations when it comes to hostage situations, including the moral considerations of paying ransom.

We'll revisit that philosophical aspect of moral philosophy and violence in the latter half of this compilation. But for now, we'll look to this episode for a more intimate engagement with violence. In particular, we're going to get advice on what you might want to do if you ever happen to be violently kidnapped. This is Sam with Chris Voss from episode 132, Freeing the Hostages. So given what you know about negotiating from outside the crisis? What would you do if you were taken hostage that it might not occur to the average person to do? Well, since I know the chances are I'm going to come out, it's up to me then to engage

in a psychological approach that maintains my sanity as much as possible, makes me treated better. Make sure the kidnappers know my name. Don't resist what they want me to do. Don't be a pain in the neck. But if they grab me and they try to drag me to the other side of the room, I just look at them and I say, I'm Chris. You know, I will repeat my name to them as much as possible so that they figure out eventually I'm going to condition them to say,

Chris, come over here and I'll go over. Right. Instead of them dragging me over eventually, I'm going to condition them to say, Chris, come over here, and I'll go over instead of them dragging me over because then I'm Chris. As soon as I become Chris, the chances are that they're going to harm me, hurt. I become a person. Now, at some point in time, when they see me as a person, they're actually going to want to make friends with me. They're stuck with me too. There was a Mark Wahlberg movie a number of years back where he was running a facility where they were using chimpanzees for science experiments in space flight. They had all the chimpanzees numbered and he came in and he gave them names. The guy stopped him and he said, as soon as you give them names, it's going to be harder to walk them out to the experiments. You're going to get attached to them. You're going to treat them

better. That's human nature. I'm going to exploit what I know to be the case in human nature, and I'm going to sit back and I'm going to develop a relationship with my captors, and then I'm going to think about who I'm going to sell my story to when I come out. So it is such a high probability of a successful resolution that you would view it as unnecessarily risky to attempt to escape and what are the conditions under which you would decide you should be running the risk of violent conflict by attempting to escape yourself well um all right so when they first grab you they expect you to fight back now that's the only time you can get away with fighting back it's still a stupid idea because since They expect you to fight back. Now, that's the only time you can get away with fighting back. It's still a stupid idea because since they expect you to fight, they're also prepared to beat

you senseless. Now, it's a separate issue as to whether or not you run away. The issue is not whether or not you try to get away. The issue is whether or not you use violence to do it. They're not going to blame you for trying to get away. They would too. They're just going to blame you if you use violence to do it. You walk away, run away, they catch you, they'll be mad at you, but they won't beat you unconscious for it. We had one hostage walked away in Ecuador a couple of times because they let him go to the bathroom by himself. And every time he went to the bathroom by himself, he'd stay away for a few minutes longer. He conditioned them to expect him to be away for a while. And when he built the time period up, he walked away when he went to the bathroom. That was the extent of their punishment.

Other hostages who've tried to escape by the means of violence have gotten themselves killed. So a walk away, a run away, they don't blame you for that. They expect you to do that as long as you don't do it with violence. This is interesting because this advice is diametrically opposed to what I consider to be the conventional wisdom in self-defense situations that are not classical hostage situations. But if you're getting into your car in the parking lot and someone comes up with a gun and says, you know, get in, the advice I've always gotten from law enforcement, from martial artists, from people who just know these situations, is to resist violently and explosively as quickly as possible, and that, above all, never let yourself be taken to a secondary crime scene. You might not agree with that self-defense advice in the first place, but assuming you do,

it sounds like the rules could change if you're in a situation where hostage takers just have a sufficient control that then your marshalling violence is virtually guaranteed to work against you? Yeah, well, you know, there's a couple nuances to that question. You got to be careful about generalizations, but that is a great question. All right, so first of all, the common theme at all times is to get away. Now, your choice is to how you want to get away and what you're faced with. And there's a big difference between a domestic U.S. hostage kidnapping and an international kidnapping. Massive difference. Principally, in a domestic U.S. kidnapping, the bad guys know they're going to get caught. They assume they're going to get caught. and you are the number one witness against them. So domestic U.S. kidnapping is a very

dangerous affair. So let's unspool that a little more slowly. What is fundamentally different in terms of what you'd assume the outcome would be domestically? Yeah, the domestic guys know that we've got this great, not only do we have a great law enforcement infrastructure, we've got a prison system that holds people for a long period of time. And most kidnappers still believe that you get the death penalty for kidnapping. Now, you only get the death penalty for kidnapping if your victim dies and the state has a death penalty. But the bad guys are not studying up on U.S. history and the changes in the laws. So they figure that at a bare minimum, they're going to jail for a very long time, if not receiving a death penalty. That is not the case in other countries where kidnapping exists.

You don't go to jail in Mexico for kidnapping. If you do, you stay there just long enough to get a meal. The domestic, Brazil, same way. You don't do any jail time in Brazil. And if you got jail time, there's going to be a prison break. You're going to get out anyway. So they know that. They understand how long they're going to stay in jail.

So domestic U.S. kidnapping, very dangerous affair. And you are the biggest threat to their freedom as a witness. And they do not want that witness to live. In the third world, the developing world, they could care less. They're more interested in getting paid. They're not worried about getting caught. Otherwise, there wouldn't be so much kidnapping in Colombia, Ecuador, Central America, South America, Mexico, Iraq.

So you've got to know where you are. But that might cut both ways. Might? In the sense that in, let's put it in Colombia for the moment, if the risk of being caught and prosecuted is so low, then I would think the life of the hostages would be commensurately cheap there too, because presumably you're not getting easily caught and prosecuted for murder either. Right, so now the question is,

and you gotta be careful about projecting the wrong set of values into the wrong place. So you're in a commodities game. You're in a commodities business. It's not what it is to us, it's what it is to them. Any business that doesn't deliver its product, what happens? It doesn't last very

long. They go out of business. And if you're a kidnapping gang and you develop a reputation for not delivering hostages, that's going to get out. It sounds insane, but it doesn't matter what it is to us. It matters what it is to them. Right. And if they don't deliver, they don't get paid. And they're much more interested in getting paid because to them it's a business. attempts on the part of the hostage taker to commit suicide by cop, what would you expect if you heard that someone had been kidnapped in the U.S.? Yeah, and a great question because, you know, what type of hostage situation is it? You can't broad brush kidnapping and suicide by cop are as different as zebras and giraffes. Yeah, but they're both from Africa. Well, they're a giraffe and a rhino. They're both African animals, right?

Suicide by cop takes place principally, primarily at banks. Secondarily, any situation where the bad guys are trying to get the police's attention. That's one of the first elements of suicide by cop. Did they create a provocation they know the police are going to show up to? Why does that happen at banks? Banks got bank alarms. Cops show up really fast. Kidnapping, completely different animal. They're not trying to get the police's attention. They're trying to get the family's attention. At domestic U.S. kidnapping, because they figure they're going to get caught, and if they get caught, the primary witness is the victim. Different game entirely.

The victim is now a threat. Kidnapping internationally, who's got a robust penal system, jail system, in comparison to the United States in the third world? Nobody. the United States in a third world. Nobody. Okay, so that should get your mind sufficiently geared up for some of the unpleasantness of this topic as we zoom out from the personal to the philosophical. Boss has navigated the thought experiments and discovered a raft of interesting psychological techniques geared towards de-escalation and rescue. In many ways, his job is to be a speed-dating therapist, tasked with hijacking whatever vulnerabilities the target might be harboring in order to bring the situation to the best possible conclusion.

As we go forward, much of our examination of violence will attempt to strike a tenuous balance between moral reasoning and frantic urgency. Because in thinking about violence, we must also consider a particular emotion that's almost never absent when violence is present. That emotion is fear. Any situation that includes the following ingredients is a recipe for fear. There are many uncertain outcomes. Nearly all of them are extremely undesirable. The path towards desirable outcomes is narrowed by a high risk of failure.

There's a rapidly declining time frame before the undesirable outcomes materialize. There's a rapidly declining timeframe before the undesirable outcomes materialize. And there's a necessity to break moral norms to try to bring about the better outcomes. This recipe comes together when an animal is being cornered by a predator, or when humans read a news report about an approaching hurricane. Fear usually isn't high on people's lists of favorite emotions to experience. But our next guest wrote a book entitled The Gift of Fear, which attempts to give fear some love. Fear, he argues, is a message from within ourselves to another part of ourselves, and it serves a tremendously important and underrated role. Evolution favors animals with a good deal of fear.

All of us animals currently living are trailing a long line of the evolved behavior of fearful animals who utilized this fear to avoid death. The dead ends on the family tree are much more likely to be the animals who are most numb to the threat of something truly dangerous, rather than the ones who reacted to the first rustling in the leaves as if it were a poisonous snake. But, of course, there's a balance to strike.

An animal who was too jumpy and ran away in fear every time the leaves rustled may have missed out on a lot of good feeding opportunities, and may not have had the privilege of passing on its genes. So this evolved fear meter has been calibrating its accuracy within us for quite some time, but it's not a perfect instrument. Evolution, as always, is merely a blind process, seeking the path of least resistance suitable enough to keep the genes going. Evolution also moves at a much slower pace than the technological and societal evolution of our modern civilization.

The overwhelming majority of the fear meter's evolution took place in an environment when we were around similar-looking and sounding kin, and took place in the absence of technological threats like guns, bombs, and radiation. Our fear meter may therefore be calibrated to be hypersensitive to encounters with new and unfamiliar devices. with new and unfamiliar devices. To make this point, imagine plucking a human out of history from 300,000 years ago. You and this earlier human decide to go for a walk in the woods.

Imagine coming across a discarded blender by the side of the path. You would recognize the object right away, and though you may have some questions as to how it ended up there, you'd be pretty confident that it posed no danger. You could see the rusted plug laying harmlessly in the dirt. But your caveman friend might be startled and mystified by it.

The sharp blades on their own may scare him, and if you weren't there to encourage him to inspect it, he might take extraordinary caution towards the thing. Next, imagine that a human 300,000 years from now plucks you out from history and takes you on a walk in his world. Imagine coming across a strange device in the grass with a shape and material that made little sense to you. Your internal fear meter may be beeping and sending all kinds of fear chemicals your way to urge you to be very careful with the strange thing, even while your futuristic hiking partner assured you that the thing was harmless in this context. Fear of the unknown may not be entirely universal or felt as strongly by everyone, but it seems to be the default for humans.

The blueprint of evolution reads, better safe than sorry. But it's not just new and unfamiliar kinds of objects that can trip our fear response. Our fear meters can also be hypersensitive to new and unfamiliar kinds of people. This wrinkle is what often drives all forms of bigotry and racism. When we feel that fear of other people, it seems to spring from a mysterious source. We may experience it as just a bad feeling or something that doesn't feel quite right. So what are we to make of this? That's Gavin DeBecker's area of interest. DeBecker is an expert in the prediction and management of violence.

He's worked in security details for celebrities and investigated stalkers. He's developed threat assessment systems for governors and U.S. Supreme Court justices. And he's frequently been brought in as an expert witness in high-profile cases. He's also managed security for Sam's public events. Here, he and Sam will focus on fear and the mysterious concept of intuition. You'll hear DeBecker give a robust defense of

this inner sense and the nearly subconscious form of intelligence it represents, as it has been molded through countless trial runs of evolution. This is Gavin DeBecker from episode 90, Living with Violence. with violence. Let's talk about intuition because we have just said that people are fairly confused about violence and tend to be bad at dealing with some of the information that's out there about it. But this point you make again and again, you've made it here and it's the very title of your book, The Gift of Fear. There's one thing that we are actually very good at. Evolution has made us experts at detecting danger and detecting shady people, feeling uncomfortable in the presence of people who are liable to do us harm. Talk about intuition here and what it means to trust it and why so many people are unaware of the validity of trusting it, the reasons given for not trusting it. Talk about the primacy of intuition for a moment.

we can give to listeners and this goes for female listeners and male listeners this goes for decisions you make in your work and decisions you make for your safety ultimately the biggest decision we all make is who to include in our life and who to exclude from our life that's choosing friends uh spouse neighbors all you know uh co-workers etc et cetera. We make those choices. Those choices aren't made for us. And so my advice always is to make very slow and careful decisions about whom you include in your life and very fast decisions about whom you exclude. So if you have that nanny that you're uncomfortable about, she goes quickly. There's no reason to keep her around. I mean, I've had people through my career say, you know, should we put in a nanny cam because we're worried that this nanny is doing something dangerous with our kids. And I say, no, you should get rid of the nanny because no kid is going to thank you in 20 years. Mom, thank you for having that video of me being hit by a spoon

on the head by that crazy nanny you guys hired. And so the concept of listening to intuition is what I want to focus on for a moment. Because America particularly, or Western societies, we look to government and we look to experts and technologies and corporations to solve our problem for us. And I am very glad to tell everybody here that the police are not going to protect you because they're not going to be there during the moment that you face an intruder or you face a violent situation. And government's not going to protect you. It can't. It tries to pretend it can, but it can't. And the only thing that's going to protect you is your own intuition, which is your own ability to recognize that something is up while it's right in front of you or while it's in your environment. And I think, as you said, Sam,

it's super hard for people to accept the importance of it because intuition is usually looked on with some contempt. It's described as emotional or unreasonable or inexplicable, and husbands make fun of wives for feminine intuition, and they don't take it seriously. But what I can tell you about intuition, I learned from the origins of the word itself. The root of the word, inter, means to guard and to protect. Super interesting that that's what it means. We think we're using intuition to make a thousand other decisions, but what it's built for, what it's in this system for is to guard us and to protect us. And what it does is, and I'm really going to quote you for a second here, because you said a moment ago that evolution has really honed this. True. We didn't get the biggest claws. We didn't get the sharpest teeth or the biggest muscles.

What we got is the biggest brains. And the idea that we use the expression gut feeling, well, the gut actually has more brain cells than a dog. So the gut is literally where a lot of that thought is going on. That's why you get that bad feeling in your stomach about this employee, this friend, this thing somebody said to you, this danger. And that's a very meaningful thing. Gut feeling is the perfect word for it. And it's visceral. It's in the tissue.

And it isn't just a feeling. No, it's called the enteric nervous system. Well, you're smarter than I am. You gave it a better name. I mean, it's called the enteric nervous system. Well, you've given it, you're smarter than I am. You gave it a better name. The idea is that this is a process.

This process we ridicule, intuition, is a process more extraordinary and ultimately more logical. In the natural order of things, it's more logical than the most fantastic computer calculation. And it's our most complicated cognitive process. And it's also, in some ways, it's the simplest, which I'll explain. But what it does, intuition, is it connects us to the natural world and to our nature so that when we are free from judgment

and we've got only perception, we say that thing, you know, in recounting what happened to us, somehow I knew. So if people will do these two things, one is to pay attention to intuition. In my opinion, it's always right in two important ways. One is it's always based on something. And two, it always has your best interest at heart. And so I'll give you a fast example. You're in an airport and you get that feeling, I shouldn't get on this plane. And millions of people have had this feeling. This plane's going to crash. Something, they get anxiety about it and I shouldn't get on this plane. So what I ask people to do is look introspectively for a moment at where that feeling's coming

from. And if it is coming from a news story you saw two weeks ago on television of an ugly plane crash in Peru, that is not based on your environment or your circumstance. It's based on your memory or your anxiety, and that's not actual fear. If, however, the feeling is based on seeing the pilot stumble out of the bar at the airport

and make his way slowly down the jet walk, now you've got something that's in your environment. And the question to ask always, this is how, you tell the difference between true fear, like I'm afraid of getting on this plane, and unwarranted fear, worry, anxiety, et cetera. This is how. True fear will always be based on something in your presence and will always be based on something you perceive. The signal comes from your perception, from your senses. Unwarranted fear will always be based upon memory.

And so it's something you remember, something you recall, something you're worrying about or something you're thinking about. But something based on your actual environment is a gift, hence the title of that book. There's not an animal in nature that would say, oh, I don't want that gift. Don't tell me when I should be worried about my safety. It's so much trouble. You know, there's no antelope that suddenly is filled with fear and says to itself, it's probably nothing.

But human beings every day are engaged in the constant prosecution of their own feelings. And, you know, the most vivid example I'm aware of is a woman alone in a building late at night. She's working late in the office and she goes to the elevator. The elevator door opens and there's a guy inside who causes her fear. She's afraid of him. And so what does she do? Most women get into a steel soundproof chamber with someone who causes her fear, something no animal in nature would do. And why does she do it? Because she says, I don't want to be the kind of person who makes a decision because of the guy's race or because his clothes look shabby. I don't want to be like that, or I don't want to offend him, or I don't want to make him angry. She talks herself

out of what I call prosecutes, her own jury's conclusion. And she talks herself out of what I call prosecutes her own jury's conclusion. And she talks herself out of it and gets into the elevator. And as I say, these are things that no animal in nature would ever even remotely contemplate. And human beings do it every day, participating in their own victimization. The elevator example brings up some other issues here that are hugely important. And this is the other side of the balance that causes people to not value intuition or to prosecute their feelings, as you say. And it's that these moments of negative intuition can be in contradiction to a variety of social norms that well-intentioned people want to adopt. And so, yeah, you just named one. You don't want to be racist, right? So if you're a white woman and the elevator door is open

and the man on the elevator who makes you uncomfortable is black, well, you may just get on that elevator perversely to prove to yourself and to him that you're not racist, right? You override your intuition. And in fact, I know someone who was in a circumstance like this, and it didn't end well. And we can make it even more provocative than that. There are certain circumstances where the race of the person is obviously relevant information. It is in and of itself a pre-incident indicator or a statistically relevant fact, regardless of any other messages that are coming.

There are places where it's more surprising or less surprising to see a person of a certain race. And people feel very bad. We've all been trained to ignore those facts, which again, we can in many cases just instantly and intuitively surmise. So what are good people to do with that? We're going to let that question from Sam hang in the air for a bit, We're going to let that question from Sam hang in the air for a bit, because you must be hearing how unafraid Sam is to take the logic of fear and poke at some strong societal taboos. Sam's line of questioning takes us directly toward one of the most precarious

moral and political tightropes out there at the moment, the topic of profiling. We'll be taking a little time to walk that tightrope now, so let's see if we can keep our balance. Our sense of evolved, intelligent intuition sometimes mixes with other forms of embedded biases that are unhelpful or immoral, and that can create a jumbled emotional brew within us. The elements of this concoction are sometimes hard to distinguish and differentiate. That's why, when fear is felt, De Becker encourages a moment and method of introspection.

It's invaluable to sharpen our internal tools so as to better heed the strange alarm bells that sound from our guttural, enteric nervous system. So, when we get a bad feeling about someone who's walking toward us on the same side of the street, what's really happening there? Well, in a generic sense, we are engaged in profiling. Well, in a generic sense, we are engaged in profiling. If we allow ourselves to drain the political ugliness from this term, we can simply define it as the process of gathering information about a potential threat in our environment so as to inform our interaction with it. What kind of information can be gathered from seeing a figure on the same side of the street as us?

Well, there's the likely sex of the person to start. There's the height and build of the person, which may be easier to track depending on the clothing they're wearing, which can itself reveal important information. Are the clothes appropriate for the weather? Do the clothes look expensive? Are the clothes appropriate for the weather? Do the clothes look expensive? Does that signal that this person has a lot of money and likely isn't thinking about robbing someone?

Or are the clothes extraordinarily trendy and expensive, which makes you suspect that they're more likely to target you and your very trendy shoes? Are they wearing a suit? A torn and stained T-shirt? Is the stain fresh? Are they stumbling? Does that indicate intoxication? There's information to gather about their hands. Are they holding something? Do they have pockets that could be concealing anything? Does the person have tattoos? Are they on the forehead or on the forearm?

There's even non-visual information to gather, like the odor that might be coming from the person. Is it alcohol or cologne? And there's contextual data to incorporate. 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.