Making Sense with Sam Harris - Vaccine Mandates, transgender athletes, billionaires… (AMA #19)

Episode Date: January 31, 2022

Questions: What is your position on vaccine mandates, school closures, etc.? Do you think painful memories remain painful because there is something left unresolved? How can you forgive a consequential lie? Can you clarify your plans to support effective altruism with NFTs? What are your views on transgender women in sports? How can we combat disinformation and misinformation coming from friends and family? You’ve said that we shouldn’t demonize billionaires, but is it really possible to become that wealthy without perpetuating the evils of capitalism? How do you guard yourself against cognitive bias? Can mindfulness provide relief in the case of extreme suffering (e.g. after the death of a child)? 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.

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 Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, jumping into an AMA here. We got questions over Twitter and by email. I have audio for, I believe, most of those questions. Let's jump in. First question. Hi, Sam. I'd rather remain anonymous. My question for you pertains to being pro-vaccine and anti-restrictions, a position unmoored from any political base in this interesting timeline.

I listened intently to your last on disappointing my audience segment, and I'm wondering if perhaps you're allowing your understandable frustration with a backwards, anti-vaccine minority to obscure your view of what these restrictions have really been like for much of America that does not have the luxury of remote work. My wife and I have been incredibly fortunate these past two years, but we have many friends that have lost careers, businesses, and family without the ability to stay home and stay safe that is increasingly classified as a virtuous position. I consider myself deeply pro-vaccine and also vehemently anti-lockdown, a position born of a career managing risk in complex systems for the aerospace and defense industries. The absolute risk that children and vaccinated individuals have faced from COVID

has been well below ordinary background hazards for nearly a year now, and I believe our failure to grasp the harm we are inflicting on children, working women, and the poor risks further polarization if it is not immediately stopped. Do you feel that unrelenting mandates and restrictions from the left are justified? And what do you feel they will do to our already splintered political and class structures if allowed to persist? Thanks so much for taking my question. Okay, well, good question. Actually, I agree with most of that, probably all of that.

And yet the question was asked as though I was expected not to, which makes me think there's something, and I'm also looking at some of these other questions here, which put this concern in my mind, there's something about the way I've spoken about COVID and vaccines and and vaccines, and misinformation that has conveyed the sense that I'm completely in favor of the most draconian measures we've taken to achieve zero COVID, right? Which, apart from in the first month or so, was never in the cards. I take all those points. I think it's almost impossible to exaggerate the difference between good and bad luck with respect to what one was doing to earn a living, in particular, when the pandemic hit. And this interacts with the variable of class, but not entirely. I mean, there were people who were, in fact, very well off before the pandemic hit,

but happened to be in industries that just could not survive anything like a lockdown. So, I mean, think of people who owned movie theater chains or restaurants, no matter how successful. Unless you had a restaurant that could pivot to delivery, there were some great restaurants that failed during the pandemic. And all of this was just luck, right? So I take the point that some people have been very lucky and had it very easy, comparatively. In fact, some people's businesses grew during the pandemic. And of course, this differed by country, too, where there were some countries that locked down much harder and much more effectively than we did in the U.S.

I think in the beginning, locking down and locking down harder than we managed to do made eminent sense, right? We didn't know what we were dealing with, and there was the possibility of achieving something like zero COVID, although our openness to immigration and travel would have always posed a problem there, right? We would have had to have closed the borders. But the rationale for locking down then was not so much achieving zero COVID. It was to avoid crashing our healthcare system. And it made perfect sense. And the people who were complaining about it at the time had no leg to stand on. And we spent an enormous amount of money trying to ensure that no one was too badly damaged by our efforts there. But once we

began to understand the scope of the disease and how it was transmitted, and needless to say, once we got effective vaccines, yeah, then our thinking about what was saying public policy shifted and had to shift, and perhaps it should have shifted more. I think it's pretty clear at this point that the degree to which we closed the schools and the length of those closures turned out to be a very significant mistake. Distance learning didn't work all that well, and once we got into a position where anyone who wanted to get vaccinated could get vaccinated, then I think the rationale for closing schools and, frankly, even forcing kids to wear masks in schools, generally speaking, all of that is at minimum quite debatable. And my mind

is not settled on some of these points. But many things have changed. Vaccines are ubiquitous. We have treatments for COVID now that we didn't have, even a few months ago. And the latest variant, Omicron, which I think has a 98% prevalence now, appears to be far more mild, especially if you've been vaccinated.

And COVID, as we know, has always been comparatively mild in kids. So as for lockdowns and even mandates, at this point I am skeptical, right? I think mandates are probably counterproductive across the board. My friend Peter Attia just wrote a nice article avidly supporting vaccines and just as avidly condemning mandates. You can look that up on his website. And I think I agree with basically every point he makes. The one thing I would emphasize, though, is that his argument only makes sense in the presence of a disease that is comparatively benign. And much of my thinking in the last year or year and a half around COVID has been not so much worrying about COVID per se.

Again, once we got good vaccines, things changed a lot. And now in the presence of good treatments, things have changed again. What has worried me most is that we seem completely unable to depoliticize a conversation about basic epidemiological facts. And this is terrifying if you imagine a much more lethal pandemic. Again, it's possible to imagine that as you turn the lethality dial up, everyone's politics will magically evaporate. All the conspiracy thinking will find nowhere to land. Just the sheer terror of mortality will clarify everyone's epistemology.

error of mortality will clarify everyone's epistemology. No one will have any time for Alex Jones when they see a sufficient number of bodies stacked like cordwood in a park. But I'm not so sure. I think the fragmentation of our media ecosystem, I think what's happened on podcasts and in newsletters and in right-wing media, I think the ways in which Republicans in particular have tried to leverage an anti-vax hysteria, something like this, I think, is quite possible even in the presence of much more serious disease. And if that's the case, and we were to fail to solve our problems of coordination and cooperation and basic trust of institutions and public health messaging in the presence of something 10 or 20 or 30 times more lethal,

that's what I'm worried about. It has been a very long time since I was personally worried about catching COVID. I haven't caught it. I still do what I can to keep myself and my family safe. Much of my thinking here is still focused on the few members of our family who have significant comorbidities and for whom even a vaccine doesn't seem like a perfect insurance policy. But if you've gotten the idea that I think we should be responding to COVID itself as though it were a terrifyingly lethal illness at this point, that's not what I've meant to convey. What I've meant to convey is my absolute astonishment and despair in the face of the fragmentation of our society, the total loss of trust in institutions. In fact, the conviction

among so many otherwise smart people that we don't even need institutions, right? That's the old way. Now we're going to just run this thing by podcast and newsletter and Twitter feed. That's how we're going to deal with all the challenges we face in this century. Cybersecurity, cyberterrorism, the remaining threat of nuclear war, climate change, pandemics, natural and engineered, the threat of artificial intelligence run amok. The pressures exerted on our society by wealth inequality. All we need to do is move fast and break things. We just need disruptors. We're going to run this whole thing like it's a new tech startup. That's how we're going to maintain cruising altitude into the 22nd century. That's completely insane.

into the 22nd century. That's completely insane. It feels in some sense like the teenagers have taken over the place. There's no expertise that matters, right? You can't trust the experts anymore. No, we're all going to get online and become epidemiologists and virologists and immunologists in a few short weeks by doing a lot of Google searching and YouTube. Douglas Murray told me recently that he saw a tweet where someone said on Twitter, oh look, all the people who knew everything about COVID last week now know everything about COVID last week, now know everything about Afghanistan. I mean, that is the spirit of the time, and it's not good for us. The truth is, I have at no point in this pandemic had a strong opinion about COVID or public health measures, right? I have just had a strong opinion that it makes no sense for unqualified people to have strong opinions on these matters, and that it's dangerous when you have millions and millions of people deciding that their intuitions about a brand new pathogen and the first significant pandemic in

anyone's lifetime should supersede the product of rational scientific investigation by those who are most qualified to perform it. And the difference between dispassionate scientific analysis of COVID or anything else, and advocacy, right? There's a difference there that is very difficult to digest, and we are clearly bad at doing this, and we have to get our act together, because this will not be the last pandemic. In fact, given how disruptive COVID has been, I would bet that the threat of bioterrorism has increased significantly. This is about the easiest way possible to disrupt a society. And if you're a nihilist, or you're insane, or you're a jihadist, or you're a fanatic of some other stripe, well then, bioterrorism just got its Super Bowl commercial. So, getting better at responding to a pandemic,

getting better at producing vaccines, and getting people to actually take them, I consider that one of our most important tasks as a society at this point. Okay, next question. Hi Sam, my name is Andy and I live in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. My question for you is related to mindfulness and memories. I've been finding a lot of value in your guided meditations on the Waking Up app, and since I've started practicing I've noticed an improvement in my ability to recenter myself in times of stress, especially when confronted with embarrassing or regrettable memories.

Some people suggest that memories like these resurface now and then because they aren't fully resolved. Do you think that these memories need a resolution, or is mindfulness the best way to manage them? Thanks, Sam. Thank you for the question, Andy. I don't have much of a psychodynamic interest in mulling over the past. It's not to say that's not ever useful. There's certainly patterns you can discover, and making that discovery can equip you to live differently, right? If you see you keep getting into the same situations and suffering the same kinds of collisions with other people or circumstances, there may be something to resolve conceptually about all that. But generally speaking, the fact that a painful memory The fact that a painful memory or an embarrassing one surfaces and that it is painful or embarrassing in the present, that doesn't really suggest to me that there's something unresolved about that.

It's just a more general symptom of this feeling of being a self, right? That's what's unresolved for everyone until you can resolve it, right? I mean, it just feels lousy to feel identified with this fictional center of gravity, especially in the midst of unpleasant thoughts about one's past or future. Right? So the interesting question is, how is it that in the present moment, a memory of something that happened even quite long ago can arise in the totally evanescent way that any memory does, and yet carry with it a fair tonnage of misery, right? How does it impose its weight on you in this moment? Not why does it, right? That's the sort of resolution you're asking about. But how does it?

What is the mechanism? How is it possible for something as gossamer as a thought to make you miserable in this moment? Well, the discovery to be made here is that it is something that you're doing. Right? There's a contraction. There's a failure to recognize thought as thought that is the proximate cause of the present suffering. And for that, mindfulness really is the antidote, right? A clear scene of the mechanics here. And the freedom to be felt is the freedom of just watching this otherwise lethal thought just pass you by, right, and realize that you, as the conscious

witness in this moment, are truly unimplicated. The past truly resolves itself when you can stand free of it in the present. Again, there may be other things that are useful to do conceptually. Reframing your thoughts about the past can also help in many ways. You can view some past trauma or embarrassment as the very thing that gave you certain skills or feelings of compassion in the present. You might be able to draw a direct line from something terrible that happened a decade ago to your ability to help specific people in your life with similar challenges in the present. So there's reframing that is available to us much of the time that can be very powerful. But from my point of view, there is no real antidote to the most basic mental suffering that is better than insight into the illusoriness of the self

around which all of our suffering appears to be constellated. Anyway, hope that helps, Andy. Hi, Sam. My name is Isabel, and I live in New York. My question for you is, how can you work through a consequential lie by a close and trusted person in your life? How can you forgive and trust again? Can you share your own experience on how you've dealt with lying by someone you care about? Thank you, Sam. Hey, Isabel. Thanks for the question. Well, this goes to the topic of

forgiveness, which is more general than the issue of lying. And there, for me, the crucial variable in whether or not you can forgive somebody, whether or not an apology is acceptable, is if you can see how this person has changed. If you can see how they view their past action, which you find reprehensible, and in this case a lie, in the same way that you do, right? Which is to say they disavow it, right? And they assure you that it won't happen again. To take your question generically, I mean, assuming we're talking about a significant betrayal of trust, the question for you is, well, can I ever trust this person again? And that depends, at least in part, on their view of what they did, right? Do they regret lying to you? Or do they have some defensive story about why it was necessary? So those are

the kinds of details that matter, right? I think to forgive someone, we need to feel that there's a plausible path that stretches from who they used to be when they intentionally injured us to who they purport to be now, right? Someone who can be forgiven and brought back into the fold. But it's also important to acknowledge that it is often hard for people to change, right? And if you have someone who's quite habituated to lying, that's hard to completely reform, unless the person has had some real ethical breakthrough. unless the person has had some real ethical breakthrough. So sometimes when you catch someone lying, you understand something about who they're likely to be in the future,

and forgiveness or apologies aside, it might not be appropriate to trust them all that much going forward, depending on how ingrained this tendency is. So there are many variables that are hopeless to quantify and really must be judged intuitively. Anyway, I hope that helps. Thanks for the question. Hi Sam, my name is Tim and I live in Ontario, Canada. My question for you is regarding your plans to promote effective altruism by awarding NFTs to certain individuals who donate sufficiently large amounts to certain charitable organizations. I think it's a great idea, but I'm just wondering if you would consider expanding the scope to include people who may or may not have a lot of money to give or who simply give

their time and efforts in a way that also achieves effective altruism and equals or exceeds any good that a monetary donation to a charitable organization might do? Should such people not also be eligible to receive the recognition that these NFTs endow? Thanks very much, Sam. Thanks for the question, Tim. This gives me a chance to clarify something that apparently was not clear. Although if you get into the fine print on the giving what we can pledge, it becomes clear. It's not about the amount of money that anyone would give. It's the percentage of earnings, right? So it doesn't matter how much money you make. You could be making $30,000 a year. If you're giving a minimum of 10% of what you make,

you can take that pledge. Of course, there's this added consideration that many people might realize that the best way they can contribute to the most urgent causes is to simply make a lot of money in some unobjectionable way and give a lot of money each year to those causes, right, rather than volunteer somewhere or spend their time in some way that's explicitly philanthropic. And this is what Will McCaskill and the other effective altruists call earning to give. And that's what Sam Bankman Freed is up to over there at FTX. And of course, 10% is just the minimum. Many effective altruists give much more than that. And some people pledge to give everything above a certain amount. They decide what they want every year to live on and then

give a hundred percent beyond that number. And again, that number can be whatever you want it to be, right? I mean, I'm not advocating that people live abstemious lives and give everything else to charity. I mean, that's amazing if you want to live that way, but I really don't have a negative conception of wealth here, right? I don't think that, I mean, you take someone like Sam Bankman Freed, right, who's making billions of dollars and will be giving billions of dollars to the most urgent causes. In my mind, it really doesn't matter how much money he spends on himself, right? Because anything he spends on himself really is just a rounding error on the amount of money he will ultimately be giving away,

right? The difference between him living in a studio apartment and him having a 30,000 square foot house in one of the most expensive cities on earth would be almost impossible to discern against his actual wealth. Obviously, he's an outlier, but something like that applies to the rest of us. I do think that if we're going to solve our problems collectively, it's not going to be a matter of convincing the most affluent people and societies to make significant sacrifices. I think we need to improve technology, we need to increasingly produce what we produce in a carbon neutral way, and then we need to prioritize

helping people and safeguarding the future. And I really do think we can massively change how we allocate resources without stigmatizing wealth. And part of this has to do with creating virtuous cycles that leverage people's desire for better things. This has happened with electric cars, right? Elon Musk started building electric cars that did not represent a sacrifice for anyone, right? He made electric cars some of the most desirable cars ever built. I mean, you have to spend something like $2 million on a combustion engine car to have a car that is faster than the current version of the Model S. So if you want a fast car, it's completely rational to want an electric one at this point. And I think that's the path forward on many other fronts, in particular with the problem of climate change.

I think we can get there by focusing on the things we want, right? For climate change, and now I'm rambling, for climate change, we don't even have to talk about climate change. We can just talk about the virtues of having clean air. You just look at the consequences of particulate pollution and how much nicer it is to live in a city that doesn't have any. That solves for climate change. And there you're just talking about people not dying from emphysema and cardiac arrest and everything else that bad air creates. Literally millions of people, globally speaking, die every year because we use dirty fuel that puts particulates into the air. So rather than guilt trip people over risks that seem merely hypothetical to most

of them, why not focus on how much nicer our world could be if we weren't breathing bad air everywhere? Anyway, there's just a few thoughts, but the short answer is, at any level of giving, if you're going to give a minimum of 10% of your pre-tax earnings to some of the most effective charities, that is, not to your alma mater, or to the local symphony,

or anything else you might want to support, that's all good too, but separate, you can take the Giving what we can pledge and the waking up pledge will be structured along those lines. Hey Sam, this is Clint from Monument, Colorado. My question is this, what are your views on transgender women in sports? If you were asked to advise policy on this issue, what would you recommend? Or philosophically, how would you approach this complex and sensitive topic? Well, thank you, Clint, for asking the question that gets everyone canceled. It is the very essence of a fringe issue, but I do have a few thoughts about it.

First, it strikes me that there's a spectrum of concerns here. 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 Thank you.