The Jordan Harbinger Show - 509: Sam Harris | Making Sense of the Present Tense

Episode Date: May 18, 2021

Sam Harris (@SamHarrisOrg) is a neuroscientist, philosopher, and author of five New York Times bestsellers. He is the host of the Making Sense podcast and his latest book is Making Sense: Conversations on Consciousness, Morality, and the Future of Humanity. What We Discuss with Sam Harris: How can someone in the public eye speak freely without worrying about being canceled? How to keep an open mind when debating someone with whom you disagree vehemently. What it really takes to get people to behave ethically. How to resist the distorting effect of social media's "funhouse mirror" on reality. Why, if you choose to participate in social media, you should make sure to follow at least some (preferably many) people who don't share your views. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/509 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. You should be following people on social media who you disagree with, or at least people who are adjacent enough to people who you really disagree with, that where you're seeing things you disagree with. If you're only seeing things you agree with, right, where it's just everything's got the top spin that you like, you're disposed just to forward it on even before reading the article, right? You just like the headline enough, and you like the source enough

that, you know, this is good enough, and you're just going to kind of give it your boost, you know, you're absolutely part of the problem. Welcome to this show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with people at the top of their game, astronauts and entrepreneurs, spies and psychologists, even the occasional four-star general national security advisor or extreme athletes. Each episode turns our guest's wisdom into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better critical thinker. If you're new to the show

or you're looking for a handy way to tell your friends about it, we now have episode starter packs. These starter packs are collections of your favorite episodes organized by popular topics. To help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show, just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start to get started or to help somebody else get started. Of course, we always appreciate that. I know there's 500 plus episodes of this show alone to get through, so a lot of people don't know where to begin. And that's why we created those starter packs, Jordan Harbinger.com slash start. Today on the show, Sam Harris, philosopher, neuroscientist, author, thinker. If you're a Sam Harris fan, I hope you enjoy this conversation. And if you're not familiar with him,

this should be a decent introduction to a neuroscientist, philosopher, political thinker. It's a tough guy to label sometimes. We actually recorded this before the election. I had some technical issues. This pushed the release way back. Thus, the context, this one should be October 2020. It's not a bunch of political stuff. It's not a bunch of Trump or Biden stuff. So don't worry. You're not going to get thrown into that. We are definitely still going to piss off the extreme left and the extreme right or just the left and the right. It's hard to even know it's extreme anymore. Maybe I'm extreme. Extreme Center. Is that a thing? Save your outrage emails for after you're done with the episode so that you can include everything. It's just to approach

it there. If you want to get mad, make sure you're an all-encompassing kind of angry. By the way, If you're wondering how I manage to book all these great authors, thinkers, and creators every single week, it's because of my network, and I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. And by the way, most of the guests on the show, they already subscribe to the course, they contribute to the course, come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. Now, here we go with Sam Harris. I wondered how you developed your ability to articulate so well off the cuff.

were you initially similar to like a stand-up comedian and not that great at that at first? Because I think a lot of us, especially I look on Reddit, I find a lot of people going, I had to slow down this episode because of these choice phrases or this sick burn that Sam was able to just come up with seemingly on the fly. Well, I'm glad you think so. I mean, I stand in perpetual criticism of how I speak. So I'm often disappointed by the words that actually make it out of my mouth. But I don't have any story to tell about how I came to speak the way I do. I mean, I just, I've spent so much time writing that, and I think, aspired to speak as closely to the way I write as possible. I mean, you never quite achieve that as any verbatim transcript of what one says proves. I mean,

it is way more like word salad than a writer would ever want it to be, but I was a writer first before I was any kind of public speaker, and there's just kind of an attention to the structure of what comes out that I bring into my speaking. It's my advantage that I'm a fairly slow talker, right? So I've got a fair amount of time to get to the end of the sentence and choose my words, and I find it impossible to speak quickly. I mean, it's really a kind of neurological deficit. I mean, even if I knew exactly what I was going to say, even if I, you know, had a script and had rehearsed it and put the words right in front of me, I actually can't speak as quickly as someone who speaks quickly can and always does.

I mean, I've had a few people on my podcast who are fast talkers, and it's just amazing to me. It's like a Cirque de Soleil routine that I could never emulate. I have the opposite problem where I have to force myself to slow down, or when I'm doing these live shows, people will say, dude, your WPM is freaking me out right now because it's just boom. And, yeah, I also am disappointed with most of the words that come out of my mouth the arrangement of those words, I should say. So that's probably just a thing that podcasters or any

speaker actually has. Yeah, yeah. But there's kind of an underlying ethic to much of what I'm doing, because I'm touching very controversial topics, and I'm committed to being as rigorously honest as I can be on, you know, whatever the topic. And so it rather often has the character of a dangerous high wire act where I've decided to go into fairly fraught territory. And, and decided not to lie about anything. And that forces a kind of hair-splitting search for nuance, which also kind of bends my speech around and makes it, gives it a certain kind of character,

which just being enforced by the topics as well. Do you think that there is a strong chilling effect, not just with you, but with anyone, like, look, I'm largely apolitical, and I'm sitting here before this show worried about having a conversation with you or with HR McMaster, because of this cancel culture that has sort of permeated everything now, and it can result in me losing my entire living and not being able to feed my kid who's 14 months old because an angry mob online decided that my word choice when I said,

Indian instead of Native American, for example, was therefore racist. Dot, dot, dot, dot. I'm a Nazi and should be deplatformed. Yeah, well, there's a massive chilling effect throughout media and tech and academia. I mean, that's just so well attested, and I've done so many podcasts on it. I wasn't saying there's a chilling effect on me. In fact, I've been so deliberate in protecting myself against any kind of incentives that would have created a chilling effect. I was saying the opposite.

I go into this morass, knowing I'm going to hit all of these difficult spots, but knowing that I'm committed to just saying what I actually think. I don't have Tourette's. I'm not just kind of broadcasting the most shocking things I might think casually, but I do, my whole MO really as a public-facing person is to be intellectually honest, right, even when it's inconvenient. To the contrary, there has been a, the effect on me and my podcast has been, I have focused on these topics more than my interest would dictate. I have zero interest in race relations and in race as a topic, right? I just, I think we have to get over race. I think we need to achieve a truly

race-blind society, but I've done, I don't know how many podcasts on race because the culture is in a hysteria over it. So I seem like, if you just look at my podcast, I seem like somebody who had a real interest in this topic. I don't at all, but it's a kind of moral emergency that keeps presenting itself, and it's politically so dysfunctional that my interest in not having four more years of Trump has caused me to try to help the left get its house in order. I can't say that I've made any progress there, but I just felt like I had to put my shoulder to the wheel multiple times trying to get our conversation with ourselves about race and other fraud topics to move in the right direction. Yeah, so it's kind of amplified my speech on those inconvenient topics,

but I'll be quite happy to retire on that front if politics can take up less of our bandwidth going forward. It seems terrifying and almost like, look, I'm 40, so maybe I just haven't seen enough chaos, but this seems like certainly the most chaotic time in the country that where I've been alive or old enough to understand the type of chaos. And I wonder if you think, is this actually a more fraught time in the country's history, or is it just that this is a fraught time, plus we have social media blaring emergencies on every channel 24-7? I definitely think it's worse than anything that I recall. I mean, I mean, I was, I'm older than you, so I was a young child in the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate. So that was a mess too. And if we'd had social media

at that point, one can only imagine how destabilizing it would have been. But I just think the last three and a half years have been so awful. And so much of that can be laid at Trump's door. But not all of it. I think social media has been the technology that has deranged us. I mean, we're, as I've said several times before, we have effectively been enrolled in a psychological experiment to which no one gave consent. And there was so little foresight around what each feature of this technology would do to us or would be likely to do to us, you know, everything from the like button onward. And it's just been terrible. I just think it's been bad for society in almost every respect. We obviously have to figure out what to do about it and just,

switching the platforms off is clearly not an option. I should definitely share your perception that these are uniquely bewildering times. With the advent of false news or fake news, it seems like we can't even agree on what's actually real. And I think that's one of the scariest things from me, because when I was younger and I used to enjoy saying to somebody, hey, that's not how this works. I could look up a news source or Wikipedia or even a scientific paper that I could then read, digest, understand, and show someone, hey, you're wrong about this. Now, the sources are so widely discredited. I've posted things that are true. I mean, just verifiably true, simple facts that one would have learned in high school. And I remember getting replies like, well, I hope you didn't

see this on Google, mainstream media, Wikipedia, or Snopes, because all of that is just fake. And I'm like, oh my gosh, you're literally attacking some of the only things we can say, hey, these are reasonably accurate 99.9% of the time as don't even look there. It's all garbage. Look at this random blog instead. Yeah, it's really dangerous. I mean, that is certainly one of my top concerns at this point, the fact that the very foundation of epistemology appears to have broken down and that we can't even source information that most people most of the time will agree is valid. You know, this extends to the New York Times at this point. This isn't just conspiracy thinking that the New York Times has become so ideological and so prone to double down

on their errors, on their obvious errors. It really is shocking and I am desperate to be able to rely on the normal organs of journalism like the New York Times. And I find that I can't. I mean, when I know enough about a topic to see how they are distorting it politically, it makes me just as vulnerable to that same kind of challenge that you just described. I mean, if I circulate a New York Times article and someone pushes back saying, this is fake news, you know, unless I know a lot about the topic, at this point, I don't know which end is up anymore. At least I'm not willing to fight over it because it's, no one can take the time to fact-check everything that they circulate. We have a completely polluted information ecosystem at this point.

And this is what most concerns me about what's happening on the far left. I mean, it's obvious what's wrong with the far right. The far right has always been terrifying and inimical to most of what we value in a open society. Right. So it's like you go far enough to the right. You meet just obvious racists and anti-Semites and increasingly anti-government lunatics or, you know, proto-fascists. I mean, there's so little to criticize there because it's so obviously evil or evil adjacent. Whereas on the far left, the craziness, the far fringe has moved so far inward that it has captured the New York Times to a significant degree.

You know, the fringe on the left is increasingly mainstream, you know, on topics like, race and gender and just the reaction and overreaction to Trump, right? I mean, some of this, again, can be ascribed to the malign influence of having a lunatic like Trump in the Oval Office, but he's become such a super stimulus to the left that it has deranged the left. I mean, now it's essentially broken CNN and the New York Times. I mean, you know, New York Times to a lesser degree, it's all Trump all the time. And there's so much to react to with him. And the reaction has become so undisciplined that they just half of the allegations against him don't stand up and there's no reckoning over that and the ones and you sort of lose sight of the ones that do and there's so many

opportunities to attack him that one need never be imprecise. There's no reason to be sloppy with allegations of racism against a genuine racist, right? But the left is so sloppy that it falsifies more or less everything that they attempt to land. So it's been a mess on. on both sides, but I've spent much more time worrying about the left because the left really has to get it right. Maybe the left is the wrong designation here. I mean, the liberal voices in our society, which capture 90 percent, 90 plus percent of journalism and academia and entertainment, right? So you're talking about Hollywood and the university system and, you know, virtually all private schools down to the high school level and journalism and science. These,

are the people who have to get their facts right. And now we have our most prestigious scientific journals publishing editorials that are completely deranged politically. I mean, literally science and nature have published articles on race that make absolutely no sense. I mean, just offering mea culpas about, you know, the systemic racism of science as though, you know, most scientists sit in their labs cracking jokes that the KKK would find funny and that now have all been caught doing it, right? It's madness. And there's been a kind of hysteria that has led to a masochism and self-annihilation on the left that, again, has crept so far inward that, you know, now it's an article of faith that, you know, the only way to describe the United States now and its history

is one of irredeemable, you know, racist atrocity, as though we have stood for nothing else, you know, low these nearly three centuries. That's the position. And then, then, then, if you're a Hollywood celebrity, you need to, you know, get on Twitter and release your hostage video saying that you finally realize the depth of your culpability for all of this evil. The messaging from the left on these points has been so morally deranged in recent months. Can we repair this kind of thing? I mean, when people will willingly deny what they see right in front of them on a videotape because of the cognitive bias and the frankly unwillingness to accept that their ideals conflict with reality.

How do you even, I think you did a show that said it best, like, can we step back from the brink? Because how do you convince somebody that what they're looking at on video is what they're actually looking at on video when literally anyone with two brain cells to rub together can see what that is, and they're just going, nope, like their brain is just rejecting it? Well, it's surprisingly hard to parse these videos.

I mean, one, the videos start and stop at, you know, arbitrary or, you know, calculated points. You simply do not know what happened before the video was switched on or before the edit you're seeing starts. And people's lack of understanding, if we're talking specifically about police videos, the lack of understanding about the continuum of violence and the cop's eye view of the world leads them to conclude things that you just can't conclude from these videos. And they're also unaware that we, have videos of a certain sort aggressively marketed to us, right? Videos of black men and women being mistreated or killed by cops, in particular white cops, those get amplified to a degree that

can't possibly be exaggerated, right? They become a kind of pornography of racial grievance, whereas other videos where white suspects are being killed or mistreated by cops, or when black suspects or, you know, suspects of color are being killed and mistreated by black cops or of color. We're not seeing those videos, right? So people have no, they're drawing conclusions about the representativeness of these documents, you know, in the population. And they simply don't know the statistics of violence and they don't know that, you know, more white people are killed every year than black people by cops in the U.S. They haven't done the exercise to just discover how hard it is to think about the demographics of violence, right? So it's just, it remains an open

question how we should think about police engagement with the population given the relevant crime rates, right? I mean, it's pretty clear that, I mean, here's just, I don't know that we want to spend much time on this, but here's the picture in brief. If you have 50% of crime, violent crime, perpetrated by 12 to 13% of the population, which is in fact the status quo in the U.S. and has been for now decades, right? What percentage of encounters with cops would you expect that 12 to 13% of the population to have, right? Would you expect it to be 12 to 13% of all police encounters? Well, no, they're committing 50% of the violent crimes. Would you expect it to be 50% of the encounters. Maybe not. I mean, that's, but it's going to be more than their representation

in the base rate of the population. And so how one speaks about these statistics is really determined by one's background assumption of just what should be the case given the level of crime in each community. And there's a much larger discussion and even more fraught to try to figure out what we can do about that level of crime and the disparities in crime in the various communities. And just whose responsibility is it? And how much is white racism still the reason why we have this crazy disparity in crime, particularly in the inner city in the black community? There's so many assumptions built into everyone's experience of just watching those videos and having a reaction. So yeah, we find it impossible to talk about what seems to be, you know,

depending on how you're viewing it, just a patent factual encounter. You see what's happening, and when I watch those videos, it's often very clear to me what is happening, why it's happening, why it makes sense that it's happening, how it wouldn't have been otherwise, even if you change the skin color of all participants. But people who are agitated by a sense that we have an epidemic of racist violence perpetrated against black men and women by racist cops, they have a very different experience. Their eyes seem to be revealing to them a totally different set of facts. It seems very dangerous that as a country, we can't even have conversations about this. Like, even whether I agree with you or not, or have all the facts or not, this is one of those things

where my entire body is like tensing up because I'm like, oh my gosh, what are the consequences of having this discussion on any, in any medium? Whether it's live in person, on a podcast, on television, it's something that if we weren't our own boss, so to speak, if we didn't own the outlet or the medium that we're using, this could easily result in us with an early retirement if we're lucky, right? Yeah, so yeah, in the podcast you referenced, can we pull back from the brink? That was me responding to the eruption of, I think, collective delusion around the George Floyd killing. And I had thought, I think I say it briefly at the outset of that podcast, I thought I should bring on a black intellectual to help kind of midwife this conversation for me. That would

have been the prudent thing to do not to just be the white guy on his soapbox talking about what's wrong with this reaction. That just seemed like an act of cowardice. I knew what I wanted to say at that point. I did the research into the data such as we have at the moment on police violence and I felt I just needed to say what I thought and then I could deal with the aftermath. Again, for the reasons you just sketched, unusually free to have these conversations or to broach these topics on podcasts when we essentially own our platform. But, you know, I've had subsequent conversations with people like John McWhorter and Glenn Lowry and Thomas Chattered and Williams and Coleman Hughes and other, several other people I could list who are black writers and

academics and journalists who are really rigorous and refreshing. honest on this topic. And on some level, there's no substitute for having them weigh in as prominently as possible. Because for a certain audience, the color of your skin, no matter how careful you are and what you say, the color of your skin is entirely determined whether you can be listened to on this topic. That shouldn't be the case, obviously. That is the very symptom of the disease we are now suffering, that that is the case. But it simply is the case, right? So, you know, I sort of pick my moments to talk about this, but here were two white guys talking about the problem of race or lack thereof in America right now for a significant percentage of your audience. You know, that framing will entirely determine whether, you know, anything I or we say can be taken at, you know, face value. But you put two black people in the same conversation. And then, those conversations are happening and hopefully to increasing effect because there's some great black public intellectuals out there now who really should be leading our analysis of what's happening in our

society now and they're being sidelined again by a kind of moral panic and a kind of a witch craze. And then we have people who are thoroughly dishonest who are being promoted to kind of the highest levels of journalism and, you know, who have the best-selling books in the country. right now, people like Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, who's, these are the people who are being recommended to deprogram, you know, Fortune 500 companies and, you know, whose books are being, you know, incoming parents of private high schools are being admonished to read their books. And these books are so deranged and deranging in how they talk about race. It's worth pointing out that these are everything being said by these people explicitly repeat.

repudiates the vision that until almost yesterday, all of us were taught to champion of someone like Martin Luther King Jr. I mean, the idea that the goal was to get to a time where people could be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin, that goal has been explicitly repudiated now on the left, right? No, we're being offered a vision of the future where race is indelible, right? And any hope that we would arrive in a colorblind society is not only fatuous but obscene, right? It is you are culpable for the evil of racism by even aspiring to be colorblind. There's an original sin of whiteness that you can never cleanse. What's being offered here is a perpetual fragmentation of our society around this variable of race. This very concept is

ruled out in principle, but it is a kind of reverse racism. I mean, if you just imagine a white person, speaking the way Ibram Kendi does, he would be a member of the KKK or, you know, some neo-Nazi front group. That's how polarizing and bizarre the framing is. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Sam Harris. We'll be right back. Now back to Sam Harris on the Jordan Harbinger show. You said in an earlier podcast or book, now I can't remember quite what it was, but our sense of being offended isn't something that anyone necessarily needs. needs to respect. And even we should not respect our own sense of being offended. I would love for you

to explain that a little bit, because I love the idea that, and especially right now, for everyone who is definitely, right, there's going to be some contingent of my audience that's like, I can't even believe what Sam Harris is saying on Jordan Harbinger's show. They're drawing up their nasty email to me right now. Right. I actually enjoy hearing things that make me feel a little bit offended. It depends on what it is, of course, but I have to look at the reason why I'm offended, and sometimes the reason is because sometimes the reason is, quite frankly, quite poor. I'm offended because I always thought one thing, and now I'm being dragged, kicking, and screaming into what is actually correct through logic.

Well, so just to see if I can reel in some of the people who are even now fatally offended before I answer your question, I'll plant a flag where everyone can see it. I mean, this is the society I want to live in. I want to live in a society. I want to live in a society. where we care no more about skin color and other superficial characteristics that are often attributed to, you know, are ascribed to race, than we care about hair color, right? I mean, just that there's, we're not living in a world where people are disposed to worry that, you know, a corporation like Apple isn't hiring enough blondes or brunettes or people with red hair. I mean, no one is, no one's checking.

We don't come from a history of discrimination based on hair color, but I think everyone can agree that it's a good thing no one's checking, right? Who cares? It's good that we live in a society where no one cares about hair color in that sense. I mean, you can have preferences, you can dye your hair, you can do anything you want with your hair, you could admire the hair of other people, but there is no moral or political significance attached to hair color, and that is a very good thing.

And if someone told us that they wanted to bend us toward some possible future where people suddenly cared a lot more about hair color, right, where you had to walk on eggshells around people of a certain hair color or it's not say certain things about hair or carefully dye your hair so as to fit in, all of that. That is a future, the door to which is presumably closed and it would be insane to try to open it, right? That would just be fucking awful. Well, we're in that, space on the topic of skin color. The way out of this predicament is not to care more and more about skin color. So we have to figure out how to break this spell. And the left is running the opposite algorithm. The left is telling us that, no, no, we have to care more and more about this. We have to

talk more and more about this. This is the master variable. And whether you want to identify along these lines or not, you have to wake up in the morning and look in the mirror and know that you share something important with everyone who has a skin color that's kind of vaguely the same shade as yours, and you are importantly separated from everyone who doesn't. You have to just carry that around with you all day long, and your interactions with other human beings has to be, you know, filtered through that lens at all times. I'm not willing to play that game, right? So I'm going to continue to try to live in the world where skin color is no more important than hair color. And if that makes me some kind of troglodyte in certain conversations or seem to be a troglodyte,

well, then those are collisions I'm willing to have because what I'm seeing advertised to me from all quarters. And again, this is coming from the New York Times and other mainstream outlets. And it's coming from, again, journals like nature and science is the opposite attitude, which is we have to be more and more captured by this variable of difference between people. it's just absolutely obvious to me that that is heading us in a direction that is toxic and divisive and dishonest, frankly. I mean, it's just, it is simply not the case that we're dealing with more racism now than we ever have. In the aftermath of a two-term black president in the U.S., it is simply not the case that the political aspirations of black people in America have never been worse, right? And yet we're being goaded to act like they have never been worse, that any acknowledgement of racial,

progress is to not understand the gravity of systemic racism in our society. I'm not saying systemic racism doesn't exist. I'm not saying there aren't things we want to correct for. I mean, the criminal justice system has some terrible problems and some terrible legacy code. It's still running. The war on drugs has been a disaster for everyone and a special disaster for people of color. And, you know, we should declare it lost and empty the prisons of nonviolent offenders insofar as they're in there, but we have serious social problems to figure out how to alleviate, and their alleviation is not synonymous with finding more white people who are racist in our society. There's simply not enough racists to be creating these problems. And the fact that I can

predict that this weekend, there will be an inordinate number of black people murdered in Chicago by other black people. You can set your watch by it. The reason for that being the case is not because there are so many white racists enforcing systemically racist policies that are somehow forcing people in Chicago to kill one another, right? It's just not the case. And if it were the case, then obviously we should solve that problem immediately, right? I'd be the first person to want to solve that problem. But no one has offered a compelling argument as to how that is the causal chain of events in the year 2020. So we have to figure out how to solve these to rectify the terrible inequalities in our society with respect to education and health care outcomes

and wealth inequality. And insofar as that these are correlated with race and they are, we should want to figure out how to ameliorate that. I mean, that is clearly that is a pressing issue. But to simply call people racist, people who are among the least racist people who have ever been born into any society, right? I mean, really, the academy, awards. This is a bastion of racism. That's the target. It's so dishonest that is toxic. Its dishonesty is destabilizing for us. So anyway, that's one hobby horse I've ridden, but it's a thankless job to ride it as a white person in most contexts. Your only reflexive allies are people who are captured by right-wing conspiracy thinking and, or if not, you know, racists, right? I mean, it's like

the people who really win here is when it, when, when the, The left has made it palpably unsafe for anyone to demur on this particular topic. The only people who will have the courage of their convictions are actual racists. And that is, you know, there are many topics where we've landed there. You know, it's not so much in the news now, but there was a time when we're dealing with, you know, the Islamic state and intolerable level of Islamic, you know, racism, especially in Western Europe. the left made any connection, drawing any connection between Islam and terrorism, you know, taboo. And so to be drawing the honest connection there that, yeah, there's only one religion on earth that is producing jihadism,

because jihadism is only a tenant in one religion. To speak honestly about that puts you in the company of, you know, right-wing and increasingly fascist lunatics in Western Europe. That was an awful juxtaposition, But that was something that was being forced on everyone because the left had just seated the field of any semblance of intellectual honesty on this topic for reasons that are every bit as cultic and weird as the crazy conspiracies you meet on the right. How do we keep an open mind during intense debate with someone we disagree with? Because I think a lot of people listening who disagree with you, their instinct is to shut down and just go, this is garbage. I don't want to do that. And I see most people are absolutely unable to do this, even in the slightest. and we as a species, or at least as a nation, we're getting worse and worse at this by the minute

if social media and news are any indication. Well, it goes back to the question that I didn't answer, which you asked in reference to something I said about one's feeling of being provoked or offended. I said somewhere that your capacity to be offended is not something that anyone needs to respect, and it's not even something that you should respect, right? It is simply an emotional reaction which doesn't in and of itself have any content, right? It has no philosophical content. It has no, it's not the basis for an insight, right?

It's simply a signal of salience for you, right? The fact that you're feeling outrage or anger or disgust or fear or something negative in response to certain ideas, right? That doesn't tell you that the ideas are not based on facts. that can be confirmed, that it doesn't tell you whether a chain of reasoning is valid. You have to do further work to disentangle yourself from some unwanted opinion. You can't just recoil and say that doesn't feel good. And if you do that, which, you know, as you say, I mean, many people are doing simply that and feel no intellectual burden to do anything more than that.

But it's, that is what it is to be an unreflective and, and useless interlocutor. You're not advancing anything when you're simply calling people names or reacting without argument. Either you can find the hole in the argument or you can point to the data that disconfirms the claims being made,

or you can't. And if you can't, then you need to be open-minded. I mean, you need to be willing to have the conversation because an unwillingness to have the conversation that guarantees political and social division and ultimately it guarantees violence. This is something I'm always fond of pointing out that we really only have two options.

We have conversation or we have violence. When it really matters, when we really have to modify the behavior of other people, we can either do it by talking to them and getting through to them and therefore engineering a kind of convergence, a shared worldview, or at minimum a rational compromises at the perimeter of a shared worldview,

or we have to force them to change what they're doing. And there's not that many tools. I mean, we're social primates that makes, you know, small mouth noises that can, you know, rather often mean something to perfect strangers in this world. And what we have to do is figure out how we can collaborate with one another in an open-ended way that is allowed. for, you know, increasingly creative and beautiful cooperation. We need to figure out how to get $8 billion, $9 billion, $10 billion, remains to be seeing where we're going to top out here

in the near term, strangers to collaborate on this common project of building a global civilization that is less and less fragile, right? And the algorithm that so many people are running seems to be, I'm not going to fucking talk to you if you say that. And again, that just when push comes to shove, that just leaves us with violence. I mean, that's terrifying. It should terrify anybody no matter what side of the political spectrum you're on, because that's, I mean, this sort of discussion is the foundation of democracy in the first place in many ways, at least according to my legal education from 15 years ago that I barely remember. It's all a matter of ideas, right, that we find compelling. We persuade,

one another of the wisdom or utility of various projects and allocations of resources. This is what we're about all the time. It's everything from, you know, trying to convince your son or daughter to do their homework or help you do the dishes to what should we spend billions of dollars on as a society, you know, immediately, right? And what should we not spend billions of dollars on? And what sort of, what rate of death from various causes is acceptable? and what is an emergency that we have to stop everything and figure out how to solve. I mean, these are all just conversations and their products based on data or lack of data or, you know, educated guesses. It's just a tissue of memes and, you know, statements that are found to be compelling or not for good or bad reasons.

And what we have more and more politically are various cults of, of bad reasons forming and being amplified by social media and being becoming entrenched by our capacity now to silo ourselves based on social media in various echo chambers where we're just not getting the same information. This is truly new. You know, this is not, it's tempting to think that, well, this is just the same problem we had when people could decide to start listening to Republican, you know, right-wing talk radio or not, or watch one. television channel or not. I mean, maybe this is no different than having Fox News. But it's different in that with social media and the, you know, the algorithm that is tuned to just game everyone's

attention in a totally bespoke way, you know, moment by moment, we're not seeing the same things, right? When you go on YouTube, the algorithm is aimed at you in a way that is quite different than the way it's aimed at me based on your pattern of usage. And this is how people are getting fixated on things that would otherwise be unthinkable. I mean, we literally have people believing that the earth is flat now, right? There's a whole flat earth society. I mean, I've never even, I've never encountered it myself. I mean, I consciously went and found one video that was kind of summarizing this problem for me, but I'm not seeing any of this stuff. And there are people who are seeing it all the time or it's, you know, QAnon, right? I mean, you go far enough

I guess it's maybe right and left or the wrong framework here, but Q&ON is a cult of people who believe that there is another cult of people filled with Hollywood celebrities and left-wing politicians like Hillary Clinton and the Obama's, you know, most left journalists who are not only kidnapping and raping and killing kids, but eating them, right, or extracting their vital essences so as to create some kind of long life potion. So it's a cannibalistic cult of pedophiles that has among its members, people like Tom Hanks and Ellen DeGeneres and the Obamas and Hillary Clinton. This apparently is believed by not a small number of people, not just in America, but in Europe now, based on an ability to go down a rabbit hole on social media and never come out again. and just based on the human capacity to be bewildered by seemingly credible information. I don't know how this stuff seems credible at any point to anyone. But this is a not insignificant social movement that is obviously dangerous. The fact that it's possible to have a social movement like this spring up is, again, something we have engineered for ourselves,

and it's being gamed now consciously by outside actors like, you know, the Russians. and the Chinese. I mean, they're just pumping their own disinformation onto these platforms. And Russian state television, RT, is the most watched news channel on YouTube now. It's amazing what we've designed for ourselves. And the fact that we can't figure out how to get out of it because the business model is what it is, right? I mean, this is where it all comes back to advertising on social media. I mean, the fact that this is, the algorithm is tuned to, you know, clicks and time on site that we're prioritizing that, no matter what the cost, it's an amazing situation we're in, and one can only hope we figure out how to correct course. Yeah, that to me is shocking.

A while ago, I had an offer of doing some kind of show or something for RT, and I said, isn't that Russia today? And they're like, no, no, no, it's RT now. And I said, well, okay, so has it changed? No, we just kind of rebranded. And I, I thought, have you heard this show? Are you offering me a job in a propaganda department of a potentially hostile, you know, foreign intervener here? Like, what are you thinking? One Google search would tell you that I'm the last person to go for this.

And they're like, well, here's the salary. You know, here's what we're thinking in terms of compensation. And I go, oh, that's why you have people that seemingly should know better creating this for you. Right. It's just purely economic. It's, they know what journalists make in the United States. And they go, look, here's a percentage so that you can forget your morals.

and your patriotism and your sense of right and wrong. Yeah, I mean, so much of so many depressing facts come down to incentives in the end. And, yeah, it's just what has happened to journalism and politics in this moment of kind of disaggregation of so many business models. It's really been depressing. But, yeah, it's often a matter of where the money is coming from or is likely to come from or is no longer coming from. that's why it's important to get the business models straight and to incentivize the things we want to encourage and to disincentivize the things we want to discourage. And it's with the right incentives, you can get even, you know, fairly conflicted, selfish, you know, mediocre people to behave more and more like saints.

That is why incentives are so important. And, you know, conversely, with the wrong incentives, you can get fairly good people, heretofore really good people, to behave terribly. And you can basically require a sainthood of people to, you know, to get them to behave well when the incentives are wrong. And so that, I mean, so much of what we need to do to improve society is not a matter, is not a matter and will never be a matter of convincing individuals on their own to behave more ethically. It's a matter of tuning the incentive so that it's just to their obvious advantage to behave more ethically. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest Sam Harris. We'll be right back. Hey, thanks so much for listening to this show.

Your support, it means the world to us. The fact that anybody cares to listen to what we are creating here is amazing. And your support of our advertisers, that keeps us going, keeps the lights on around here, keeps my kid in diapers, and he uses a ton of diapers. To learn more and get links to all the discounts you hear on this show so that you can check out the sponsors, you don't have to remember the codes, you don't have to remember the URLs, just go to Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. That's where everything is all in one place.

Please consider supporting those who support us. And don't forget, we've got worksheets for today's episode just like we do for every show. If you want some of the drills, the exercises, the main takeaways talked about during the episode, they're in one easy place for those of you drive and jogging, bench pressing. That link is in the show notes. harbinger.com slash podcast. And now for the rest of my conversation with Sam Harris. A Reddit user gave me this question, so I'm going to, I'm going to phrase it like I thought of it, but I don't want to get called out on a Reddit, so how that goes. He said, I once heard you say

that you'd felt pleasure in having your assumptions challenged, specifically when you hold one position and you didn't want to accept an opposing viewpoint, but you've been dragged to it by the sheer relentlessness of their logic. I'm wondering when the last time that happened to you, when the last time you felt like that's happened to you? It happens a lot around this sort of tripwire I just described a few moments ago. I have the same thing everyone else has where I have the things I want to believe. It's certainly more convenient to believe these things. It's an expression of solidarity to believe these things.

I know what it's, I know what feels good to believe. And then when I stumble upon something that feels bad, rather than just plunge into being offended or recoiling from that thing or just wanting so desperately for it not to be so that I'm unwilling to pause and reflect, I have another module installed in my brain here. And this is really, I think, mostly born of my background in philosophy, which is just to become interested in it and to want to find the flaw. There's probably some shadow of motivated reasoning still there. If I want to find the flaw in the other argument, there's an asymmetry there. If you're telling me something I already sort of believe and want to believe, I'm not disposed to spend a lot of time finding the flaw in that case.

And that's just, you know, that is the confirmation bias that everyone tends to live with. But when I find my cherished opinions opposed by some argument or some set of facts, I'm committed to finding that interesting, right? So, I mean, this can extend to anything that I would be prejudiced against. Like, you know, I think Trump is the worst person who has ever been president of the United States. And that is obvious to me. It's a terrible misfortune that we have gotten ourselves in this position where we've spent three and a half years with this man as president. And he's done immense harm to our country, our standing in the world, our society, our credibility. And when you're you just look at the opportunity cost of having to spend so much time paying attention to his madness rather than doing other profitable things. It's been awful. But that's not to say he doesn't occasionally do something that's good, right, or say something that's factually correct. He lies more than any person in human history. I think that's an objective statement. I would bet a lot of money that no one can name someone who has lied more than he has lied in public in recent years.

yet, you know, occasionally he'll say something that's absolutely true or occasionally something said about him will be totally dishonest and wrong, right? He'll be unfairly besmirched by his enemies, even when there's so much to condemn him for. And so, yeah, when I land on one of those things, I mean, it's sometimes totally inconvenient, right, to take the case of race, right? I think he is a racist, right? I think I believe correctly that he is a racist based on things I know about him. Unfortunately, the things I know about him are not public in the way that they should be, right? So I think that, you know, I know enough kind of back-channel information about him to feel, you know, to a moral certainty that he's a racist. Not a member of the KKK necessarily, but just a racist asshole.

But fully half of the allegations that I've seen about him being racist made in public seem totally spurious. And that's a huge problem. And it's totally inconvenient to have to make that argument because, again, I think he's the worst president in human history. And anything that can be made to stick against him should stick because, you know, he's an existential threat to our democracy. But take the case that the fine people claim that is often made against him where in the aftermath of Charlottesville, he said there were fine people on both sides. And in that moment, couldn't even condemn white supremacists. Rather, he referred to them as fine people. This allegation is,

just ubiquitous against him on the left. Every journalist makes it, Joe Biden makes it, Kamala Harris makes it. They're never criticized by mainstream media for making it. And it is actually fallacious, right? If you watch that press conference, he explicitly condemns white supremacists, right? He just, he does it within 15 seconds or so of the fine people statement, right? And when he was talking about the fine people, he made it absolutely clear that he was not talking about the white supremacists. He was talking about other people who were out there protesting their statues being taken down, and these are not the people with the tiki torches. These are not the members of the KKK. And he condemned white supremacists and Nazis explicitly in that press conference, right? And yet everyone is lying

about it, or they just don't know their lying about it because they never went back to check to see what he actually said. So when I get hit in the face with something like that, which is totally inconvenient for my side because I'm on the side of anything that can sink Trump should be used. Because, you know, again, he's almost the worst human being I can name, right? I just think he's scarcely human in the jeopardy he puts us in on all fronts, right, for everything from, you know, deciding what to do with our nuclear weapons on down. And yet everyone on the left is lying about what he said in that press conference. And I think he's racist on top of that. But rather than, you know, Rather than not be honest about this, I'm committed to being honest about it, right?

It's just a huge problem that people have just thrown out the rulebook here and are just trying to smear an eminently smearable person because they think it's politically justified. There's an article in Slate Star Codex. I don't know if you've read this piece, but the gist is that at some point in human history, humans may not have had the language or knowledge to understand that the voice in their head, was in some sense themselves. This article posits that the imaginary friends or maybe even gods

or the invention of people trying to explain that voice. And there's sort of a theory in there that's an exploration for how our theory of mind may have developed over time. And I'm wondering what you might think of this. Like, does the theory of mind, does this make sense that it could have come from ancient religious beliefs,

those beliefs came into existence developed over time because of something like this. I've never heard you talk about this, so this might just be too far off base. I don't think I've seen that article in Slate Star Codex, but it sounds like it's reminiscent of Julian James's notion of the bicameral mind, which is kind of an old thesis, which I've never known how much credibility to give it.

But, I mean, the idea that the voice in our head has not always felt like a self. At one point, it felt like we were in communication, with the gods. And this explains some of what we can glean about human subjectivity from, you know, Greek myths and Homer and all that. I don't know what I think about that. I mean, I think the notion of the self is definitely there to be deconstructed and criticized. I mean, I don't think we have a self in the way that is usually supposed, which is to say, you know, there's no, there's no subject in the head interior to the body that is carried through, you know, each moment of experience as kind of the unchanging source of attention and reflection and, you know, the thinker in addition to the

thoughts that arise. I mean, there is no thinker in addition to the thoughts. The thoughts simply arise in consciousness. And the feeling that there is a thinker, the feeling that there's a subject is what it feels like to not notice this process clearly and to be identified with with each thought that arises in consciousness. I go into that in much more depth in waking up both the book and the app. But we have to get some distance from, or at least notice an alternative to being taken in by our own opinions, right? Like we don't have to believe every one of our thoughts.

We don't have to form an opinion about all the things we form opinions about so readily, and we certainly don't have to do it as quickly as we do. And even when we have an opinion, we can hold it much more lightly than we do, at least bracket it and wonder, well, what would have to happen for me to no longer believe this? I mean, like, in what sense is this opinion falsifiable, right? And if it's not falsifiable at all, well, then what makes me think I'm actually living in such a way as to be in contact with reality, right? like how am I going about my my information gathering and my, you know, conversations with other people and just my moment to moment navigation of the world such that I think my beliefs are actually responsive to the world and to what's actually happening outside my door? Because, I mean, that's what it is to actually believe something.

You can't believe something just because you want it to be true. I mean, that's why we have a phrase like wishful thinking or, you know, self-deception. You have to believe it because you think. it actually is true, right, whether you want it to be true or not. That's what it is to presume to be in contact with reality. And we have to believe things in such a way as to feel that if they weren't true, we wouldn't believe them, which is a further claim about our minds and our entanglement with reality altogether. I mean, in order for me to think that what I believe about Trump is true, I have to believe that I stand in some relationship to his existence and to, you know,

everything he's doing and saying and thinking such that if it weren't true, I would not have come to believe this about him. I'm not in some kind of, you know, stream of misinformation systematically with respect to him such that I'm now just, my beliefs about him are just a tissue of fiction. So it's a presumption that you're just standing in some place relative to the facts that you claim to know something about such that you're not systematically misled by the facts such as they are that seem to arrive at your door. More and more, we are entangled on platforms that are delivering information to us where we can't reliably make that claim, right? Because now we have to assume that what we're seeing in our timelines is curated

in such a way as to amplify at minimum bias, if not misinformation. It's gaming our attention based on what we've shown we wanted to pay attention to yesterday. And that is definitely a distortion of our epistemology, and we have to take some conscious steps to correct for it. And we have to follow, I mean, to take a concrete example, you should be following people on social media who you disagree with, or at least people who are adjacent enough to people who you really disagree with, that where you're seeing things you disagree with. If you're only seeing things you

agree with, right, where it's just everything's got the top spin that you like, you're disposed just to forward it on even before reading the article, right? You just like the headline enough, and you like the source enough that, you know, this is good enough and you're just going to kind of give it your boost. You know, you're absolutely part of the problem. In closing here, you receive a lot of criticism. A lot of it is very aggressive, heinous. How do you, you deal with it so that it doesn't affect your work and your personal life, or at least minimizes the effect on your work and your personal life? There's a few answers to that question. The main one is to create a platform and a business

model. Unfortunately, this isn't something that I can just recommend to people because I do consider myself a kind of outlier here where I've been able to do this, and it doesn't leave me in a position to give advice that people can readily follow. But insofar as it's possible to create a circumstance for yourself where you're not vulnerable to the mob, well, then you should do that, right? Because that gives you the oxygen by which you can function, right? You know, you're not, you can notice all the chaos around you, much of which may be aimed at you, but you can not care because you're invulnerable or comparatively invulnerable. I mean, obviously there are things that could still take me down in the end,

but it would be hard. It'd be fairly extreme. So there's that. I mean, just, you know, not to have to worry about being fired is a very big deal. And I recognize I'm in a position of immense privilege to have been, you know, lucky enough to stumble upon the technology, you know, at the right time, the technology here being, you know, podcasts and apps that allowed me to, you know, not be in a kind of a normal job, right, where I have a boss who can be sensitive to public, opinion in such a way that, you know, I get the knock on the door, which says, sorry, your, your career is over based on that last thing you tweeted or that last thing you said. And so many people are in that position. I mean, even, not even getting tenure as a professor is enough of a inoculation so that, you know, people feel free to speak. I mean, it's just like, I can't tell you how many tenured professors are not free to say what they think is true in the current environment. So insofar as you can do that, do that. But then, I mean, it's just like, I can't tell you Then there's this other component to it, which is just recognize that so much of what is being said about anyone online is being said by people who, I mean, one, are not representing that either the, it's hard to know whether, some people are probably revealing their true selves and it's their fake self that you meet in real life. But more and more, I think it's a matter of people's worst inclinations are being amplified by the platforms themselves. So anonymity is one.

important variable, that kind of the mob-like behavior and the social signaling, the need to virtue signal to the mob. So that so much of political communication now is not honest communication. It's an expression of solidarity to the group and it appears to be facing outward. It appears to be, you know, worried about the target of criticism, but really what it is is just a way of advertising that you're in good standing with your particular mob. So you just have to recognize that it's dishonest and you're seeing the worst sides of people. I mean, you're seeing people who, in real life, if you could actually sit down, you know, face to face, and COVID has made this even worse because, you know, we're dealing with fewer face-to-face encounters. But if you can

actually sit down with these people in real life, you would meet normal people in most cases, or you would meet people who are obviously crazy and therefore not worth talking to, right? But online, everyone has the same status. You know, in your Twitter feed, every tweet has the same status, whether it's coming by blue check marks aside, this person can be a great academic or a great journalist or somebody who's, they could even not even be a person, they could be a bot, right? And you don't know what you're dealing with. So so much of what's coming back at you is something that you need not take seriously on its

face. And even when it's coming from serious people, their worst inclinations are being selected for. by the platforms themselves and by how we've all been trained to use them, people are behaving in ways that they would not behave, they would not say this in person to you or about you. And it's a fun house mirror that wherein human nature and your own reputation is not being accurately reflected. If you can discount for that, I mean, again, it's not in some ways that fun house mirror

is becoming reality, unfortunately. So it's like, it used to be comforting. to say that, you know, Twitter is not real life and real life is real life, but more and more, given the business models and their effect on the world and given the nature of politics, more and more, unfortunately, Twitter and, you know, the fun house mirror of social media is becoming as important, if not more important than real life in terms of the maintenance of one's reputation. So there's not a totally consoling message to draw, but, I mean, the lesson I've drawn here is that You're getting an inaccurately depressing picture of humanity online, and then you're disposed to

react to that, right? People are not this bad in real life face-to-face, certainly most of the time. We've driven ourselves properly crazy by having been inducted into something like a reality TV show 24-7 for now years. A lot of it has to do with what social media has done to us and what the smartphone has done to us. I mean, just look at these protests and riots and look at how many people are recording them. And then ask yourself, how many people would be participating in this mayhem, but for the opportunity to record themselves? What they're doing with the recordings is another question.

I mean, how many people have platforms that can be serviced by these recordings, but the percentage of people recording themselves and everyone else recording the mayhem that they're producing. I mean, whether it's burning a bus or, you know, whatever. And how much of this is being inspired by the fact that it's possible to record yourself doing this in the first place. We're in a hall of mirrors that our primate minds were not designed for. It's having, I think, a net negative effect. There's no question. So some course correction is coming.

Do you ever fear for your safety? A lot of your critics are, they're insane. They're absolutely insane. they've made good on threats to murder other people who do and say similar things, as you've said and done, especially when it comes to your critiques of religion and things like that. I mean, do you ever sit back and go, this person's looking at me weird while I'm eating outside? What does that mean? It's been a long time since I've eaten outside. I mean, I'm in COVID land here, so it's been seven months since I can remember having had the privilege of eating in a restaurant. You know, I don't, I mean, fear is virtually never my state of mind. around that. I mean, no more than I need to feel fear to buckle my seatbelt when I get into a car, right? It's like, obviously, I wear a seatbelt because I'm aware of all the bad things that can happen to you when your car collides with some other large object. But fear is not the state of

mind that leads to prudence there. But I, you know, I am very prudent with respect to my own security and my family's security. And, you know, I don't know how much you, you're aware of, you know, said on this topic, but I've written and spoken a lot on, you know, self-defense and martial arts and firearms and all, like, I've gone down that particular rabbit hole and did it a long time ago. You know, I take my personal security seriously, but that's the mental state associated with that isn't fear. It's, I mean, if anything, it's fun, right? I mean, it's kind of a guilty pleasure. I mean, once you decide, you want to be the sort of person who knows how to defend himself and, you know, knows how to work with firearms and all that. Like, like, then it just becomes,

you know, fun to do. It's like a high-stakes video game to, you know, train in Brazilian jiu-jitsu or to train with firearms. And it's just like that part's fun. But most of security is information security and being hard to find and not, and when you advertise where you are going to be, to always have professional security. And so I've just decided that all comes with the territory. And so it's not onerous anymore. It's just a lot of boxes that I check intelligently at this point. Because as you say, you know, some people are crazy and some people are ideological and I seem to have attracted both forms of antagonist. And it's definitely not a perk of the job. There's a significant hassle factor associated with it. But at this point, it's all just sort of priced into my routine. Sam, we could go on forever,

but I take it that that's not in the cards. So I do appreciate your time. This is fascinating. Next time I'll have to have you come back and talk about free will and lying because those were popular last time we spoke. I really do appreciate it. The book will be linked in the show notes and hope to talk to you soon as well. Yeah, yeah. It's been a pleasure, Jordan, as always. Thanks so much. I've got some thoughts on this episode. But before I get into that, here's what you should check out next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. Pakistan was just one of many bad things that happened to me in my life. I've had so many things happen and I just learned to get over it. You know, you get knocked down six times. You get up seven. And that's the only way I've

ever known how to live. When I got out of the cab with the suitcases to leave Pakistan, the guy who was there's like next time you come back we'll show you around you will hook you up with some girls you'll have a great time and i'm humoring this guy i'm like yeah sure next time i come back i come back i know for a fact i'm never coming back to pakistan country sucks that's fucking country sucks and i'm good at finding like good things that are everywhere so it's early in the morning and i go into international departures and long line curving around the corner i'm waiting in line and the line goes all the way up this wall to where there's customs tables and when the customs officer sees me and flags me I'm about six inches taller than everyone.

And I get brought to another room. Finally, the guy who asked me if there was narcotics in my suitcase comes in. He's holding these two sandwich-silled things. And his exact words to me is, what is this? And I said, I don't fucking know what it is. Yeah, sure. He says, this is all for him. I said, why are you showing me this?

Because it came out of your suitcase. Felt like such a fucking idiot. Yeah, because I thought that the DEA was going to hook me up, you know, because they're going to see that I'm innocent. I truly thought those guys are going to be there to help me now. Because I wasn't guilty. So this shit doesn't happen to innocent people. Three years of my life for a crime I didn't know I was being used to commit.

To hear the rest of one of the most harrowing stories I've ever heard in my time doing this podcast, check out episode 147 with Eric A'Day here on the Jordan Harbinger Show. Thanks to Sam, we'll be having him back again. Well, it depends how much hate mail I get for this. Actually, it doesn't. him back again. I always do. It's funny. I do love hearing what you guys think about every single episode, but I will tell you, some of the people that make a lot of you angry are the most interesting people and they challenge our thinking the most. And when I say you, I mean,

there's a tiny, tiny minority of extremely vocal people and it usually surprises me. It usually really surprises me who's controversial and who's not. Some of them are obvious and some aren't. You can't really do a Sam Harris episode without pissing off a ton of people. So I'm ready for that. Go ahead and email me directly, Jordan at Jordan Harbinger.com. I'm ready to hear you out. And again, thank you for listening. And a big thank you to Sam Harris for joining us today.

Links to his stuff will be in the show notes. Please, if you buy any books from any authors on the show, do use the links on the website. That adds up. It helps support the show. Worksheets for the episode are in the show notes. Transcripts for the episodes are also in the show notes. No video for this one at Sam's request. You know, hair and makeup.

Such a to do. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. or hit me on LinkedIn. I do enjoy talking with all of you on many platforms. LinkedIn seems to have the least amount of crazies. But you know what? Go ahead and DM me on Twitter or Instagram. I am there. I'm teaching you how to connect with great people and manage relationships using systems and tiny habits over at our six minute networking course. Again, that course is free. I don't need your credit card info. None of that. There's no upsells. Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. I'm teaching you how to dig the well before you get thirsty. And most of the guests on the show, they subscribe to the course. They contribute to this course.

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A lot of us don't even have any friends after this pandemic. Share it with the strangers you interact with online. That's just as good. If you know somebody who's a Sam Harris fan, somebody who's interested in the subject we covered here today, please do share this with them. And I hope you find something great in every episode. Please do share the show with those you care about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen, and we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast. Finding a new great

podcast shouldn't be this hard, so let me save you some time. If you like the Jordan Harbinger show, you'll probably like Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. It's one of those shows that makes you smarter in a practical, useful way. Same curiosity vibe we go for here. just in a fast-focused format. Mike brings on top experts and asks the exact questions that you'd want to ask, and the topics are all over the place in the best way. Recently, they've covered things like why we care so much what other people think, the benefits of laughter, why sports fans get so invested,

and what makes people like you or not. The through line is always the same. Smart ideas you can actually use in real life. Something you should know has been featured in Apple's shows we love, and it's got thousands of five-star reviews because it's consistently interesting. So if you want another show that scratches that I want to understand how people in the world really work itch, search for something you should know wherever you get your podcasts. Look for the bright yellow light bulb and start listening. You can thank me later.