TRIGGERnometry - Sam Harris: Trump, Religion, Wokeness

Starting point is 00:00:00 Your capacity to be offended is not something that anyone need or should respect in you. You were calling for Twitter to shut down Trump's account and we're happy that it happened. That's a very different position to pretty much everybody else. Why did you take that position? Trump University as a story is worse than anything that could be in Hunter Biden's laptop, in my view. That's just a conspiracy. That's a left-wing conspiracy to deny the presidency to Donald Trump. Absolutely it was.

Starting point is 00:00:35 Absolutely. But I think it was warranted. But Sam. You can't do that, Sam. You've got to be fair. Most people in our society, even if they're nominally religious, really are struggling to find meaning in their day-to-day. When you look at just the hour-by-hour increments at which life has doled out to us,

Starting point is 00:00:57 You're cast out of deep sleep or, you know, the phantasmagoria of dreams, you know, when the alarm goes off in the morning, and how do you feel about your life? And what is going to give you moral urgency and meaning? Millions and millions of people found it at specific moments in our recent history. Like George Floyd killing was certainly one of those moments, where it's like, okay, enough is enough. This is my religion. Did you know that you can ask guests your questions?

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Starting point is 00:03:02 dotlocals.com and join the community. That's trigonometry. Dotlocals.com. We'll see you there. Hello and welcome to a very special episode of Trigonometry on the road from the USA. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissen. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Delighted to say our brilliant guest today is a neuroscientist, philosopher and one of America's and the world's most prominent public intellectual, Sam Harris. Welcome to Trigonometry.

Starting point is 00:03:35 Thanks, guys. Yeah, great to be here. It is great to have you on the show. We mentioned that usually when we start the show, we ask our guests to introduce themselves. You're well-known enough that you don't need to do that. But what we did want to talk to you about, which is what we've been asking a lot of our guests on this trip in the U.S., is how are you who you are?

Starting point is 00:03:53 Because you've done things that most people wouldn't do, or wouldn't want to do, would be scared to do, calling out some ideologies that people are afraid to call out. That takes courage, but it also takes determination. It takes something. Why do you have that something? How did you get it? It's a hard question to answer.

Starting point is 00:04:11 I mean, I think there's one algorithm I'm running more than most, which is what I would call intellectual honesty. And so the burden is not to be who you were yesterday. The burden isn't to join some tribe who you'll get social reinforcement from for conforming to. So it's insofar as I'm continually just trying to figure out what's true and what's consistent with what I claimed was true five minutes ago or five years ago, that causes me to just bump up against taboos and blasphemies and ideologies

Starting point is 00:04:57 that are more rigid than that, right? I mean, it really, it's, I mean, even having an identity itself is too much. You know, it's like, not only can you not really conform to a tribe, you can't really even conform to who you were yesterday if your master value is to be honest and rigorous and available to new data and new arguments and, new insights. That's a very good answer, but it doesn't answer my question,

Starting point is 00:05:31 which is how did you become that way? Why are you that way? Yeah, I have no idea. I just, like, that was my, you know, factory setting. And so from a very early age, you know, I guess I showed up as a skeptic on many fronts. I mean, I was certainly an argumentative teenager, you know. I'd like to say that. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, that was really, some kind of default.

Starting point is 00:05:58 And that part really hasn't changed. I think I pick my battles better now than I used to. I could turn any dinner party into a knock-down, drag-out debate about the most fundamental issues anyone could summon. And, you know, I think I, as I get older, I pick my battles more. Just because, like, the hassle factor of touching certain topics and, certain ways has become more salient for me. I mean, Twitter was the, was the real teaching tool for me. Like, I just, you know, I got on the platform as everyone did, not really aware that I was

Starting point is 00:06:38 enrolling myself into a psychological experiment to which no one had consented and the outcome is as yet unforeseen. And, yeah, I just kind of let loose, you know, on various topics. And I would, you know, when I would see some malefactor there who was treating me or other people badly, well, then I had to deal with that right then and there. And, yeah, it's just the hassle factor of dealing with the toxicity of it. And also just the, I'm convinced now that at bottom it's a misrepresentation of humanity, right? It doesn't seem like, I mean, you're actually dealing with what someone wrote there. I mean, it's not in error.

Starting point is 00:07:23 but you're not getting the whole person. You're getting a part of them that has been amplified by the frame into which the conversation has been put. And the frame has certain features that are not helpful to good conversation. I mean, it's got anonymity. It's got, you know, it's got facelessness. It's got the performative aspect. You're doing it in front of your crowd or some possible crowd. So it just, you know, it's disastrous for intellectual honesty.

Starting point is 00:07:53 and compassion and, you know, theory of mind to actually understand, taking the extra moment to understand where the other person is coming from. So there's no principle of charity. So it's just, it's really a disastrous machine for manufacturing discord. We had a guest on the show called Richard Grannan, who made the point that what it does is reduces everyone to an avatar. So if everyone's an avatar, what does it matter if you attack them, if you, you know, dehumanize them, if you misrepresent them? Because the game is to win, right? It's not to actually have a discussion,

Starting point is 00:08:34 it's to destroy and ultimately to win. Yeah, well, especially if you're not, if you're a public person dealing with people who are not public people, right? Because then there's really, then it's just a single shot, you know, lottery. It's not a, there's no ongoing, future of collaboration or cooperation that is being maintained. I mean, it's even bad when you have two public people who, you know, who both know they're going to meet each other in real life at some point. Still, the wheels come off rather often to a surprising degree. But, yeah, it's just, in the end, I think it's bad technology, which is still somewhat

Starting point is 00:09:18 inscrutable because it seems like it should be good. I mean, and in some ways it is good because you're seeing, you know, you're seeing a lot of smart people tell you what the most interests them and most worries them on a daily basis and, you know, sending you articles and videos that's why I'm on. That's why I can't break my connection to it because I'm following so many smart people who are curating for me an information diet that I still appreciate. And then I, you know, occasionally put my own stuff out there just so it's like kind of a marketing channel. But I'm doing much less in the weeds back and forth with even public people who I notice, you know, poke me on a given issue or whatever. Sam, does it not go, do you not have a little thought in your head when you go to tackle these very contentious subjects? And you know that you're going to get pushed back. You know that you're going to get flat.

Starting point is 00:10:13 You know that you're going to get misrepresented. Do you not think, I really shouldn't be doing this? or what goes through your mind before you go out and you make your point? Well, again, I think about it more than I used to now. I used to do it very, basically there was no friction in the system. I mean, I just was like, okay, this is like that cartoon meme. You know, somebody on the Internet is wrong about something. I was that guy on Twitter, and so I'm not that guy.

Starting point is 00:10:49 anymore. And I really do pick my moments and there's a cost of that because there's, you know, that you decide to sit certain moment, you know, cultural moments, you sit on the sidelines. And, um, but, I mean, if I guess I could distill it to a, to a lesson here, it's like, you're not, you don't, you don't always need to have an opinion about everything, right? You certainly don't always need to have a strong opinion about everything. And even if you do have a strong opinion, you don't always have to be the person expressing that opinion because very likely someone else will. Right. And given, you know, given those adjustments to the, to the machine, you can just aside, you know, is this, do I really want to spend the next

Starting point is 00:11:39 24 hours dealing with the aftermath of this thing that I'm tempted to tweet, right? Or to say in some other format. In particular, it relates to the likelihood that certain personalities are going to go berserk. And then with certain people, it's, you know, it's guaranteed that they're going to go berserk. So like, do I, yeah, here's this, this, this, this odious opinion expressed by a, you know, a semi-odious person who really deserves to hear what I think right now. Is it worth, you know, whacking that hornet's nest and then just dealing with and being seen to deal with

Starting point is 00:12:18 or to not deal with and to maybe look like you can't deal with the aftermath. Sam, you talked about tribalism at the beginning and that's something that Francis and I both feel very strongly is contributing to much of the divisiveness and the way

Starting point is 00:12:34 things are going and look, let's be clear the show is called trigonometry. We want to explore difficult subjects. There's no question that neither him or I are woke in the consent. Opposing that ideology has been a big part of what we do. But the tribalism is a different thing. We don't want to be in the anti-woke tribe or the work tribe, right?

Starting point is 00:12:53 And there was a tribe around 2015-2016, this very small tribe of very smart people, which was referred to as the intellectual dark web, which I remember at that time, we weren't doing this, we were just two comedians. I remember watching you guys have those conversations and being inspired by people. I don't think you guys had the answers, but you had the right questions.

Starting point is 00:13:14 You did have the right questions. And then over time, we watched that loose tribe of very bright people, as loose tribes of very bright people always do crumble, disintegrate, fall out. What happened? Well, the first thing that happened is that it was actually, for some of us more than others, a tongue-in-cheek label for a tribe that really wasn't. I mean, none of us are tribal people. you know, it really is a herding cats sort of situation.

Starting point is 00:13:43 And when I launched, so, you know, it was Eric Weinstein coinage, which I launched on a podcast we did. And I think in that context, I telegraphed that I thought it was tongue and cheek. I mean, I think he probably thought it was more in earnest than I did, or he was at least more attached to the label. And then very quickly, there were people who sort of joined this. this collection or who were said to be in it, some of whom I had never heard of at that point, who, you know, upon just a little bit of analysis, revealed themselves to be people who I, you know, I really don't agree with, not just on the actual substance of specific opinions,

Starting point is 00:14:27 just their methodology by which they would generate opinions or their lack of methodology. So, you know, I'm not inclined to name names, but there are people who, like, It's just wrong to think they were ever moving in the same lane I was in at that point when we were all called IDW people, right? But I think the biggest force of fragmentation was Trump and what certain people did or didn't do with that phenomenon. And this is what I was going to ask you. I'd say there were two things that fractured it from that looking in from the else. COVID later, but Trump was the big one. So let's start with Trump, because I want to talk about COVID as well.

Starting point is 00:15:10 But if we start with Trump, you took a different view to almost everybody, I would say, in what was described as the IDW, in the sense that you were, I think you were calling for Twitter to shut down Trump's account and were happy that it happened. Yeah. That's a very different position to pretty much everybody else. Why did you take that position? Well, for two reasons. So the generic reason is, and this is something I've never gotten a clear answer on for many of the people who took the different side of this. And so many of these people are ostensibly libertarians, or at least quasi-libertarians.

Starting point is 00:15:52 And they want something like a minimum of state coercion and control. they don't want just a proliferation of laws just to make our lives more difficult and that's an orientation though I consider myself liberal and have always voted as a Democrat I mean until we dealt with this woke apocalypse I would have certainly called myself a Democrat

Starting point is 00:16:18 without much self-consciousness I've always had this libertarian kind of underpinning to my politics which is, you know, if the private sector can handle it, it's probably best done there, right? I mean, just given the level of inefficiency and poorly aligned incentives you get in a government bureaucracy. And peaceful, honest people should be,

Starting point is 00:16:43 should have the right to be left alone. You know, so it's like unless somebody is harming people or, you know, guilty of fraud, you know, the, i.e. theft, you know, stealing from people. We don't need the government involved. And so, you know, that's my general framework. And many people, ostensibly in this group, ostensibly agreed with that.

Starting point is 00:17:11 So when I look at Twitter, you know, Twitter is a company that can decide to, you know, as someone who has started information-based companies at this point, I'm just thinking about, what's the scenario under which I would want the government to force me? to have Alex Jones on my podcast or to have Donald Trump on my podcast. Shouldn't I be able to have anyone I want on my podcast?

Starting point is 00:17:35 Is it conceivable that my podcast could grow so big or that my, you know, that any other platform, you know, I've considered creating a social media platform, right? If that could grow so big that suddenly the government would have an interest in forcing me to have people on it who, for whatever reason, I object to having it on it. I mean, I, so this is some, this is a way in which I'm, I'm more extreme than most people on the left.

Starting point is 00:18:02 Like, I do think at this point in history, you should be able to have a social media platform and exclude any specific group you want and just say that's the way we do it, right? And if you don't like it, boycott us. Right. So, like, I wouldn't have said this in 1964 when we're having to pass a Civil Rights Act. But at this point, I think you should have the right to be an asshole who destroys your reputation. and suffers the penalties in, you know, in the marketplace of ideas, right? So I think if you want to just have a social media network for beautiful people, right,

Starting point is 00:18:39 or people who are, you know, guys who are over six feet two and blonde hair and blue eyes, right, you know, I can't get on. You should feel free to, you know, raise money for that enterprise, launch it, and I'll be, you know, I'll laugh when it fails, right? So, like, that's, now under some construe, that kind of thing, you know, is or should be illegal, you know, if you're just a normal person on the left. But I don't think, I think at this moment in history, it shouldn't be. But in any case, I just, when I look at Twitter, I see a company that has a term, has terms of service, which people like Alex Jones and Trump clearly violated.

Starting point is 00:19:19 I mean, whether they, in fact, violated this terms of service as written. I think they violated any coherent terms of service that Twitter should have had. You shouldn't knowingly be able to turn your mob on a private citizen and ruin their lives through doxing, which is what Jones and Trump were doing again and again and again to people. Every time, I mean, Jones was doing it with the Sandy Hook parents, right? You literally have... But Sam, you're conflating two very different people.

Starting point is 00:19:51 I mean, Alex Jones does not belong in this conversation. I'm not interested in Alex Jones right now. I would dispute that. I think Trump is essentially, we got Alex Jones as president of the United States. I don't think they're very different people. I think it's the same phenomenon in my world. Because just the level of misinformation,

Starting point is 00:20:08 disinformation, lying, the charlatanism, the conscious fraudulence of everything at scale and the targeting of individuals with known consequences. Like Trump, every time Trump singles out a specific, citizen and says, look at this jackass who's, you know, trying to, you know, whatever the claim would be, that is a human sacrifice.

Starting point is 00:20:36 We know that person's life is just never the same again because he's turned tens of millions of morons on that person and, you know, vicious morons on that. I mean, like, that's the core of the Trump phenomenon is now and has been. for many years. I mean, really since the beginning, certainly since he became the frontrunner and certainly since he became elected in 2016, it's a personality cult. I mean, it has all the dynamics of a personality cult.

Starting point is 00:21:09 These are not reasoning, yes, there are some, there are a few calculated people like Peter Thiel on the margins who have some story as to why they would back him, right? But the core of the cult, you know, which is all nested with QAnon and, and conspiracy thinking and the big lie and, you know, it's like Trump can do no wrong, right? He's, that is so, it's, I mean, as a Venn diagram, it's just, it overlaps 80% with the Alex Jones phenomenon. So I just, I see them as the same problem.

Starting point is 00:21:44 I see these are, these are, you know, if they're not actually clinically, you know, diagnosable as psychopaths, they're the next best thing. These are people who are so malignantly selfish and so careless with respect to the consequences of their actions in the lives of others that if you are, if you own a platform or you're overseeing a public company that owns a platform, why should the government force you to keep these people on? You should be free to say, sorry, you're not on my watch. Are you going to be having these consequences? And with Trump, it was after January 6th, that was just, I mean, that's when it happened. I thought it happened a year too late. But, I mean, January 6th finally convinced Dorsey he should kick Trump off.

Starting point is 00:22:38 And that, I mean, if that's not going to convince you that, you know, we have, we had a, at that point, we had a sitting president who for months and months and months, I mean, at least six or eight months, you know, certainly months prior. to the November election, would not commit to a peaceful transfer of power. And then he did, you know, certainly something, whether it was everything in his power or just a lot, he managed to see that we did not have

Starting point is 00:23:07 a peaceful transfer of power, right? And then, you know, so who's, what's the mob going to do on January 7th and 8th and 9th, you know, if you just leave Trump on the platform? I thought, I mean, I just thought it was a, a very simple decision to kick him off. And it's totally analogous to the Alex Jones decision. I mean, Alex Jones is just less consequential,

Starting point is 00:23:30 but there are Sandy Hook parents who have had to move 10 times since their kids were murdered. That's all on Alex Jones, right? And it's all conscious. It's all he could see the consequences of his actions in real time. It's not like he woke up after, you know, five years and thought,

Starting point is 00:23:49 Oh my God, I can't believe that, you know, it was totally inadvertent. I released a podcast and, you know, then it had this totally unforeseeable consequence in the lives of these grieving parents. No, no. He monetized their misery with just a blizzard of lies. Alex Jones is, for me, a different case, but I hear what you say. I mean, Trump is just... I hear what you say. In your mind, they're similar.

Starting point is 00:24:16 He got the reputation washing of having successfully become president. you know, he's Alex Jones. Okay. Francis, before you move us into COVID, let me try from a different angle, Sam, because I want to explore this intellectual point, right? Do you really want to live in a country where you have a digital public square,

Starting point is 00:24:34 which in my opinion, Twitter is? We can disagree about that if you want, but that's my opinion. It's a digital public square, and you have a company that has clearly one-sided enforcement. I hear what you're saying about delegitimizing the electoral process

Starting point is 00:24:49 that Trump did. And I was concerned about that. I think you can't question the system in that way. But when you see that he gets banned and then a story about Hunter Biden gets banned, that under the guise of it being Russian disinformation, we later learn it wasn't Russian disinformation, that to a lot of people seems like,

Starting point is 00:25:09 you know, I said when we were talking to Joe Rogan, it's putting your hand on the scales in favor of one side. In the digital public square, you add that to the banning of Trump. and lots of other people being banned from one side predominantly. Right. Is that the world you want to live in where one team gets to just ban people

Starting point is 00:25:29 that disagrees with off the platform? It gets to pretend that things that are true are not true. It gets to shut down the sharing of information with people who want to make their own democratic choice? Well, it's a hard question, and there are pieces of the question that are individually hard. It's like the Hunter Biden laptop story is something that I still don't have a full opinion about.

Starting point is 00:25:55 I actually don't know what we should have done about that. So I see the reason, I see both sides of it. I can argue either side of it. So let's leave that piece aside. The bias on the platform, so either Twitter is a company that can do what it wants, right? It can have its own terms of service. It can change its policies. it can change, you know, it can decide, you know, it can have a point of view or not, right?

Starting point is 00:26:22 Or we have to seize it as some kind of, you know, crucial piece of public infrastructure that has to function by different terms. Do you not think that it is a crucial piece of public infrastructure? I think people who are addicted to Twitter feel it is. Most, you know, and I think it's, you know, I don't think it should, should be. and it's odd to say that it's just so, first of all, it's just, I mean, Facebook is much, much bigger, right? It's just that we have a lot of smart people, journalists, brands, political people, focused, concentrated on Twitter. So Twitter moves the conversation more than Facebook does, but it's, it's, a scale of it is much smaller.

Starting point is 00:27:07 I don't know. I just feel like people can start their own companies, which they have, right? They can start competitors at Twitter. There are many people who, you know, Twitter is not, it's still a failing business, right? It's like it's not, it doesn't work, really. I mean, Facebook is a much better business. There's nothing stopping Facebook from becoming stickier for intellectuals and journalists and attracting more of the conversation over there.

Starting point is 00:27:40 I don't know, it's just, it's an extreme move to say you, you, you can't, you can't be biased, right? Like, who's, who's going to say that? But behind the saying of that is a law in the end, and therefore it's a gun. Therefore, it's jail time for the person who wants to keep breaking the law. Right?

Starting point is 00:28:03 So, like, just imagine, imagine Twitter, the Twitter board. It's like, everyone gets what they want, you know, everyone who's of this opinion, gets what they want. You just, we're going to come in and enforce something like, a zero-bias state in Twitter in so far as that's possible.

Starting point is 00:28:22 And if the employees and the board just say, you know, sorry, we have a point of view. We want to have, we don't like these people and we like these people. What, now you just break up the company? You just say, you know, I mean, I thought, what I thought it should have happened

Starting point is 00:28:39 with Twitter is I thought Jack Dorsey should have deleted it. I mean, I literally thought he should have got the Nobel Peace Prize. Had he just, at a certain point, deleted it, right? But, yeah, I don't, so in any case, should there, should they be forced to be impartial? I'm very skeptical of that.

Starting point is 00:29:01 Should they be cajoled by unhappy people like yourselves or like, you know, the, you know, the Trump fans to, to behave better? I'm just putting an accounts or argument to them. I mean, I think, so, yes, I think if they were going to be, the first thing to admit is it may be impossible to do this impeccably, right? It's like until we have perfect artificial intelligence, it's just going to be impossible

Starting point is 00:29:29 to be truly consistent with your terms of service because you're always going to be able to find the example of the thing that was not appropriately moderated. Yes, but we all know that if that laptop was Donald Trump's Jr., this would be treated.

Starting point is 00:29:46 That's all I'm asking about. Oh, yeah. So let's take that piece. I think it was totally appropriate to view Trump in a, to be existing in a domain that was orthogonal to partisan politics. My criticism of Trump is totally nonpartisan, right? There is absolutely nothing I say about Trump that I can say about any other Republican, right? And I think Liz Cheney is a total hero.

Starting point is 00:30:20 Right. So, so, and I don't agree with her politics at all, right? Like, Liz Cheney is a religious maniac by my lights, right? And in, in that sense, kind of a terrifying political figure, like, like that, like the, the old me who, you know, was just worried about the Christian theocracy in the United States would have just revolted at everything she would attempt to implement as a politician. but at this moment, she's, you know, she has no bigger fan than me because of how she's dealing with the Trump phenomenon. The Trump phenomenon is not a matter of political partisanship. He is just a sui generis phenomenon.

Starting point is 00:31:05 And it's, again, it's analogous to having elected Alex Jones president of the United States. It's a, it's not a matter of his part, like, I probably agree with. half of his policies or more than half of his policies. It's not a matter of policy. It's a matter of having someone who's totally unfit to have power be given more power than any person in a generation. And he's unfit for in every possible way. It's like it's not, it's not that he's just got a few screws loose. Like every screw is loose. Every screw that you would

Starting point is 00:31:40 want totally cranked down is loose or non-existent in him. And so, yeah, so it's, but that's my argument. So my argument is that it was appropriate for Twitter and the heads of big tech and the heads of journalistic organizations to feel that they were in the presence of something like a once in a lifetime moral emergency, right? Whereas this is not the same thing as not liking George Bush, you know, or not liking John McCain or not liking Mitt Romney. for their politics. This was, here's a guy who is capable of anything, right? He's not ideological,

Starting point is 00:32:25 but he's, again, he's a black hole of selfishness, right? He's, he's just, and so there's no telling what he's going to do. Um,

Starting point is 00:32:34 and we cannot afford to have four more years with this guy, right? And, and so, um, so what, what should, well-intentioned people do who have a lot of power in these various ways

Starting point is 00:32:49 you know you're running the New York Times you're running CNN you're running Twitter what should they conspire to do admit that it's their fault admit that Trump is their fault and like on someone from the left absolutely that that's well no that that's the perverse thing it's totally their fault

Starting point is 00:33:05 he'd be CNN gave us Trump right without no before CNN gave us Trump Mark Burnett gave us Trump I mean there's one person who could have not done what he did and could have closed the door to this whole phenomenon. It was Mark Burnett. But, yeah, no, by giving him the attention,

Starting point is 00:33:28 but he was great ratings for the whole run-up to the 2016 election. Oh, yeah, no, no one has clean hands here. But at the 11th hour, when it's when who knows how this election is going to go, who knows what the capacity for, you know, disinformation at the last minute to tip the balance is, then what do you do with the Hunter Biden laptop story when we already know, we know how this played out in 2016

Starting point is 00:34:02 with the Hillary Clinton email, you know, press conference, where Comey and an abundance of scrupulosity felt like he had to come before the cameras, I think 10 days out from the election, and say, you know, we're going to open up this investigation again because we've got Anthony Wiener's laptop. We could see, I mean, again, her failure to become president was overdetermined. She was an appallingly bad candidate.

Starting point is 00:34:30 But in terms of just tracking the poll numbers, you could, like, that was the killing blow to her candidacy, right? That final moment. And this was a highly analogous situation. This was, we're going to open up this laptop from hell, and the news cycle for who knows how long is going to be just conceivably just a nuclear bomb of an October surprise, and we're going to get four more years of Trump

Starting point is 00:35:01 if we actually give this a fair hearing. But Sam. But you can't do that, Sam, surely. You've got to realize that you've got to be fair. And the thing that I want to talk... We're all equal before the law. Yeah. Aren't we?

Starting point is 00:35:13 This isn't the law. I know it's not the law. But if you accept my supposition that this is the public square, then it is the law. If it is the public square, then it is law. Now, you're arguing it's not the public square, which is fair enough. Yeah. Right? That's fine.

Starting point is 00:35:28 Why don't we move on? Because I think we've done enough. Yeah. He's sucked up a lot of it. As he always does. No, but I'll just say, just finally, I do, again, it's like a coin toss for me, the Hunter Biden laptop thing. because I do understand how corrosive it is for an institution like the New York Times

Starting point is 00:35:51 to show obvious bias and inconsistency and dishonesty in how they... It's like they couldn't even frame it honestly. It's not like... It's not like... The way I would frame it is... Listen, I don't care what's in Hunter Biden's... I mean, Hunter Biden, at that point,

Starting point is 00:36:10 Hunter Biden literally could have had... had the corpses of children in his basement, I would not have cared, right? It's like there's nothing. First of all, it's Hunter Biden, right? It's not Joe Biden. But even if Joe, like, whatever scope of Joe Biden's corruption is, like, if we could just go down that rabbit hole endlessly and understand that he's getting kickbacks from Hunter and Biden's deals in Ukraine or wherever else, right, or China, it is infinitesimal.

Starting point is 00:36:41 compared to the corruption we know Trump is involved in. It's like it's like a firefly to the sun, right? I mean, like, there's just, it doesn't even, it doesn't even stack up against Trump University, right? Trump University as a story is worse than anything that could be in Hunter Biden's laptop, in my view, right? Now that's not, that doesn't answer the people who say, it's still completely unfair to not have looked at the laptop in a timely way

Starting point is 00:37:10 and to have shut down the New York Post's Twitter account. Like that's just a conspiracy, that's a left-wing conspiracy to deny the presidency to Donald Trump. Absolutely it was. Absolutely. Right. But I think it was warranted, right?

Starting point is 00:37:24 And again, it's a coin toss as to whether or not Sam, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I was the one that said we should move on, but you've just said something. I really struggled with that, which is you support. The kids in the basement? No, no.

Starting point is 00:37:37 Fuck the kids in the basement. I'm interested in democracy. You're saying you are content with a left-wing conspiracy to prevent somebody being democratically re-elected as president. Well, no, I'm content. But the thing is it's just not left-wing, right? So Liz Cheney is not left-wing, right? Liz Cheney is doing everything in her power. You're content with a conspiracy to prevent somebody being democratically.

Starting point is 00:37:58 No, but there's nothing. Conspiracy, it's not, it was a conspiracy out in the open. It doesn't matter if it was, it doesn't matter what part's conspiracy, what parts out in the open. I mean, I think it's like, if people get together and talk about what should we do about this phenomenon, you know, if it's like, if there was an asteroid hurtling toward Earth and we got in a room together with all of our friends and had a conversation about what we could do to deflect its course, right? Is that a conspiracy? You know, like some of that conversation would be in public, some of it would be in private. We have a massive problem. We have an existential threat, right? Politically speaking, I consider Trump and. existential threat to our democracy. Right now, he's not going to destroy the world, very likely. If you destroyed democracy in the process of protecting democracy.

Starting point is 00:38:46 But that doesn't destroy it. No, our, I'm not, what I'm not suggesting, at no point was I suggesting we should stuff ballots or actually break the machinery of democracy. But the political opinion is already being just completely, inundated with misinformation, bias takes, half-truths, and outright lies, right? Or just the amplification of bad or misleading information based on, you know, the algorithm, right?

Starting point is 00:39:22 So it's like it's already just an abattoir of opinion, right? And now the question is, you know, what can you do with your own biases and your own to get the outcome you think is actually better, not just for yourself personally, but for the world, right? So, like, I have, like, it is, I'm completely unconflicted in, in the claim that a, that a first Trump term was bad, and a second Trump term would be bad.

Starting point is 00:39:57 And it literally doesn't matter what was, what else was on the menu. Like, literally, pick a, pick a random American better than Trump in the Oval Office. Like the likelihood that you're going to get someone who's worse than Trump, given what I consider that is bad about Trump, is, I mean, it's on the order of one in a million, right?

Starting point is 00:40:21 Like, you're just not going to get, you're not going to get worse than Trump, if you pick it random. And, you know, Hillary Clinton, for all of her flaws, was not worse than Trump. Joe Biden, for us. Joe Biden, we could have known Joe Biden was going to just be comatose in office.

Starting point is 00:40:36 Not worse than Trump, right? Kamala Harris, not worth it. And again, it's not just a marginal call. It's just these are people who are normal politicians who are so much more constrained by predictable machinery, right? There's, like, there's such less of an opportunity there to destroy institutions that we have to rely on, right? with any of those people in charge,

Starting point is 00:41:06 including a random person in charge, a random person who's going to be terrified at the responsibility of the office and default to expert opinion, you know, across the board. No, Trump is, again,

Starting point is 00:41:20 Trump is an Alex Jones level figure for me. Okay. And so, you know, it's an allegation, like a smaller problem is to just for some billionaire to buy the New York Times and give it to Alex Jones to run, right? That would be an enormous,

Starting point is 00:41:32 it would be a catastrophic loss. and mistake, but that's a smaller problem than getting Trump reelected. The last question I'm going to ask, which actually isn't really about Trump, is I think, could you agree that with Trump, the reason he is created is because he's a symptom of the system

Starting point is 00:41:51 whereby people, ordinary people, feel that their voices aren't being heard. Yeah. They realize that, you know, Washington is a machine that doesn't particularly care about them. they were betrayed time after time, many times by the Democrats, many times by the Democrats who said that they were representing ordinary working people like the Labour Party were in my country.

Starting point is 00:42:12 And they felt that these politicians didn't care. So why not vote for Trump? What else have you got to lose? Yeah. Oh, yeah. No, I think that explains most of his support and certainly his success. Yeah. But I think we should be honest about how,

Starting point is 00:42:30 well, both uninformed and nihilistic by turns that attitude is, right? It's just like it's not, I mean, that is like the clearest eruption of thanatos, you know, in our lifetime, right? It's just like, let's just burn it all down on some level. Like this guy's our wrecking ball. We hate the elites. We hate the so-called experts. Go fuck yourselves. we're just going to enjoy just watching this thing, you know, swing through everything you care about. And, you know, just the sounds of explosions are going to just give us pleasure, right? Like that's where we are with tens of millions of people in this country. That is a very scary basis from which to try to cooperate.

Starting point is 00:43:33 scale and and produce political outcomes that are actually going to be good, right? And again, the extremes amplify each other, right? So you've got Trumpism and there was no greater goad to wokeism than Trumpism, right? And so, like, and, you know, I put myself, you know, in second place to nobody, you know, although I probably spent a little bit less time on it than some people we could name. in the revulsion, I feel, to the extreme left, you know, activism, right? I mean, it's just, it's as dishonest as it can possibly be. And it's, and its dishonesty is harder to parse for smart people.

Starting point is 00:44:18 Smart ethical people find what's happening on the left much more confusing than what's happening on the right. So it's like, so people ask me, like, and so, and I spend much more time focused on the left than I, than I do on Trump or on the right. Because... Not in this interview, Sam. That's awful. You go to me. But look, revulsion.

Starting point is 00:44:36 You've got the full dose of my Trump. Revolition is a strong word. Why do... And I feel exactly the same thing. And you know why. We talked about my book before I come from a society that's seen some of these ideas being implemented. Why do you feel revulsion,

Starting point is 00:44:51 a very, very strong emotion about this ideology? Well, because it's... I mean, one, it is destroying, institutions that I actually care about. Right. So, like, you know, white supremacy and far-right lunacy is not affecting institutions that matter, you know, by my lights, right? You know, you could argue it affected the, you know, the White House and the U.S. government to some degree at the margins.

Starting point is 00:45:23 I mean, I think allegations of Trump's racism or his alignment with the far right and white supremacist, I think that's been massively exaggerated by the left. And, you know, most of the claims to his right, I actually have no doubt that he's actually racist, but most of the public claims to his racism, I think are obviously false and, you know, inconsistent. And so it's, I mean, I think you have to be intellectually honest, even as you derive these dangerous people and extremes.

Starting point is 00:45:57 So the left has, you know, as I'm sure you've pointed out many times on your show. I mean, it has captured institutions. It has captured academia. It's captured journalism. It's captured science to an amazing degree. It's captured Hollywood. It's, and for reasons that are understandable,

Starting point is 00:46:20 because, you know, it is hard to figure out what's wrong with Black Lives Matter. As a movement, as a, it's like it's, you look at it, you know, it's almost perfectly engineered to just get. you know, get past the, the, the, the blood brain barrier and just attached to all the right ethical receptor sites, right? So, like, it's just, this is, this is, of course I care about, you know, of course, racism is, is disgusting. I would, the last thing I would want to be as a racist.

Starting point is 00:46:55 Of course, I acknowledge the, the, the legacy of slavery and just how hard fought all of our civil rights gains have been in the United States. of course I don't want members of minority groups feeling victimized, you know, much less being victimized. You know, I want fair hiring practices. Just check all the boxes

Starting point is 00:47:14 on, you know, to have a good liberal conscience, right? If you're that sort of person and you're confronted by Black Lives Matter as a social phenomenon and the protests over George Floyd and all of that,

Starting point is 00:47:30 it is very hard to see that you're in the presence of a completely dishonest moral panic, right? Because there's so many points of contact with real grievance or potential points of contact with real grievance. And so, yeah, it's harder to parse, therefore more interesting, and is also more consequential in my world because it's vitiating the New York Times

Starting point is 00:47:57 and Princeton University and, you know, science magazine. And so like it's just, it's a full-on moral panic out there. And what's more, you have this layer of smart people who think all of that's being exaggerated, right? It's not really happening. It's just a few college campuses. It's a few kids, you know, on a few college campuses. It's just like, you know, 18 people at Yale, you know, lamb-based in Nicholas Christakis. And everyone else is really just a bystander to this.

Starting point is 00:48:31 and it's all being exaggerated. The kernel of truth there is it really is, it's still a minority of people who actually believe this stuff, but you only need something like 5 or 8% of really energized activist minority to completely co-opt a conversation, and that's what has been accomplished. But it's not just they're a minority, they're an exceptionally powerful minority, Sam.

Starting point is 00:48:57 You know, they're the ones who dictate culture. They're the ones who set the time. They're the ones who, you know, who edit and create newspapers. 100%. So that's the real problem, isn't it? But the question that I want to ask you is, where do you think this is going to go? Where do you think this is going to end up? Because he's more positive about it, and I'm a rabid pessimist.

Starting point is 00:49:18 Right. Where do you think this is going to go? Well, I think if I had to bet, I think the vapors of wokeism will magically dissipate. at a certain point. I think it's just whether we're going to have one example of hypocrisy or, you know, just one own goal that is so spectacular

Starting point is 00:49:43 that everyone will just all of a sudden pretend that they were never woke, you know, like whether it's going to be a salient moment where you can point to in your timeline or it's just going to be this magical dissipation of, you know, where people start making much more sense on these topics. if I had to bet, I would think that's going to happen.

Starting point is 00:50:04 And I don't think it's good. And I think it's going to happen in some short order. I don't think we're going to be having this conversation in five years. I would be very surprised if we're having this conversation in five years. Now, you know, count me, I guess as an optimist on that front. And I certainly could be wrong. But I would be surprised. I mean, the one caveat I would put there as if we get four,

Starting point is 00:50:30 four more years of Trump, then that goes completely out the window. I mean, I think, or if we get four more years of Trump or a Trump-like phenomenon that's just as provocative to the left, then that calculation changes. But if we got a normal presidency in 2024, you know, Democrat or Republican, I think the woke thing has just become so unpragmatic. And, yeah, I just don't see how people don't begin aging out of it in some short order. I mean, it's somewhat analogous to the, it's a much bigger phenomenon, but it is analogous to the child sexual abuse, satanic panic thing we had.

Starting point is 00:51:20 I don't know if you guys had it in England. No, we just had the Catholic Church. Yeah, which is the true, yeah, which is the true version of many of these concerns. But, yeah, I mean, in the States, I don't know if you know this story that the journalist Lawrence Wright told on my podcast, but he wrote a book on this. And when he was doing the New Yorker article that became a book, he was just researching the whole satanic panic phenomenon.

Starting point is 00:51:50 And this is in the 80s in the States. And so for those who are too young to remember this, I mean, the allegation was that, you know, satanic cults had infiltrated preschools, and they just, in a very, you know, conspiratorial way had decided to just get access to kids so that they could perform human sacrifices

Starting point is 00:52:11 and ritual abuse. And this was now happening at scale in American society. And, you know, we had this massive... And it was, you know, who knows what was... Truly at the bottom of it. And, you know, whether it's, you know, certain rock lyrics were getting into the heads of teenagers

Starting point is 00:52:29 and spawning a... a generation of devil worshippers, who could tell, but we clearly have a problem on our hands. And so Lawrence Wright, in kind of getting on boarded to this phenomenon, went to a seminar run by law enforcement. I'm not sure if it was in, it might have been in Texas, where he's lived for many years. So this is, you know, a seminar for, you know, journalists run by law enforcement.

Starting point is 00:52:58 and he remembers that moment where the sheriff or some Leo said to the group, last year, 50,000 children were murdered in ritual sacrifices by satanic cults in this country. This is a cop saying this. And it took Lawrence, you know, five seconds to understand that there's a, been no year in American history where there have been 50,000 murders of any kind, right? And here we have a cop saying that 50,000 kids have been killed. There's 50,000 missing and murdered kids, right? So what explains that level of confusion and derangement, right?

Starting point is 00:53:48 So we're in a moment like that. And here's the question we were going to ask you about that. And I'm really glad you phrased it in that way, Sam, because I was a big fan of the new atheist movement. Francis and I are none of the three of us are religious. I was a big admirer. I still am a big admirer of yours. Richard Dawkins. I read many of his books.

Starting point is 00:54:11 However, is it possible, just is it possible that people like us who think in the way that we do have forgotten that thing? I think it was it Chesterton who said this, that when you stop believing God, you don't believe in nothing, you believe in anything? Right. Is it possible that this new religion, and I certainly see wokeness as a religion, is a product of a society that has let go of that a religion that are used to follow? Well, I think it's, I mean, the short answer is probably not because I think many of the woke are, you know, religious by my lights. I mean, they would certainly claim to be religious. It's not like you have a, I don't know if polling research exists on this. It would be interesting to run these polls. But yes, yes. Loss of faith has been kind of ramping up in America, really in all secular democracies. But it's still not, you know, you don't have a minority of people, you don't have a majority of people identified as atheists, right?

Starting point is 00:55:16 And the minority that I identify with atheists is still, it's still in a single digits, because atheism as a concept has got bad, you know, PR associated with it. you have something like 20 to 25% of the so-called nuns who are, again, these are not people who identify as atheists, but these are people who would say they're not identified with any specific church. But you still have most people who are, you know, at least nominally Christian and pretend to care about being Christian in the U.S. at this moment. And you have something like fully half who are, you know, really will check many or most, you know, all the boxes to, to

Starting point is 00:55:55 attest to their belief. I mean, it's more than how, you know, it's, if you ask, if you, and again, a lot of these people are on the Christian right, but many of them are, are woke or woke adjacent, you know, it's like I just was on Van Jones's podcast, right? Now, he's not, I mean, he's much woker than any of us. I think he's probably said some rational, pragmatic things. We didn't actually talk about this topic. He has, I remember seeing some of that.

Starting point is 00:56:29 He's kind of taken the Obama line of like, like, you're saying, listen, kids, like, this is not, you know, they're bigger problems than pronouns or whatever. I don't know how he touched it. But still, he's like, if he's someone who's coverage of Black Lives Matter, I would have, you know, many critical things to say about it. And again, the topic didn't come up. But he's someone who, if you ask him,

Starting point is 00:56:59 do you think Jesus will be returning to Earth to raise the living and the dead? I am pretty sure he would say yes. Right. And you'd be surprised at the number of, the percentage of sober, non-biblical thumping people would say yes to that question. I mean, I've been amazed at the people who I would have bet a lot of money would be skeptical of that piece.

Starting point is 00:57:28 They might be Christian. They might be like, listen, I love the Bible. It gives me a great moral framework. He gives my kids a great moral framework. This is the tradition I'm identified with. This is all super important to me. But that's kind of as far as it goes, right? like I'm not going to make magical claims about flying saviors who are literally going to come down from where is heaven exactly,

Starting point is 00:57:55 given that we have, you know, multiple telescopes up there, you know, beaming back, you know, tens of billions of years worth of information. I'm amazed at the number of people who will bite the bullet on the core doctrine and say, yeah, I think Jesus is going to come back and raise. the dead. But Sam, surely you have to agree in a society which is becoming ever more atomized. Let me just close a loop on it. So go for it. Many of these people are awoke, right? So you can't say, you can't, the punchline can't be, well, they lost their religion and now

Starting point is 00:58:32 they're, they have a vacuum of ethical and existential vacuum that they're filling with wokeness. Now there's, I would grant you that it's, and don't lose your point, I would grant you that it's drawing a lot of... quasi-spiritual, quasi-religious energy from the fact that most people in our society, even if they're nominally religious,

Starting point is 00:59:02 really are struggling to find meaning in their day-to-day. When you look at just the kind of the hour-by-hour increments at which life is doled out to us, like you get up and, you know, you're just, you're cast out of, you know, deep sleep or, you know, the phantasmagoria of dreams, you know, when the alarm goes off in the morning and how do you feel about your life and what is going to give you moral urgency and

Starting point is 00:59:34 meaning? A lot of, millions and millions of people found it at specific moments in our, you know, recent history. Like, you know, the George Floyd killing was certainly one of the those moments where it's like, okay, this is enough is enough. Like, this is my religion, right? And that's, it's understandable. And it is, yes, it does have a religious dynamic. And there's a religious dynamic. I mean, to call it religious is to just basically say,

Starting point is 01:00:11 it's actually an invidious statement about religion. It's basically saying, like, all the things I don't like about religion is tribalism. dogmatism, it's immunity to good arguments and good evidence, right? The fact that it just, it can't be reasoned with, really, because it's just chucked reason out the door, you know, initially. And what it's brought back in the name of reason is functioning under the, the, the sort of the new physics of just casuistry. Like, like, we already know that God exists and we know that the Bible is perfect, or we know that Quran is perfect. And so within that frame, now we're going to get really reasonable, like, you know, St. Thomas Aquinas, or, you know,

Starting point is 01:00:48 St. Augustine. That's all the stuff about religion that I find so obviously wrong, and it's so easy to see once you're not indoctrinated into that religion. A lot of that explains what is happening politically on the far left and the far right at the moment. Or the far right being Trumpistan. Right.

Starting point is 01:01:15 So Sam, but you, I think all of us have got to admit that in a society we're becoming ever more atomized, where people are becoming more isolated. Religion, organized religion, it was a bond. It was a community. People could go, they could meet other people, they could feel connected. And so when people are disconnected, they're going to look for ways to connect with someone else.

Starting point is 01:01:39 And what better way to do that was then with, you know, I support this political movement, BLM, or, you know, you share the same immutable characteristics. says me, you know, I'm gay or I'm black or et cetera, et cetera, because we're so desperate, because we're literally programmed to form communities that we're going to have this ideology, which is going to enable us to create a community. Yeah, and on the woke side, it has this, I mean, it has a precursor in Christianity,

Starting point is 01:02:09 but it's somehow in a purer form now. It has inverted the value-strived, is such that, you know, the lower status you are, the higher status you come out, you know, once the calculation has been done. It's like, you know, Dungeons and Dragons with sort of the new dice where it's like the least power points you have, you know, you know, the more you find yourself winning.

Starting point is 01:02:36 And so the victimology of it is, you know, and the meek shall inherit the earth. I mean, it's really, it is that ethos implemented in a very weird, way and sort of gamified somehow in all of the intersectionality details of it. Yeah, I mean, it's, there's no question people draw a tremendous amount of energy and, you know, I hesitate to say meaning. I mean, there's meaning and scare quotes from this. And it's all, I mean, I guess, so, I mean, to steal man, all of it, you know, briefly, it is, again, it's, especially on

Starting point is 01:03:19 the left, it's genuinely confusing, right? Like the, the mad work that the tiny pieces of misinformation or just fraudulent assumptions is doing is, it's really impossible to exaggerate. I mean, so if you ask most people who, like most people who saw the George Floyd moment, I mean, it's, again, I don't know, we've yet to totally understand what happened there because, like, Like, who knows? Just let's bracket that. Because I don't, we still don't know who Derek Chauvin really is and why he did what he did. Right.

Starting point is 01:04:00 So like, either it was a racist murder or it was a, you know, his brain malfunctioned or like, I just, I don't, I honestly, I look at that video. I don't know what I'm looking at there. It's just, it's apart from the horrible killing of a person who certainly did not need to be killed in that situation. But you ask most people who. Most people who saw that, the vast majority of people who saw that, certainly left of center, would bet their lives, bet the lives of their children, that what they saw there was a racist lynching.

Starting point is 01:04:37 What we have is a white man, killing a black man because of racism, because that wouldn't have happened to a white man. It wouldn't have been perpetrated by a black man. Race is 100% of the explan. variable there. And not only was that as unambiguously evil and sadistic and racist as it seemed, that happens thousands of times a year in America. Like you ask people to estimate,

Starting point is 01:05:12 how many black people do you think get murdered by white racist cops in America every year? They imagine, we're talking thousands, right? So if you believe that, right, then what would you do? You know, wouldn't you, you know, wouldn't you to take to the streets when everyone says we're going to, you know, we're protesting on Tuesday? Of course, right. So it's like, so you don't have to add too many pieces of, you know, distorting, you know, pseudofacts to get, to get people who I otherwise totally understand to, to mouth, you know, all the predictable pieties on this topic. But the truth is, all of that is wrong, right?

Starting point is 01:05:59 Like, you know, you can count on two hands the number of unarmed black men who get killed every year by cops. And you can count more white people who get killed every year by cops, right? Under identical circumstances, again, I've talked about this on my podcast, so we need not go there. those who are interested could look at the episode. Can we pull back from the brink? It was beautifully done.

Starting point is 01:06:24 Like two hours I talk about this. It was exactly what needed to be said in that moment. I really congratulate you on that. I invite people to go and find that. Really very good. Yeah. So we can leave that aside. But the misinformation or the faulty assumptions

Starting point is 01:06:38 occur at the highest level, right? It's like this is not, you know, I mean, does, I guess there are some people who actually know what is real here and are just cynically manipulating the politics. But it's hard for me to believe that someone like Kamala Harris doesn't actually know the numbers, right? But it's not in her political interests or in what she conceives of as her political interest

Starting point is 01:07:03 to act like she knows the numbers, right? But anyway, so it's not... I mean, the charitable view is there are very few people who are... consciously lying or seeking to do things that they know or wrong. I mean, just conscious evil is a rare thing. Yes. Mostly useful, it is what I talk about in my book.

Starting point is 01:07:36 Yeah, I agree with you. Sam, listen, you've been very generous through the time. There's about 50 other questions we want to ask you. We're not going to get a chance to. So we'll pick out from our, we do a couple of questions for our supporters. So I'll make sure to pick out a COVID question. because that came up a lot. Before we ask you the final question,

Starting point is 01:07:54 if you don't mind a few more minutes. Go for it. Well, Francis and I both wanted actually to ask you, we've talked about these very divisive things and people will have a different opinion about Trump and COVID and Brexit and all of this stuff, whatever you want to. But one thing that it strikes me is

Starting point is 01:08:09 you're one of the few people that we've met who's content, who's happy. I can tell. Right. how does how if people are watching this and they would like to be happy in spite of all the terrible things that they think about

Starting point is 01:08:25 they see happening on Twitter it strikes me Francis uses your app every morning how do you how does one in the modern world get closer to that point where whatever is happening

Starting point is 01:08:40 out, whatever storms are out there you are calm and peaceful inside Well, first, let me say I'm certainly not always calm and peaceful, but the half-life... Your voice is, though. Your voice is great.

Starting point is 01:08:54 Yeah, yeah. But the truth is, so the backstory here is that, you know, in my early 20s, I got really into meditation, and I mean, the first psychedelics just showed me that it was possible to have a very different experience of the world. And that there was a landscape of mind

Starting point is 01:09:13 that could be explored based on just how you paid attention to experience, right? So prior to psychedelics, I would have really just been kind of waiting for the third-person brain-based discussion to deliver all the right answers about what the human mind is. And it was pretty well-established

Starting point is 01:09:33 and still is thought to be well-established in Western science, psychological science, cognitive science, and even Western philosophy, that introspection was a dead end. I mean, they tried to get it off the ground somewhere around 120 years ago, and it just, you know, you come up short almost immediately. I mean, the truth is you can't, you close your eyes and you look inside, and you can't even tell that you have a brain, right,

Starting point is 01:09:58 much less that the brain is doing all of these complex things that is actually delivering your experience of the world. So, and, I mean, this is just one curious asymmetry of, you know, cultural wisdom in the East, you know, for all the fame, of what didn't happen civilizationally in Eastern culture, and there's a lot to be said about that, they didn't lose this strand of wisdom, which is there actually is something to be discovered

Starting point is 01:10:30 in a first-person way about the nature of your own mind that is liberating, right? You suffer by a certain machinery, a certain dynamics, which could be either completely, inscrutable to you or can become more and more transparent and in its transparency, less and less operative on a, you know, a moment-by-moment basis. And so, I mean, take any of the topics we've talked about. So we've talked about me getting on Twitter and getting really spun up over, you know,

Starting point is 01:11:04 somebody saying something about me or about something else that I care about. You know, I've talked about, you know, anyone who thinks I have Trump derangement syndrome is going look at me and say, well, why are you talking to this guy about meditation? This guy's so worked up over Trump. You know, whatever. It's like, this is a, you know, it's a performative contradiction, right? That's actually to misunderstand my, you know, emotional relationship to the phenomenon of Trump, right?

Starting point is 01:11:32 Like, I can say everything I say about and think about Trump without spending much time feeling contracted around Trump. But it's not to say, that's not to say no time, but it's just much less time than I otherwise would if I didn't know how to, you know, quote, meditate. Now, the word meditation can mean many different things to people. But what I think it should mean is a, just a simple recognition of what consciousness is like

Starting point is 01:12:09 prior to entanglement with thought. So we're all, three of us are sitting here and we're having an experience of the world that's happening in, you know, five sensory channels, but there's this, there's this other mode or this other, you know, aspect to our condition, which is our thinking about what we directly experience through our senses, right?

Starting point is 01:12:35 And for most people, most of the time, the thoughts are incessant and uninspected, right? And their arising is unnoticed, right? So you're just, it just feels like you, right? So you'll say something that I disagree with. And there's a voice in me which says, what's he talking about? Or like, what does that mean?

Starting point is 01:12:57 Or like, what I go like, but what he do? But you just, like, there's just that voice that, you know, is, that either feels like a self. I mean, in, you know, nearly a hundred, percent of the cases, that just feels like I, right? That feels like it's me. And then you're, you're told something about the project of, well, again, so you could have an experience haphazardly or on psychedelics where that get, that identification gets interrupted, right? Where all of a sudden, there's just, the mind is suddenly much more vast than that, right?

Starting point is 01:13:35 It doesn't feel like there's a subject in the head looking out through your eyes at a world that's not you. And, you know, forever implicated by the glances of other people and the opinions of other people. And it's just me and here, this kind of embattled ego, trying to navigate a world that is fundamentally or at least potentially hostile to my interests, right? Like that subject-object dichotomy where it's just like I'm the man in the boat trying to steer it, you know, to, to some safe place and not go over the falls emotionally, that suddenly relaxes. Again, it matters. Now, I guess, I'm talking about psychedelics

Starting point is 01:14:18 because it's more replicatable for people. Depending on what drug you've taken, that can relax in one or another way. I mean, MDMA is really just the relaxing of the emotional tone of all that without the pyrotechnics of, of changing your perceptions. If it's LSD or psilocybin,

Starting point is 01:14:38 you could have a much more fundamental transformation of how you perceive the world. But whatever's the case, it just so happens that our nervous systems are perturbable pharmacologically or just by happenstance, right? This could happen to you just because it happens to you, right? And people have those stories.

Starting point is 01:14:57 But there's vast testimony on this topic that you can experience your mind as a much vaster place than you tend to experience it as. And then when you come back from one of those experiences, you might become interested in what is it that trims it down so reliably to this experience of confinement where you feel like it's just me here feeling uptight again, right? You know, like what's that about?

Starting point is 01:15:30 But virtually 100% of that is just what it's like to be you identified with thought. And then if you're identified with thought habitually, you are at the mercy of whatever you happen to think about. Right. So it's just like there's a – I mean, the analogy I've drawn somewhere is just, it's really – it's like the most boring person in the world. comes through the front door of your house and takes you hostage, right? You're like follows you from room to room, telling you the same stories over and over again. You can't shut him up and you can't get away from him.

Starting point is 01:16:13 And it's just, and that's your life, right? And you're thinking about the past, about what you could have said or should have said or almost said. You're thinking about the future. What's this, what's, you know, how's this going to go? And most of the futures you visualize never happened the way you've obsessed about them in the first place. So like 99% of your self-talk is, I mean, at best it's neutral with respect to its emotional tone. I mean, that's really, I mean, some people have, I'm convinced, some people have a fairly happy self-talk.

Starting point is 01:16:46 And that's a, you know, it's sort of hard to get through to them because they really don't think of themselves as ever suffering much psychologically. Right. They're very confident. They love the people in their lives. They get a lot of love back. they're not really conflict they don't have regrets and disappointments that they're trailing and they're not worried about anything and they just want to get up and do it again tomorrow because they're having so much fun there are people like that psychopaths but it's most people are

Starting point is 01:17:14 not like that right most people are sensitive to this criticism of the default which is most of what you're saying to yourself isn't making you happy and worse it's it's predicated on a fundamental illusion of selfhood, of identification with this subset of your mental experience, which is this, again, this discursive thought. And when you break that identification, there's just much more space there. And the past, and the, and the, it is in thought, it's in identification with thought that the past and the future exert their weight on the present. Right? So like it's like we're, it's because we're processing everything we experience in the present through this scrim of discursive thought that we don't, we never actually make satisfying contact with the present or we rarely do.

Starting point is 01:18:12 And those moments where we do, you know, those those peak kind of peak experience moments, what has made it be a peak is breaking the spell of thought for long enough for just to let in some of the breeze of, you know, awareness that it's, always, I mean, it's always there, but we just don't, you know, we're blocking it continually. We just haven't opened the door or the window. And it's, so meditation really is, again, there are many different techniques or many different ways to describe it and frame it. In the end, it's actually not even a practice you're doing. It's not, in the end, it is something you're ceasing to do. It's just, it's non-distraction.

Starting point is 01:18:58 You're ceasing to be distracted by thought. You're starting to notice thoughts themselves as appearances in consciousness. And noticed as appearances, they don't have force. They don't have, certainly don't have emotional force. It's not like you suddenly become an idiot and you can't figure out what you want to eat for dinner or, you know, how to find your car. I mean, you can think and you can plan. but the moment

Starting point is 01:19:25 you begin to suffer your new default is to become it's like a mindfulness alarm you know starts sounding and then you relax your identification with it just the physiology of suffering

Starting point is 01:19:48 so to bring it back to what we were just talking about so yeah there's a moment where I'm I notice something that I find, you know, either like personally annoying or the appropriate target of moral outrage. I don't think we should get, I'm not envisioning psychological health as being synonymous with never being angry ever again or never being fearful ever again. I mean, you know, negative emotions are, you know, from an enlightened point of view in my book, are still salience cues, right?

Starting point is 01:20:25 Like, if I walk outside this house on the way to my car and someone physically attacks me on the sidewalk, like, I don't want to be just a puddle of goo, you know, just beaming love at the person. Like, now, it's not to say that there's not, that's not a possible state of consciousness. It certainly is. And it actually, there are definitely scenarios

Starting point is 01:20:45 where that, that quote, works, right? Like, just being the guy who's, you know, beaming unconditional love as your only response to anything, right? It's possible to get out of some physical altercation because it's so surprising, right? Someone comes to mug you and you're just, you know, you're on MDMA and you just say, listen, man, I love you, right? Like that could either, like, that could turn out well, but practically speaking, it strikes me as totally appropriate to feel,

Starting point is 01:21:21 these kind of punctate classically negative emotions. The real question is, how long do they last? And what are they good for? Like, when is it, when do you want to cease being angry so that you can actually function intelligently?

Starting point is 01:21:38 And in my book, it happens very, very soon after the arising of anger. I mean, like, you don't want to stay angry, right? But the initial jolt of anger, in many cases is totally appropriate and it is the orienting response that you actually need to respond intelligently to whatever the emergency or quasi-emergency is.

Starting point is 01:22:03 But once you know how to meditate, you do notice that the half-life of negative emotions is really, really brief. I mean, it's actually impossible to stay angry or embarrassed or whatever it is. pick your negative emotion for longer than, you know, some tens of seconds, unless you're then you're taken in by thought again about why you should be angry or why you should be embarrassed. And yeah, your life becomes completely different when you can get off the ride.

Starting point is 01:22:38 You know, I mean, the difference between being angry for 10 seconds and being angry for 10 minutes even, you know, much less 10 hours or 10 days is enormous, right? I mean, just you just think of how life deranging those periods are where you're just helplessly motivated by anger, right? I mean, 10 minutes is enough to completely fuck up your life, right? I mean, to say the thing to your spouse that you can't, to ring the bell, you can't unring, you know? And, I mean, just like, you just see how people's lives run off the rails

Starting point is 01:23:12 because their minds are out of control. And literally everything we see out there, that is producing massive human suffering and existential risk even. Literally everything beyond naturally occurring disasters, right, is a matter of people's minds being out of control. I mean, we just have, we're running terrible legacy code, you know, in a condition of increasingly destabilizing power amplified by technology. I mean, it's getting an increase.

Starting point is 01:23:52 It's increasingly easy for one person to screw it up for the rest of us. I mean, so the topic of existential risk is its own thing, which I'm focusing on more and more. I think it's, you know, it's, and it's, you know, neglected to a scary degree. I mean, there's just, there's not that, there's not enough people thinking about how we can shore up our civilization against existential risk and, you know, manmade and otherwise. But, I mean, so much of the daily evidence of conflict and needless human misery is just born of people being captured by their thoughts and not knowing that there's any alternative. Right. They're just talking to themselves, right? And they're just claiming to know things that they don't know and being persuaded by those inner proclamations.

Starting point is 01:24:42 Right? I mean, just like, what does it feel like to have a very strong opinion? that is going to dictate everything you do next, and how often is that just an automaticity that's totally uninspected that could be completely deflated just with a moment's pause if you only knew how to,

Starting point is 01:25:12 or just take the other side in that. Forget about meditation for a moment, just the ability to be skeptical about one's own opinions. Like, that's, talk about an untrained skill. I mean, that's just something that almost nobody has, right? Nobody even has it as a possible norm that you could endorse, even in the abstract, right? Like, why would you want to be skeptical about your own opinions? Like, this is just what I think.

Starting point is 01:25:38 That's why I'm like, you, I'm always starting debates around the dinner table because I'm always testing what I think against what other people think, and because I'm aware that it's just thought and it needs refining. But anyway, we've got one. Sam, first of all, thank you so much for coming on the show. What a pleasure to see you and speak with you and get a little bit of your opinion and wisdom. Can I just say if people are listening to this, I use your app.

Starting point is 01:26:01 It's actually brilliant and it has changed my life. The ability to just sit and meditate for 10 minutes every morning is one of the most, if not the best way, to deal with obtrusive and obsessional thoughts. Every time he comes into the studio and he's all over the place, they go, have you meditated? The answer's always no. Yeah, so thank you.

Starting point is 01:26:19 No, it's brilliant. And the podcast, making sense for Sam Harris. I'm a big fan of, like we talked about, during the BLM situation, you covered it. I thought exactly the way that it needed to be covered, and you have important conversations on there. We'll do a couple of questions for our locals. I will ask you about COVID because we promise people we'd do that.

Starting point is 01:26:37 But before we do, our final question is always the same. What's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be? In this conversation or just as a society? As a society. Well, we've touched on pieces of it. I mean, I do think that, again, at the generic level, I mean, the problem is always failures of cooperation for us at this point. But like virtually anything that's going to just happen to us,

Starting point is 01:27:15 you know, coughed up by the hand of nature, we can figure out how to solve at this point. I mean, I think, I mean, including an asteroid hurtling towards us. I mean, at this point, we have enough tech, and I'm not so sure we have enough people watching, but close, that we'd have tens of years, right? We'd have some decades to deal with that specific problem. But so all of our problems on some level are of our own making. I mean, if nothing else, it's just our, the opportunity costs born of all of the needless bullshit we get entangled with, basically. on our own, you know, incapacity to cooperate.

Starting point is 01:27:57 So it's just, it's, and that's the first order of business and the next one to figure out how we can have successful conversations on some level, right? Like, again, all we have is, is a capacity to persuade one another so as to engineer, you know, forward-looking cooperation, or we have violence, right? And like, in the end, it's like we just, you have to force people to. to do stuff if we can't persuade them to do stuff or that they you know they they can't come to the epiphanies on their own and that's where politics comes in and but more and more i think we're in a situation where because of technology it's um it's strangely getting harder and harder to to get our

Starting point is 01:28:51 you know our cognitive horizons to to fuse right we've got eight billion strangers more or less trying to figure out how to cooperate and persuasion is the only good tool again I mean we're going to have to use force in certain circumstances and I think we should be

Starting point is 01:29:09 very I don't think pacifism is is a plan there I mean I think we actually do need to have our force game together for the situations where we need it you know and that's individually and collectively right at the level of nation states

Starting point is 01:29:27 as well. But I'm increasingly worried about our incapacity to converge on a just a dispassionate, fact-based discussion on things that are just so easy to assess. I mean, just like we've touched several topics here, but just like how many people of any identity get killed by cops every year in America? And it's like, and what are, it's like, how does that relate to the levels of of crime, you know, perpetrated by people of various identities and like, like, what situations are cops actually getting into and what are their reasonable expectations of people

Starting point is 01:30:05 in a society where there are 400 million guns? You know, like, why is it different when an American suddenly turns around and reaches into the cab of his pickup truck while getting arrested than when that happens in Japan, right? Like, where there are no guns, right? This is such an, this should be such an easy conversation to have, right? There should be no, like, I mean, this is, it's not even, it's hard to think of a simpler one, where the facts are easier to get. I mean, most of the stuff is on,

Starting point is 01:30:41 so much of the stuff is on videotape. It's so easy to parse. It's repeatable year after year. It's a problem that everyone, like it's in no one's interest that the problem be bigger than it is and not smaller than it is. Like we all want to solve this problem, right? And we find it impossible to talk about.

Starting point is 01:31:03 So your problem is, Sam, you meditate too much and you're too smart. And you think other people are like you, but they're not. Well, no, but I know, like, there's none of this is foreign to me. I know what it's like to get emotionally hijacked by anything, by something, right? Whether something happens right in front of you and your ideas about it. You care about the truth. And so you will get emotionally hijacked and then you will go and look at the facts. Most people just get emotionally hijacked.

Starting point is 01:31:28 Yeah. Yeah, so we, I mean, we need, that is a, I mean, that's certainly a software flaw in our operating system. It's not a feature. And, I mean, one way I've summarized this in the past for people to say, I mean, your, your capacity to be offended is not something that anyone need or should respect in you. Like, that's just not, it's certainly not an argument, but it's not even a basis for respect. Like table stakes for any ethical conversation is more than just your capacity to be offended. Right. And until you understand that, like you're just not, you can't play the game we need to play in order to ensure an open-ended circumstance of cooperation.

Starting point is 01:32:23 What a great note to finish on. Sam Harris, thank you so much for coming on. We really recommend you check out Sam's podcast. and his brilliant app. We're going to ask him a couple of questions from you for you. But for now, Sam, thank you so much for joining us. Really great to meet you and great to chat. We'll see you very soon with another brilliant episode.

Starting point is 01:32:40 I mean, it won't be quite like this, but it will be a brilliant episode as well or also. All of them go out at 7pm UK time. And for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go, it's also available as a podcast. Take care and see you soon, guys. Some of our listeners would be disappointed in how you handled yourself during COVID. How do you reflect on the way you thought and spoke about COVID?

Starting point is 01:33:05 Are you happy with it? Would you have done it differently?

TRIGGERnometry - Sam Harris: Trump, Religion, Wokeness

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