Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and we'll only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samherris.org. There you'll also find our scholarship program, where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't afford one. We don't run ads on the podcast,
and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. I'm fighting my way through a respiratory virus here, so I will keep this short. Today I'm speaking with Jonathan Roush and Josh Zeps. Jonathan is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. He is the author of eight books,
and many articles on public policy, culture, and government. He is a contributing writer for the Atlantic, and a recipient of the 2005 National Magazine Award, which is the magazine industry's equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize. His latest book is the Constitution of Knowledge, a defensive truth. And that is one of the focuses of our conversation today. Josh Zeps is an independent journalist. He was a founding host of Huff Post Live. He also hosted a National Morning Television Show
in Australia, and a radio show on ABC Radio. And now he's full time on his own platform, the wonderful podcast, uncomfortable conversations with Josh Zeps. Josh and I have collaborated in the past. We did some live events in Australia. And I wanted to bring him on to co-pilot this interview with me with Jonathan. As I said, we talk about Jonathan's book, the Constitution of Knowledge.
We talk about the fragmentation of society, the state of the mainstream media, diversity of viewpoints, the threatened reality-based community, with the COVID pandemic did to our information landscape, the unique challenge of Trump and Trumpism, the dangers of a second Trump term, the problem of immigration and controlling the southern border of the U.S., and other topics. And I bring you Jonathan Roush and Josh Zeps.
I am here with Jonathan Roush and Josh Zeps. Jonathan Josh, thanks for joining me. Thank you. Thanks so much. So let me explain the structure here. I've invited Josh, who I think most of my audience will already know, to co-pilot this interview with me. This is just for the fun of it, and also to get the most out of you, Jonathan. But let me just have you both introduce yourselves here. Jonathan, how do you
describe what you do? We're going to talk mostly about your book, The Constitution of Knowledge, a defensive truth, which is a fantastic defensive truth, as advertised, and also use it as a lens through which to look at some current events that I think worry all of us. How do you summarize your career as a writer and journalist? Well, that's exactly how I summarize it. I'm a writer and journalist. I'm sometimes mistaken for an academic and call doctor, but my highest degree is a
bachelor's degree in history. I started out actually in a newspaper, which is how people did start out back in the day and have done magazine work and written books on a lot of subjects. But unlike some journalists, I'm comfortable in the world of theory. And so I do a lot of that. Yeah, you should have gotten a PhD for this book. Your discussion of the foundation of knowledge and I'm just the way you marry. The principles that safeguard our scientific epistemology and political
liberalism is just fantastic. So congratulations there. Well, coming from you, it means a lot. Your work has been an inspiration and indeed is quoted multiple times in the book. Nice. Nice. Well, Josh, remind people who you are. I hear by Bestow upon Jonathan and honorary doctorate from the School of Uncomfortable Composations. There you go, John. I'm a I'm an independent journalist. Yeah, I just won't ask you to perform any cardiology if we're on a
plane and someone calls out for a doctor. Just don't make me write a speech. I'm an independent journalist. I have just left the legacy media where I was hosting a daily talkback radio show on Australia's national public broadcaster for the past couple of years. Prior to that, I anchored a sort of morning television show in Australia. And I spent most of my professional life in New York City. You may detect from my accent that I'm not from there. I'm
Australian. And in New York, I was a founding host and producer of Huffpost Live, which was this sort of big experiment to try to produce thousands of hours of live streaming talk television. And so I hosted thousands of hours of content with interesting people there. And then decamped back to Australia when I had kids and got married a few years ago. And now I've gone independent
after finding it sort of intolerable. I guess I was somewhat pushed out of legacy media in a story that's kind of parallel to Barry Weiss's or a story that has been replicated in many instances, people who don't feel like the legacy media is doing a terribly good job of encapsulating the full ranbunctiousness and excitingness of all the conversations that we could be having, find themselves excluded from the party. And at some point, I just said, you know, stuff this.
So uncomfortable conversations is now my geek. Nice. Well, it's great to have you here. And you've got the truly professional radio voice that will keep us on the straight and narrow here. I've got a respiratory virus going on. So I'm happily not catching my butt. If I may, I forgot to mention two institutional affiliations. One is I'm a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. And the second is I'm a contributing writer of the Atlantic.
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, so, you know, this is, I don't tend to do straightforward interviews. There really are conversations. And so, you know, Josh and I can be expected to take up a fair amount of time. But really, we're trying to get the most out of you, Jonathan. Just to kind of open with my concerns here, I think many of us sense that the moral intelligence of the West appears to be
somewhat exhausted. And we can see this both on the right and the left. I mean, the fact that on the populist right, people can't seem to see that we have any stake in, I'm speaking from more or less an American perspective here, if people just can't seem to see that we have any stake in reducing the danger and the chaos that is happening outside our borders, they seem to think that we should become a nuclear armed switcherland of some kind. And even a phrase like the rules-based
international order is now sneered at as a piece of neo-conservative or neoliberal can't. And on the populist left, we have people who can't seem to distinguish between civilization and barbarism as we witnessed after October 7th. I mean, they show no inclination or capacity to defend the former. And this relates to the topics you deal with in your book. These kind of unraveling relates to the foundations of our knowledge, our ability to have anything like a shared consensus about
what's happening in the world. And it relates to the hope that one day may live in a world where people everywhere can agree about the basic norms and values that allow for a truly open-ended form of cooperation among 8 billion strangers. So I thought we could start with your book. And there's two phrases in your book that do it, which are meant to work. So I'd like you to explain both of them and how they are connected. And the first is the title,
the Constitution of Knowledge. And the second is the reality-based community. What do you mean by those phrases and how are they connected? So the Constitution of Knowledge is the system of norms and institutions that we in liberal societies rely on to keep us anchored to some common version of reality. They don't require us to agree on everything. In fact, they require us to disagree because disagreement is where knowledge comes from. That's what allows us to check each
other's errors. Those different perspectives. But we do have to have a set of rules. What I'm pushing back against there is the view that I started with 30 years ago in an earlier book, which is called Kindly Inquisitors, the new attacks on Free Thought. And it's a good book.
But it kind of starts and ends where most people start and end, which is the marketplace of ideas and John Stuart Mill, which is all you need is a free environment and public criticism where people are allowed to say things to each other and correct each other and knowledge will appear as if by magic. That's not a terrible model. I love the marketplace of ideas, metaphor. I use it. And I am a fan of John Stuart Mill. But the part we forgot, partly because that system was so
successful for so long, is it doesn't just happen. You need a lot of rules and a lot of structure to get people to disagree in ways that are productive. And that requires a lot of rules. It turns out they look very, very much like the rules for the US Constitution. For example, the US Constitution pits ambition against ambition as we know from the Federalist. Constitution of knowledge pits bias against bias. They're both open-ended systems, which never allow a final say or a final destination.
And so forth. So that's the Constitution of knowledge. So the Constitution of knowledge doesn't govern everything we do in life. It doesn't decide what we can say at the dinner table. Thanksgiving, it doesn't apply in church. As you have tirelessly pointed out, most of the beliefs of most major religions would flunk the Constitution of knowledge because they're not replicable. The areas, the fields that do adhere to the Constitution of knowledge are what I call the reality
base community. These are these spheres, mostly professionals, that do the work every day of developing what we think of as objective knowledge. And the big four there are academia, science, research, all of that. That's number one. Second is media, mainstream media, reality-based media. That's my world. I think probably that's your world. Certainly Josh's world. The third is law. People forget that the idea of a fact comes not from science. It predates that. It comes from law because courts
needed account of the facts that people could agree on in order to settle cases. So they came up with these adversarial systems of fact-finding evidence-based. And the fourth is government. Our government, all liberal governments are just shot through with institutions and rules that keep them tethered to reality. Everything from the Administrative Procedures Act to the many research agencies, the inspectors general, the justice department, which for example has to be fact-based. If a government
stops being fact-based, it becomes tyrannical. It's just that simple. Yeah. It's fascinating, Jonathan. One thing that I pick up from what you're saying is that there is a gulf in our experience of how knowledge gets accumulated if we haven't worked in one of those environments
that you just pointed to. When I'm talking to friends who have never worked in a newsroom or a science lab or an academic institution or a court of law or the public service, for example, whether or not familiar with the processes that are in place to sort fact from nonsense, then I think there can be an assumption that the reason why we're losing our way and why there's so much bullshit pattern, the French, floating around at the moment, is because bad actors just aren't
doing a good enough job of being honest. And the problem as you articulate it is actually thawninger than that. It's not that there are bad people who are being dishonest. It's that we have systems in place that are ignorant of the countervailing systems that are required in order to filter the best ideas. And if you've worked in a newsroom and you've ever had an editor, come to you and say, you don't have it yet. You don't have that story yet. You've got the shape of the story,
but I need two more sources and we need someone on the record about this. Then it's hard to understand the kind of framework of truth seeking that supports and buttresses ourselves. I mean, I speak from personal experience here because I'm intentionally stepping out of that environment and I'm requiring myself to erect this artifice of truth seeking on my own and kind of build the plane while it's while it's flying. And Sam has done essentially the same thing of holding one
self accountable. But what do you want to say to people who've never been in that environment and who just think, you know, well, the problem is that people are being nasty and lying. This is a bad subject for me because I get defensive. I am I am old media incarnate. I work for the Atlantic, which is what 1857. I used to work for the economist 1848. And I am a believer that there is a reason for all of those rules and norms, those layers of editing and copy editing and fact checking
that go into a traditional media establishment. It's very expensive. It's very exacting. I just went through two days of fact checking at the Atlantic. It's it's an exhausting process. And what's what's frustrating for me and maybe for you guys too, I don't know, is people out there in the world understandably think it's just easy. You know, why don't we just write what's true and not write what's false? Why are we so biased? Why do we have all these blind spots? Why did we miss,
you know, the distress that was leading to the election of Donald Trump? Why are we too far left? Why are we too far right? And there are certainly valid criticisms. There needs to be, I think, more diversity, ideological in newsrooms. But what we are tasked to do every day is really hard. Come up with some coherent, accurate account of reality in a complicated world on very, very tight deadlines.
You know, scientists get two years to do what we have to do in two hours. So I guess I'd be whining to say the rest of the world should be more appreciative, but the truth is that's how I feel. Well, as you point out, I think the phrase that you use in the book is, the turbulence is a source of stability both politically and epistemically. Right? So it's the fact that political factions can oppose one another and government is divided. No one has all the power. That, that fractiousness
is what keeps the play in flying. And epistemically, the fact that scientists are in the business and journalists are in the business of proving one another wrong based on their own biases. All of that works to the advantage of truth and liberty on the political side in the end, except when it doesn't, except I mean, there's only so much turbulence that the system
can use to its advantage. And I think what many of us are now worried about, and you're certainly, you certainly appear worried in your book, is that the current state of media and journalism in particular and social media and the way in which the layer of social media is interacting and putting pressure on media, it's just made this, the information landscape, a kind of hallucination
machine, right? It's no longer tracking truth or it's no, I think your phrase is something like, there's no longer a positive epistemic valence to all this chaos, or it seems certainly reasonable to worry that there's not. And in the book, you talk about how fear of new media is really quite
old. I mean, it's as old as writing, and it's certainly as old as the printing press, and which, you know, quite infamously stoked the fires in the Inquisition and the Wars of Religion, the Malaya's Malafakaram, which was that great witch-finding manual of the 15th century was one of the first best sellers. So I'm not sure at what point our nostalgia for the past should be
focused. I mean, I think you also go into some detail in the book that the early days of American journalism were pretty ugly and fake news was really the standard of the time, but at a certain point that changed, and most of us, as you just suggested, are nostalgic for some moment in the past when journalism seemed to be run by at least a sufficient number of adults in the room. Do you think that was always an illusion? And if not, how do you judge the current state of journalism?
Perhaps we should take social media as a separate piece. Yeah, I was going to say one has to disaggregate. So I'd be very interested in Josh's view. He's closer actually to the newsroom these days than I am. I'd say you have to disaggregate, and that the core values of mainstream media places like the network, newscasts, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, LA Times, those places still have their values intact, and they're struggling to defend them
economically. And there's a huge crisis, and this doesn't need any embellishment on this show, but there's a huge problem with the business model, which is checking reality is extremely expensive. People think, you know, 100 Biden's laptop that came in 10 days before the election. Why wasn't it checked? Well, it took a team of Washington reporters, the better part of a year to check a handful of the material. It's just very expensive and time consuming to do this work.
But there I think that's the issue. I don't think it's really we've seen the kind of corruption of values in mainstream media on anything like the scale that we've seen it in parts of academia, which really has become very politicized. Others may disagree. They may say that I'm kind of whitewashing mainstream media so we can have that conversation. Did you read Bennett's economist piece on the post mortem from his firing from the New York Times? Yes, I did.
Yeah, okay. I just want to make sure that those facts were in evidence. John, I can hear the new media listener, the younger listener perhaps, saying to you mentally, I mean, okay, so maybe it takes a year to absolutely fact check every aspect of the Hunter Biden laptop story. But why is that the bar for me as a voter to find out about it? Why can't we just have different
categories of truth claims? Okay, if the New York Times doesn't want to publish something, until they've absolutely got something that where they can take it to the bank, that's fine. But I want to live in a media universe where I have access to information that might be true and that might be relevant. And so there has to be a mechanism by which I can know about the Hunter Biden laptop story without it being hidden from me because my grand pu bar overlords say
that I'm too stupid to be able to sort fact from fiction. And we don't necessarily want a yield that space to the temples and Alex Jones as Mike's Univiches of the world. There needs to be some other mechanism by which we can ascertain things that may be true without requiring them to meet the standard of traditional media. So I'll give you the traditional answer to that. I'm not sure
how how younger people will like it. But this is not a new problem. Journalists have been wrestling for over a hundred years since the age of the yellow press and the gutter media with what do you do with salacious gossip and the old rule was well you just print it because why not it's fun. People read it. They eat it up. And then we got a different kind of system that emerged and we got defamation lawsuits and we got schools of journalism and lots of rules that said if it isn't
true, don't print it, that's your responsible. And we wound up with kind of a multi-tiered system where you had high brow journalist places like the New York Times. And if you saw it there, it was very likely to be checked and true. You know, they got stuff wrong of course. But pretty, pretty darn responsible. And then you had the tabloid media and the gutter press and the gossip mags and the gossip columnists. And that's where the other stuff circulated.
So people knew about it, but there were these different sort of levels of gatekeeping and credentialing. And that seemed to work pretty stably for a while. The problem today, of course, is who makes those decisions and why? You know, it's really tough. For example, what would you do with the steel dossier? So this is a pile of unverified gossip. And that's all it even claims to be. Some guy goes out and collects a lot of gossip and writes it down because that's what he's been
hired to do. He's not even saying it's true. He's just saying he's heard it. And then this circulates and it seems like everyone around Washington has seen it or read it. I didn't, but apparently a lot of people did. And then no one's publishing it because it's against the policy of the New York Times and the Washington Post to publish salacious unverified, possibly completely false gossip about
anybody, including Donald Trump. So they're trying to do the responsible thing. But then BuzzFeed says, well, the heck with that, everyone's reading this. The public should be able to read it too. They published it. I think that was the wrong decision. Maybe that's old fashioned of me. But a lot of people disagree. Ben Smith clearly disagrees. And I don't think we'll ever have a pat answer to
this question. But I will tell you that I think that not thinking that this is a difficult question and that absolutely everything alleged by anyone should be immediately published and transmitted around the world is a good answer. I don't think that's a good answer. But I don't know. What do you think? I mean, you worked at ABC. I mean, the challenge is that once the BuzzFeed publishes the piece, then the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal have to report on
the existence of the controversy about the publication of the piece. So there's this meta story about the story, which it sort of would be derelict not to talk about because everybody's talking about the fact that BuzzFeed has published this thing. So then you get this weird situation where readers of the legacy media are saying, hang on, they're talking about how this other place has
published this other thing. But I don't even know what the underlying story actually is. I mean, it's tricky and it complicates, you know, one thing that I'd love you to talk about and Sam, forgive me if I'm sort of hijacking this in the sense, but I'm interested in, you talk about this funnel of knowledge that journalism is up to and academia and the other institutions that you're talking about where you want the as large as possible a mouth of the funnel where there is
total free speech and everyone can say whatever they want and that goes into the funnel. Then the funnel starts cranking away and doing its job. And at the bottom of the funnel, you have these these pearls of wisdom, you have these Willy Wonka everlasting God stoppers of truth, spitting out the bottom of the machine. The problem at the moment as I have seen it working in the legacy media is that there are constraints on what is going into the top of the funnel that
the people who are imposing the constraints aren't even aware of as constraints. They don't identify their worldview as being a worldview. They don't identify their opinions as being opinions. You know, I had a run in with management at one organization because we had a difference of
opinion about gay pride. And John, you and I are both gay. We have our own differences of opinion and probably not with each other, but with the rest of the gay universe, the extent to which you know, oiled up muscled men sitting a striped giant inflatable penises going along on a march is constructive or useful to young people who are trying to sort out their sexuality. I was trying to articulate that. Glad you got that phrase out. Use that phrase once every podcast. So
glad we got it at the top here. And my employer was fully 100% pro pride. In fact, was the official broadcaster of pride. And I got into a run in where they weren't allowing me to articulate this point of view because they said that hosts, you know, on air talent are not allowed to express opinions about controversial social or political or cultural events. Now everybody else on the air was expressing their support for pride. But that doesn't land as an opinion for them. That's
just common sense. That's just being on the right side of history. That's just not being nasty. So the funnel ends up being curtailed in ways that they don't even notice it being curtailed. They're like Josh isn't allowed to have his crazy opinion because that's a crazy opinion. But our beliefs aren't opinions. How believe suggest the truth? So you need three things to make the Constitution of knowledge work. And you need all three. And the first and most obvious is free
thought, free inquiry, marketplace of ideas, enough said. The second is you need the discipline of fact. You need a lot of people who are willing to follow a lot of very difficult rules governing who is allowed and not allowed to claim this or that as fact. And under what circumstances, when is a experiment considered replicated? When does a newsroom go with the story? Under what circumstances does it correct it? And all that discipline of fact is super hard and requires
years of training. But then there's a third. And that's diversity of viewpoint. If everyone in a room is coming from the same place ideologically and sharing the same assumptions epistemically, then no learning will take place because these people will not be able to see each other's mistakes. The whole system works because diversity of viewpoint allows me to see your biases and you
to see mine because we can't see our own. And yes, one of the problems that I worry about and I know you worry about in journalism, but especially in sectors of academia like the social sciences and humanities is the lack of viewpoint diversity. And the first symptom of that is when everyone agrees that something which is in fact quite contentious, for example, that human sexes are on a spectrum, not binary, for example, when they see that as not even contestable, that's telling you
there probably aren't enough voices in the room. But that's a solvable problem, right? That's not inherent to the model of journalism. That means that you alluded to your news from earlier. I guess maybe I shouldn't call out any particular outlet. But the implication is that those people you were working with need to hire some people from different educational backgrounds with different ideological priors for the sake just of professionalism, just of doing the job correctly. And yeah,
we've fallen down on that. There has been an effort in American newsrooms to diversify intellectually. But it's funny that you use the word diversify because diversity is the load star, the goal of all of this. But the diversity that they're looking for is a diversity of skin color and journals, not a diversity of thought. Or class or economic background editor at a a major magazine you all heard of told me a couple of years ago that he gets the resumes of which
are many come to him through a funnel of some sort. And he said he gets 25 or 50 versions of the same resume. And that's hard to change. Is there some explanation for a weird class filter in journalism in particular because to become a journalist is often the first rung on the ladder is sort of the unpaid or underpaid internship at some wonderful institution. And the only people who can do that are the people who are taking their, you know, their summers between
their years in an Ivy League institution. And it's all funded by their rich families and etc. Well, you're cutting close to the bone sound because in 1981 I started my journalism career as a summer intern and was unpaid for that summer here in Washington DC. And I could afford to do that. And yes, shame on unpaid internships. You know, I guess I'd be curious for your views on that. In some ways, we're better in that respect because there's so many more paths in now.
You know, there are all these 20 somethings that have sub stacks and podcasts and get noticed through these alternative channels that don't require you to be well healed. I think the problem has more to do with the kinds of people who are attracted to journalism and for that matter,
you know, anthropology and some of the self selection that's going on there. It just, it's going to take positive effort to go out and look at state schools that you've never hired from and where you're not getting referrals from professors and saying, okay, who here could be a journalist? Maybe someone with an unconventional background. When I entered journalism in my first job was in North Carolina now 40 years ago. There were still the last remnants of what we thought of
as his blue collar journalism. I don't know if you've heard that phrase. But journalists, reporters were not always people with Ivy League degrees or, you know, Swarthmore, humanities backgrounds. They had, they were just good writers who showed up and did the work. And there is this wonderful old reporter named Jesse Pointexter, covered the courts. He'd been covering the courts for like a generation. And he knew where everybody in the
county was buried and he knew what was going on with every corrupt cop and judge. And he wrote like a dream. But I can tell you, he was not the product of, of, of Yale. And, and we were better for that. It seems to me there's a tension between this call for diversity and another point, which I think you may get in your book, which is that at least at, at some layer of the,
the liberal epistemic order relies on elite consensus. Right. We need elites who are, who are qualified to judge the truth claims in, you know, the, in their area of specialization. We need institutions. They create the norms that allow that machinery of truth testing and infallibleism to operate, you know, intergenerational. And we need a population of, you know, by definition non-elites with respect to any specific area of specialization that trusts those institutions,
to, to trust their products. It's not to say that they're, they're not capable of error, but the error correction within physics is going to come from physicists, you know, and people who are, who have taken the time for, you know, on the basis of whatever advantages they've had, but, intellectually above all, quantitatively above all, to actually play that language game to the
point of being able to produce some work product that the rest of us can rely upon. Again, to a first approximation, all, all the while knowing that, you know, again, you make this point beautifully in the book at some point with a, you know, truth is not a destination. It's a direction. It's like in North on the compass. It's not that you arrive at the North Pole and you're done. It's just, you, you have to navigate. So we need people who are adequate based on their
expertise to provide a conversation about reality that is directionally correct. And you, you have another sentence in the book, which I underlined as really, it sums up more or less everything that concerns me intellectually, ethically, politically, even spiritually. And such a simple sentence, but it's when I hit upon it, I just, you should have seen my face. And the sentence is,
there is only one reality-based community, right? And that is such a deep insight. It says everything about the situation we are in and the degree to which it's misconstrued and in so many fashionable disciplines. It says everything about the unity of knowledge and the possibility of resilience between disciplines, however disparate. And yet, I think we're now living in a world where, you know, based on the algorithmic arrangement of, of more or less everybody, we're losing our
connection to that even as an ideal. I mean, we're certainly losing our grip on a shared civic reality. And largely, I think social media is to blame, but I think alternative media is largely to blame. And what I continually call podcast-estan, it's not functioning by the same norms and scruples of traditional journalism. And people are just freewheeling in front of the microphone and platforming anyone who has an opinion, however, you know, and they're just, there are no
position to debunk the confabulation of maniacs in real time. And therefore, this stuff just gets believed at scale. And so it does seem like a new moment to me where you have, I mean, we can talk about it through the lens of any specific problem. I think I'd like to talk about how you both view what what COVID has done to us. So we can get to that. And I think we should cover politics as well, but you know, feel free to react to what I just said. Well, to which to which part of what you
just said. You're the two of you are at least as well positioned as I am to assess kind of how we're
doing at scale on the big question of society's attachment to reality. When I look at it, I see a landscape in which you still have large, large parts of the reality-based community, the legal professions, lots of academics who are not corrupted, lots of mainstream journalists, lots of lawyers, as we saw in the Trump administration, who really are hanging on and trying to defend the norms of the Constitution and knowledge, simple stuff, but but important stuff like you don't go into court
and lie and you get sanctioned if you do ask Sydney Powell. So there's still a lot of institutional integrity that is trying to defend itself. It often doesn't know how to defend itself. As exhibit A, I would submit three university presidents who bombed in Congress, who said the right thing about what their policies were, which is it depends on context to know if the speech is allowable, but did not know how to make the case behind that statement.
So that's on us. It's on us liberals to do a better job of defending these principles and understanding these principles. And that's why I wrote the book. But then you have all that other stuff out there, which you alluded to, Sam. And that's the big bewildering, blooming, buzzing, chaotic and anarchic world of social media and blogs and the fact that anyone on Twitter can
can project a voice. And there you have a problem, which is not new. It's very old, but it's been amplified by these technologies, which there there are a lot of ways to manipulate humans cognitively, even by the way, very smart humans, such as the three of us. We can be manipulated in all sorts of ways that our attention can be hijacked. That's what trolling does. You know, if I say enough terrible things about Sam Harris, he's going to have to respond or his reputation will be damaged.
Or things like just repeating lies and so forth. The firehose of falsehood, disinformation campaigns. They're just all kinds of things you can do in an environment that's completely unregulated by institutional norms and people are doing them. It's not the first time this has happened. It takes a while for institutions to figure out rules of the road and how to how to re-norm. And I'm not completely sure how that happens this time or whether it happens this time.
But I agree with you that the environment in which those committed to the Constitution of knowledge are swimming is it's it's very challenging right now.
I find it somewhat terrifying the media landscape that we're that I'm entering, I suppose, because John, it's not just that it's not the problem is not just the way that you articulate it, which is that there is a, you know, we're in an environment that's unregulated by institutional norms by the kinds of productive fact-checking that you're talking about in your book. It's not an unregulated environment. It's an environment regulated by precisely the wrong
incentives. Algorithms are encouraging us to produce content that maximizes people's time spent on apps. That means that they want us to engage. That means that they want us to like posts, share posts, comment on posts. And that's that that is agnostic as to whether or not we're doing those things because they reinforce what we already believe or because they caricature and demonize things that we don't believe. But it has to be one of the other. If you're in the nuance game,
if you're in the game of truth is not a destination, it is a process. Then you are leaving a lot of listeners on the table who you could be getting. I mean Sam and I could both have bigger audiences, I don't know how you get a bigger audience than Sam's, but we could have a bigger audience if we decided to try to poke at elite consensus a bit more and be really edgy and follow these dissenting voices who are sticking it to the man and raising things that nobody else is brave
enough to talk about. I mean, I think there are legitimate conversations and clearly Sam does as well that we need to be brave enough to talk about. You just alluded to there being two sexes, John, which is going to get us all fired and canceled obviously. But you know, so there is a space in which there are blind spots that the legacy media has that we can step in and constructively fill.
But the majority of what's going on online is being driven by, like if you're a young journalist starting out just to come back to the question of an unpaid internship, for example, if you're starting out on YouTube or podcast stand, the easiest thing to do is to try to point out how shady and suspicious elite institutions are, including the mainstream media and to have on a bunch of people
who are conspiracy theory adjacent. I mean, the last time of one of the few times that I've accidentally blown up the internet was, I've done Joe Rogan's show seven times and the last time I was on a hand and I got into a spat about vaccines and about whether vaccines cause myocarditis in certain populations at a rate that is higher than COVID does. And it was one of these just arcane moments that momentarily everybody looks at because there's a conflict about a subject where
there hasn't been an honest reckoning in podcast stand. There's like these two rival points of view. One is the mainstream media and elite institutions are shutting us up, which to some extent is true because legacy media when it feels threatened by alternative narratives like lockdowns are going too far or there are problems with vaccines that aren't being properly articulated by public
health bureaucrats. Then the legacy media responds by circling the wagons and closing ranks and trying to insist that it has the one truth, which just makes people more suspicious and makes them go to non-legacy independent media outlets that are then caching in people's curiosity and desire for salacious conspiracy theories by feeding them nonsense. So you've got the constitution of knowledge funneling people towards their everlasting gobs to upper of truth. And then you've got
this reverse funnel, which is pushing people into a climate of bullshit. And the in-between space is one that we have to foster and water and tender and grow. And that garden is withering. And I'm not sure how to empower it without completely changing the economics of social media. Well, so Josh, why do you do it the way you're doing it if you could get more followers and make more money and be more famous by, I don't know, trolling Sam Harris and me? Because I'm not a whore.
And why not? I mean, there must be some incentives that are driving you to try to to stick to nerves. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at samherris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast. The podcast is available to everyone through our scholarship program. So if you can't afford a subscription, please request a free account on the website. The Making Sense
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