Ep#203 - Sam Harris returns

How are you? Really well, really well, thanks for asking. It's the rare occasion where there's some sun in the UK, so we get that one day a year where we top up on our vitamin D. Where are you? Are you in London? Manchester. So northwest, northwest. I think Bruce Springsteen's touring at the minute. He's in Manchester and he got papped, sat on the top of a Manchester hotel.

sunbathing no one's ever sun bathed in manchester before so it took an american to bring that bring that over that's fine yeah but if you're sitting comfortably i'll intro us in and get us going yeah let's do it

Welcome to The Night Tube. I'm Stephen Knight and I'm joined by podcaster, philosopher, neuroscientist, author Sam Harris. Sam, how are you doing? I'm great. Great to see you, Stephen. Yeah, you too. It's been a while. I mean, we've kind of... communicate here and there over the years. But I think last time I interviewed you, I don't think you'd ventured into this podcasting landscape yet. Has it been that long? Yeah, it really has. And I think I was a younger man then.

Time has taken its toll on us all. Podcasting has aged me, apparently. It's like the U.S. presidency. They got the before and after picture. Yeah, I saw what that did to Obama. Yeah, it's a tragedy. Yeah, so I suppose... just to start to ask you about that, because I get the impression you decided to take the plunge into podcasting because you wanted to...

sort of retain control of your own editorial. You had the unique pleasure of being misrepresented and cut out of context wherever you appeared, either in quote or in person.

That's been really successful for you. It's gone from strength to strength and it's kind of democratised the entire process. Now, everyone can have an audience. We don't need to wait for the BBC to give us a call or CNN. I think some great journalism has been done in that space by non-experts and amateurs, but... it's also opened the floodgates to a whole host of sort of cranks conspiracists quacks uh and i just wanted to

See if you've done any accounting on that in terms of maybe we treat gatekeepers a little bit too harshly. Maybe it's time to put the genie back in the box. What's your thoughts on this kind of digital landscape now? Yeah, well, I guess another... word for gatekeeper, or at least the abstract principle behind gatekeeping is having standards, right? I mean, certainly that's the good version of it.

No one can doubt that many of our institutions, journalistic and otherwise, have been captured by various ideologies over the years and that that has not been good, certainly not for journalism.

But, yeah, I mean, what we're experiencing in independent media now is just a total free-for-all and effectively a race to the bottom wherein everyone has disavowed.

expertise really in many cases explicitly uh and then therefore anyone's opinion on any topic is as good as any other on some level and that that is you know implicit in much of what's happening and in certain cases very prominent cases it's explicit where you have you know stand-up comedians And in certain cases, people who weren't all that good even at that, becoming very outspoken experts on wars in the Middle East and wars in Eastern Europe.

It wouldn't be a problem but for the fact that because technology has shattered culture to the degree that it has. We have millions and millions of people, speaking specifically in America, we have perhaps a majority of people getting their news and forming their opinions about current events and political imperatives. based on this form of conversation, the conversation among smugly, confident, non-experts deriding whatever expertise...

can be found on the topic. And many of them really do have a taste for the the conspiratorial the taste for the the by just by default the non-standard contrarian anti-establishment take on everything and it's it's just a fact that the

The anti-establishment contrarian take is usually wrong because the establishment and the mainstream... formed on the basis of when you're talking about science, you're talking about journalism, you're talking about any real academic discipline like history, the mainstream formed for a reason. It's not that the mainstream is always right. Of course, that's not true. And our views of various topics do get overturned. But there are reasons why most...

Real doctors and real scientists think COVID was worse for your health than the vaccine for COVID, right? It's not an accident that most people think Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy, not the CIA. Pick your topic that has been fixated upon at the highest level. by various podcasters and their guests. I mean, there's the mainstream opinion is mainstream for a reason. And we, um, you know, we over to overturn it more or less.

by default because you think people are always lying or people are always Captured by the woke mind virus or whatever your whatever the concern of the day is It's just it's it's guaranteed to produce spectacular errors

How do we decouple this value in terms of expertise from something that sounds like an appeal to authority, however? Because I mean, obviously you saw the... Douglas Murray, Dave Smith, Joe Rogan, collision. And part of me thought... Douglas Murray may have been briefed by you there. I kind of felt he was channeling you a little bit in certain areas. Maybe you can dissuade me of that suspicion. But how do we get past this idea that...

it's not an appeal to authorities, because that's what people were charging Douglas with, his detractors. Yeah, yeah. I must say, in their defense, it's easy to see why people are confused, because there really is a... a needle that has to be threaded here, and it's just not immediately obvious what is being argued.

And I didn't speak to Douglas before he went on. I was very happy he did go on and he attempted to perform that intervention, if not exorcism, of the Joe Rogan podcast and his partner in crime, Dave Smith. Here's the simplest way, I think, to think about it. Expertise is real, right? Anyone who thinks expertise isn't a thing just should spend a few seconds thinking about what it's like to fly in an airplane.

or deal with a cancer diagnosis. When things get real, when you're at 30,000 feet, you don't want just anyone's opinion about how to fly the plane, much less how to land it. You're hoping that the engines have been maintained to an engineering standard that only expert engineers had a vote in, right? I mean, this isn't even debatable. When you get cancer you want to know what the best oncologist you have access to thinks you should do and if you want a second opinion

You want another great oncologist. You don't want somebody's uncle who's pretending to be an oncologist because he got on ChatGPT for an hour and a half and is just lobbying his opinions at you. When AI becomes much better than any living oncologist, you're going to want the AI's version of oncology, right? But the point is, you're going to want real information, a real purchase on facts.

You want people with strong opinions because those strong opinions are warranted based on their actual engagement with reality, with methodologies that are designed to produce. you know, veridical opinions about the nature of the world, right? And the causes and conditions of certain outcomes, right? We just can't make it up, right? When anything matters, we know this, right? But there's so many areas where people...

feel like they can form strong opinions based on nothing, and it's fine. And it is fine when you're talking about something that doesn't matter. But when things matter, let's acknowledge that there are gradations of expertise.

And when experts fail, as they do, when experts get captured by political ideologies, which has happened of late, that is only correctable. by recourse to other sources of expertise right now. So if a non-expert notices that the... You know, some body of famous scientists is not, they're not functioning like scientists. They're functioning like political activists. That's fine. That's worth noticing.

worth criticizing but the the deeper error will only be corrected by people who can who really understand the science right and when someone some you know rogue scientists foists a proper scientific fraud on us that gets detected and and answered by more science and real science honest science it's not some other mode of non-expertise that comes online that really can solve this problem. So I'm not saying there's no role to be played for non-specialists.

have forming opinions about things i mean that that's also fine i mean we just to be an educated person in the world you're entitled to your own opinion but the cash value of all of this eventually has to it all has to eventually terminate in real methods of getting real knowledge and almost invariably that's a story of People who have specialized in these areas at great cost, with respect to time at least, they're the ones who are anchoring our understanding.

Now, all of this is made more confusing because on any topic and on any given day, you can find a credentialed expert, someone who on paper looks like the perfect sort of person to be talking to, who's... gone properly nuts and will say all kinds of things about, you know, they'll often say that they were denied a Nobel Prize. That's one of the first things to come tumbling out of their mouths.

That's usually a tell that there's something wrong with this person. But there are lots of cranks out there who do have PhDs, who are MDs, who on paper you really can't. You can't criticize their participation in the conversation, whether it's on vaccines or epidemics or, you know, to move to...

history and politics, you know, the war in Ukraine or the war in Gaza. I mean, there are people with PhDs in the relevant disciplines who are nuts or who are captured by some other interests that... that you know we could might only suspect right i mean there are people who have never said a bad word about russia for whatever reason or putin for whatever reason and and and uh you know it's entirely our fault that the war in ukraine

happened. Putin helplessly invaded based on the provocations of America and NATO allies. The picture is a muddy one because you have arguing for the difference between experts and non-experts. We can seem to be arguing for mere credentialism, just like you should only be talking to PhDs in the relevant disciplines. And of course we're not doing that. And the lie is put to that.

heuristic, the moment you find a properly credentialed expert or somebody who should have been an expert speaking nonsense, right? So it's never the case.

that we argue from authority. I mean, the argument from authority, that phrase is always the name of an intellectual error, right? There's no real authority on a topic. who's saying, X is true because I say so, and I'm a world-recognized authority on the topic. I mean, that's just not how anyone argues. And it is, in fact, true that any Nobel laureate...

can be embarrassed by the question of an undergraduate student or the comment of an undergraduate student if he or she is not making sense, right? So it's always a matter of... of making the best of the data and logical arguments so as to make the case for anything. So no one, again, no one is really relying on authority, but... Authority still matters because we don't, none of us have the bandwidth to run down every fact and every opinion.

to their sources right no it's like it's like the fact that no matter how educated you are most of what you believe is going to be the result of at least provisionally, except in the accounts of what most authorities on a given topic say in any given year, right? So it's just like, and that is rational to do because of... the structure of incentives that govern scientific conversation. Scientists are in the business of proving other scientists wrong, of checking their data.

of being skeptical and then being won over by evidence. They're even in the business of proving themselves wrong. I mean that probably doesn't happen as much as it should, but it still happens. It's really only in science. where your reputation can improve by noticing that you were wrong. Right? Even spectacularly so. And that's just to say that there are... While science is not without its capacity for error and even for fraud, they can go undetected for a time.

it is the best context we have for trying to get at the truth and therefore It is rational to default to what the preponderance of experts in any given field believe at any given moment. Again, at the leading edges of controversy, there will be debates and there will be this kind of churn.

of opinion, but not in the heart of any scientific discipline. I mean, there are things that are just well-established. And the novel and contrarian opinion on those well-established facts is almost always wrong.

And especially when it's being put forward by a – let's take the case of RFK Jr., right, who to the horror of any sane – scientist or doctor is basically running the medical establishment for the United States at the moment. He's someone who's, when you look at his track record, he's a lawyer by training, an activist by nature, and somebody who's given to spreading lies and half-truths with great alacrity.

and monetizing that whole project. He's done this for decades. You check the sources that he cites in his books, and you come up with completely fallacious readings of real sources. and imagined ones uh i mean it's just a it's he's a total mess when when it comes to actually uh talking about the the facts in his case around vaccines

Strangely, he's not such a mess when talking about climate change, right? He'll rely on the expertise of most scientists around that, but he won't for vaccines. But to rely on someone like that is... is almost guaranteed to manufacture errors and misunderstandings. And that in independent media is highly non-obvious, it seems. And we're paying a price for that. Yeah, that's a great example with RFK. And I am really concerned about this whole anti-vax.

resurgence. I think, you know, it feels a bit like Groundhog Day. This is the kind of thing that came up in sceptical circles 20 years ago. And it seems mostly like, well, people from your neck of the woods, Sam, you know, you know, it's Jim Carrey and people from the West Coast of America who really like

chakra and yoga we're utterly convinced uh that that vaccines caused autism and uh during the pandemic we know we saw a huge resurgence of anti-vax sentiment that's kind of translated in a lot of ways to a resurgence of polio I've seen that in the States, measles in the UK as well and further afield. A lot of people will attribute that to a sort of distrust or a loss of trust in governing authorities and institutions.

I put it down to a kind of proliferation of anti-vax misinformation. I suppose my question is, I mean, how likely...

Are we now to see people roll up their sleeve for a vaccination during the next pandemic, given all the damage that's been done during COVID? Yeah, no, I'm quite worried about that. I mean, it's... The rate of vaccination, I think, is coming down for all the sicknesses you mentioned and more even now. I mean, this used to be a problem.

I think almost exclusively on the left. Now it's a problem on the right and the left. I remember something like 10 years ago, it was the case that in some of the more well-to-do... left-leaning areas in california you know on the west side of los angeles or up in marin county in north of san francisco the rates of vaccination for kids in private schools was lower than the rates of vaccination

in many countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Oh, wow. I mean, that's just how dumb, dumb gets in the developed world. Yeah, I think, I don't know how far we're going to fall, but it's reasonable to worry that we're, you know, with the head of the HHS, RFK Jr., who is absolutely sure that the CIA killed both his uncle and his father. He's – we have the people in charge recommending cod liver oil to –

to those who are needing to respond to the first significant outbreak of measles we've had in quite some time. It's just an own goal on our entire society. At some point, we will realize it.

How do you kind of then balance in terms of being outspoken? I mean, you've been critical of Joe Rogan. You've been critical, very critical of Elon Musk and I think Brett Weinstein. And these are kind of people you would have considered either, you know.

associates or friends uh at some point and obviously joe hosts the biggest platform on the planet at this point i think elon musk is uh you know the richest man on the planet you know one of the most powerful but you have a habit of pissing off really powerful people come to think of it and i was just wondering how you decide to take the plunge to do this publicly versus managing a personal relationship and you know weighing it up against the blowback you might receive

Well, I take the plunge quite reluctantly, honestly. I mean, it doesn't give me any pleasure to be criticizing a friend or a former friend in public. In certain of these cases, I've tried in private and failed to get through to the person. In others, I just, because the person has such a large... public-facing profile and is visibly spreading so much misinformation, in certain cases inadvertently, in certain cases I think quite intentionally.

That would be Elon. I have to say something. It would just be irresponsible for me not to say something given my platform and the demands of my audience. But it's not fun. And it's... And I honestly don't know... As far as the ethics of it, I don't know where the sweet spot is, really. I mean, there's something about... I think, loyalty to a friend that is valuable, right? So if somebody's still a friend in good standing and you...

You realize you have a choice to say something publicly about how confused they are. I think it's reasonable to be slower to pull the trigger. on that criticism than you you would be if if that person's a stranger um but i don't know how reasonable it is and i don't know how slow one should be but in in the cases you mentioned i just you know I just decided that I couldn't resist any longer. It just was no longer... It was no longer...

ethical to do so because again, I've seen the evidence of how effective their communication has been and it hasn't been and the effect has not been good. You.

publicly, you know, came off Twitter, announced that's what you was going to do. And I think you laid your reasons out at the time. Was this something that you decided before Elon Musk took it over? Was it related to that or is it a completely separate thing? Well, I'd been thinking about it for a while because I'd been noticing slowly, slowly admitting to myself just how toxic the platform was to my life personally. It was just my engagement with it.

while in comparison with the engagement of others seems completely normal, that was not an especially compulsive tweeter. But I just noticed that... Almost every bad thing that had happened in my life for about a decade was the result of my engagement with Twitter. It sounds strange to say it, but it's apart from... illness and mishaps with kids, a kid breaking a wrist ice skating, things like that. It was all Twitter.

And they were significantly deranging things, things that took weeks or even months to dig out from, things that just subsumed my attention. Far too long. Things that I felt I needed to respond to in one podcast after another. It was all Twitter. And it was all this, I'm convinced, errant signal.

that was just not even worth paying attention to. I mean, now I still trend on Twitter, apparently, because someone will attack me. Elon will attack me or Tucker Carlson. Somebody will attack me by name. And apparently that'll go stratospheric on Twitter. And it simply doesn't matter, right? Because I'm not there, it doesn't matter at all psychologically.

um when i hear about it because some you know people occasionally send me a tweet you know very often from from elon um because he's the biggest person on the platform And, you know, they'll ask me if I'm okay, right? Or is there anything they can do to help? And literally, it has no effect on my life at all. It's incredible.

mismatch between what is happening on Twitter and what is happening in the real world. Again, if you're lucky to be appropriately inoculated against the effect of you know attempted reputational murders on twitter right and that's i you know and i've taken some pains to to protect myself from that i've built a large enough audience that i can talk to on my own terms, so that I don't have to worry about what Elon says about me on Twitter and the lies he spreads. But no, when I left...

It wasn't because he had taken over the platform, although that's when I left. It was based on my engagement with it and what I saw it was doing to Elon as a user of the platform. So Elon at that point was a friend. Actually, our friendship has started to unravel based on some differences of opinion around COVID, but it hadn't fully unraveled.

And I just watched his life spiral out of control based on his addiction to Twitter. And that's really, it was quite evident that that's what was happening. And I saw in that kind of funhouse mirror of his Twitter use the dysfunction in my own life. It's like when I saw it, here's a guy who's got basically... No time to waste, right? He's running half a dozen companies, apparently quite successfully.

He's playing the biggest financial game and technological game there is to be played. And he is totally addicted to responding to bullshit on Twitter. at all hours of the day and night, insofar as I even have a hundredth of that problem in my life, I realize I don't want it, right? It's just like, this is... This is madness. What is going on with this person who I know at that point reasonably well, or at least thought I did? It's just...

It just seemed like the worst commercial for the effects of social media you could imagine. Here's a guy who has so much to lose. And he's busy losing it, busy throwing it away with both hands in this digital cesspool. And he's so addicted to it that he now needs to buy the platform so as to make it conform to his... tastes right it was just bonkers and so I when he so it was when he bought it but it was again it was not because at that point I was still agnostic as to whether or not

he was going to be able to improve the platform in a variety of ways. And I recognized that it was biased in certain ways and it was awful in all kinds of ways because I was complaining about it even then. It only got worse under his stewardship. I think that should be quite obvious. But it was his compulsion around it as a user and his compulsive buying of it and all the crazy...

the crazy claims of the people who, the so-called Twitter files, journalists. I mean, just the fixation on this as this absolutely essential piece of conversation. when it was so obviously deranging almost anyone who was coming in contact with it, I just thought, okay, this is a psychological experiment that I want to opt out of. And so that's when I yanked it.

Yeah, I'm getting a distinct feeling of no regrets there from you, Sam. And digital cesspool, yeah, that's apt. And things have got worse, unbelievably. I mean...

Obviously, we can obviously write off Twitter as a mode of communication for you now, but what do you gravitate towards the most in the way you release content or communicate? I mean, you write books, you podcast, you substack. you know, public appearances, videos, things like that. Have you had to choose one and only one to do? Where do you feel you are best at, you know, getting your message across, distilling your ideas? And can we expect a new book at any point? Yeah, I mean, but...

Writing books, unfortunately, has just been a great opportunity cost. They take much longer to write. They reach fewer people. There's this crazy time lag between when you're done and when they're published. And that's usually something like 11 months. So it's just... Yeah, I haven't done it. I will do it again, I'm convinced, just because...

Writing is just the best way to work out ideas, and so I miss doing more of it. But for me, it's mostly the podcast. The podcast is the place where I can reach the most people. Although Substack, I guess I reached the same audience. Everyone who subscribes to either gets both. The time course is exactly what it should be. I mean, the moment I'm done, we publish it, and so it's immediate. And...

Yeah, I mean, there's something – I'm a fan of – I've been doing more video podcasts, although I'm not such a fan of video. I think there's something amazing about audio because it is the thing that is – People have found, and I'm one of these people, people have found at least an hour or two in their day that they didn't know they had to consume information because they can listen while they do other things, while they're driving, while they're working out, while they're taking a walk.

And video doesn't really answer to that need. And there's just something more, I think there's something more intimate about audio. I mean, just kind of being right in the ear without the distraction of what you're... looking at although you know granted you can get more information uh seeing people as well but it's um i don't know i just think audio is really the sweet spot when it's when you're when you're just trying to talk about ideas

to an audience that cares what you think. In terms of writing, I suppose it's fair to say you kind of rose to prominence with your critique of religion, you know, Letters to a Christian Nation, The End of Faith, and I think your criticism of Islam. caught the most controversy for you at the time. It probably feels like a bit of a lifetime ago now, just focusing on fundamentalist Islam. And I think in the intervening...

That topic comes back around, as you know. Yeah, absolutely. It's never far off. It actually feels like he was quite ahead of the game in that respect. But it feels like, in a sense, the new atheist, skeptical, circle, human, has kind of won the battle. It feels like, you know, Christianity...

Christianity's almost on life support in many ways. And what we've seen kind of fill that hole has been a little bit of a resurgence of Christianity, in fact. And some people make the argument that Christianity would serve as a quite useful defence. against, say, the increase of Islam or kind of godless progressive ideologies. I think this is something Douglas Murray argues for. I think the problem with Douglas Murray is he's fairly convincing. Richard Dawkins announced himself as a cultural

Christian as well. A lot of people... took that as a strange kind of admission of faith when he's always kind of felt that way he kind of said it was preferable to islam in many ways and so do you i mean is it the is it the better the devil you know is the less of two evils maybe a resurgence of christianity

might be an effective measure? Yeah, well, obviously you can't believe in the doctrine of Christianity just because it's useful, even if you were convinced that it was useful or even necessary, right? It's like...

Let's just say, let's just stipulate that the only way the West is going to resist the intrusions and ultimate... triumph of of political islam is to become devoutly christian right i don't think that's true i don't see any reason why that would be true but let's just say it were That's not a path by which you can actually believe in the physical resurrection of Jesus.

Right. I mean, that doesn't provide any evidence for the physical resurrection of Jesus. What about a sort of cultural perspective then? So maybe, you know, I don't believe in any of the, you know, supernatural mumbo jumbo, but in terms of cultural identity and tradition. maybe these things serve a purpose? Well, I just think that if you're just talking about a culture that is in opposition to the theocratic belligerence of Islam, you don't need...

your own version of a desiccated, non-committal theocracy. What you need is a commitment to enlightenment values and real freedom. and real intellectual honesty and an unwillingness to bend the knee to the... malicious delusions of people who want nothing to do with your enlightenment values. It's a very stark zero-sum contest between, okay, do we...

On a hundred points, but just take one. Are women the political equals of men or not? Are we going to value them like actual homo sapiens? Or are we going to treat them like cattle? or chattel, or, you know, essentially the property of the men in their lives. You know, pick your... Pick the flavor you prefer. I mean, there's only one that is acceptable to me and I think any morally sane person in the 21st century. But...

Islam, not just jihadist Islam, and unfortunately not just Islamism. I mean, real, just virtually any flavor of Islam, even the most... seemingly compatible with secular Enlightenment values equivocates on that point to a degree that I think we should find intolerable. You know, the wearing of the veil. Wearing of the Veil is not a choice that most enlightened women make so as to throw off the male gaze, and it's not an expression of female empowerment.

It's an expression of female subservience to men in cultures where men will treat them like whores or worse if they don't wear the veil, right? I mean, these are honor cultures in which men view... the behavior of women as a um an extension of their personal honor right and so if their daughter or sister or wife is unveiled, you know, and therefore open to the predatory glances of other men, right? That's a...

a besmirchment of their own honor, right? Okay, this is just a bad piece of software, culturally, to be running on the brain of any man. The whole culture needs a firmware upgrade, right? And that firmware upgrade is called the Enlightenment or modernity or...

secular, you know, pluralistic values of open society. I completely agree with you here. I am a proponent of secular enlightenment values, but I just find that it seems like the sort of tribal... iconography of the christian church maybe in the uk at the minute is slightly more appealing than me waving around a copy of david hume or something like that it doesn't seem yeah doesn't seem like it's very easy to convince people that all we need is a sort of secular

Recommitment rather to a sort of secular enlightenment. It feels like it's going the other way. I'm seeing it with a lot of younger people in their 20s now, vocally identifying with Christianity in a way. that they see it as kind of reclaiming their Britishness, similar to how it's wed to nationalism in America. And I'm just wondering how we tackled that particular problem. Well, ultimately, I do think it's dangerous because it's a...

Implicit in that is, certainly in the American context, there's probably an implicit racism in that. There's a kind of Christian nationalism, which is sort of code for white supremacy on some level.

It is a fallacy. I'm not saying that secular culture doesn't need more innovation in areas of... Spirituality, to use a loaded word, or the building of community. I think people yearn for something more profound than just... scrolling on their iPhones and making money and just the sheer worldliness of secular culture when you strip religion out of it.

People find other ways of getting together. They become fans of their local sports team or they join a book club. There's a piecemeal way of building community. that people enjoy and people get you can get really into the arts and all of that's good you know you can go to a concert and that's and and feel a kind of brotherhood of that

enthusiasm, if only for a few hours. You can go to conferences. I mean, there are people who go to conferences somewhat regularly and those conferences serve as a kind of anchor point to various communities. But, yeah, you know, it would be wonderful to have a beautiful building in every city on Earth that...

It didn't require that you pretend to believe Iron Age pseudoscience and and fake history uh so as to be in good standing in that building right like like it would be and it would be great for that building to enshrine the deepest humanitarian and secular values, values that we can readily agree about. What are we doing here? The whole project is to figure out...

how to make life worth living, and having achieved that, how to make the future better than the past, or at least not worse. And there are many dimensions to that project. Some are economic, some are medical, some are educational, but some are contemplative and ethical, right? Some are a matter of thinking about the deepest questions. and giving attention to those and ignoring the notifications on your phone for an hour or for a day or for longer than that.

So I'm not saying we don't need profundity, and we don't need awe, and we don't need a sense of the sacred. I think we do, and I think that's readily available without believing any bullshit. And so that's the thing that the people who are... swinging back to Christianity or getting wrong is that they don't see that there's a perfectly rational alternative.

to each of the things they think they're going to get out of that project. I mean, it is possible to become very much like Jesus, right, or whoever Jesus was, I mean, who he seemed to be in his best moods in the gospel. without believing anything absurd. I mean, you can actually have a mystical life completely within the purview of... a rational scientific engagement with facts i mean you can take psychedelics or you can meditate for hours or days or weeks or months and experience

truly transformative things in the laboratory of your own mind. And all of that can be understood in a 21st century context. by reference to the best ideas humans have ever had. We don't have the right to our religious provincialism anymore. Certainly intellectually we don't. It's just not defensible. So if you're becoming just a cultural Christian, what does that mean apart from just wanting to get together with your neighbors in a beautiful building?

If it means more than that, if it means maybe you think that the Jesus story is real, and I mean real all the way down to maybe he was resurrected or maybe he... performed various miracles, or maybe he can hear your thoughts right now. Maybe he's coming back. Maybe he's not too fond of homosexuality, as witnessed in Paul. Yeah, then that becomes increasingly irrational and divisive and hostile to the truly common project of understanding what's really going on in the world.

Yeah, it's a good answer, and I'm just aware that we've got about 15 minutes left, and I'm tempted to either ask you a question about Donald Trump or about free will. And I suppose I don't really have a choice in that sense. Let's see what you do of your own free will. Oh, Jesus, the pressure.

OK, well, I think your opinions on Donald Trump are well documented. So maybe if this free will answer system, we might get a little bit to it. But let's say if I'm at a dinner party, for instance, and I decide that I want to, well.

i suppose ruin it by convincing everyone there that there's no such thing as free will and it's an illusion what would be a good go-to analogy you could make or fact you could provide that would be quite compelling Well, from a third-person side, I'm just talking about causality, talking about how human brains work, acknowledging the fact that...

Everybody's brain is in its current state at the most basic level, neurophysiologically, based on the... prior occurrences of genes being transcribed and neurons being built and environmental influences being registered. And when you honestly look at all those processes, at no point does the conscious self you're talking to, at no point did it create any of those causes and conditions for its current state.

The next thought that is going to spring to mind is a result of all of that. The next intention, the next desire, the next preference, the next intuition. So from a third-person side, I mean, just viewing people as physical systems that are not separate from the universe, there really is just the universe doing its thing. It's doing its thing deterministically, you know, just one domino is falling and hitting the next.

And if you believe that there's a component of randomness in there, then there's some jiggle to the system that is indeterministic and therefore intrinsically unpredictable. But in neither case, neither with dominoes falling or dice rolling, do you get a picture of a will that can independently author its own doings.

Right. So it used to be thought in traditionally in philosophy and science that the paradox of free will is that from the third person side, you've got this mere concatenation of causes. which neither deterministically or randomly don't make much sense in mapping to the freedom people think they have. But...

On the first-person side, we've got this robust sense of freedom, freedom to author your actions, that you are the decider, and that it's impossible to square those two pictures. But that's really not the picture at all.

probably the only original thing I add to this conversation, my argument has always been that if you look more closely at the first-person side, the reasons for believing in free will also evaporate. right so that people don't feel as free really as they think they do um and there is no first person evidence for free will when you look at how you're

decisions get made, when you look at how your intuitions appear in the first place, when you look at how thoughts arise, everything is just springing into view out of nothing, right? The next thought simply arises. You know, if I ask you, remember something, anything, you'll remember something from, what, an hour ago, a day ago, 10 years ago. So something will spring into view. And the idea that you chose that...

subjectively, if you pay attention, you should see that that doesn't make any sense. In no sense did you choose it, and if you were to learn... that there's some diabolical genius with a computer in the next room feeding you your thoughts, while there's no reason to believe that such a person exists.

You have to admit that your phenomenology, what it's like to be you, is totally compatible with the existence of such a person. Because again, everything just appears. And this is true for the most deliberate... decision right you you're deciding whether to get married say right you know have i picked the right person and you're going back and forth back and forth back and forth you're talking to friends and you're you're you know

waking up from dreams and and you're trying to integrate all the information available and you're remembering the good times and remembering the bad times and you're should i propose to this person right at a certain point Your decision process just terminates, and it terminates for reasons you can't inspect, right? You land on one intuition or the other. If you suddenly change your mind, well then...

You suddenly change your mind. Your mind suddenly changes itself, right? You're the witness of that perturbation. And if you suddenly lurch back, you say, no, no, no, I'm not the witness. I'm the decider right now. Where did that come from? Where did that thought come from subjectively? You have no idea. You can't inspect it. And the fact that in certain cases it didn't come, right, it could have come, just look at what it was like to change your mind the last time you changed your mind.

Or to fail to change your mind the last time you followed through on some plan that you were expecting to follow through on. In neither case can you inspect the causality there.

And if you say, well, no, I understand the causality. I had a conversation with a friend, and that was very influential, right? But okay, it was influential. You didn't choose for it to be influential, that you get influenced precisely to the degree you get influenced and not a jot further. You don't decide to be convinced by an argument. You simply are convinced by that argument to the degree that you are. You don't decide to find something dubious. The people who are listening to us now...

who are finding what I'm saying totally unpersuasive, they didn't choose to be unpersuaded, right? And if they're persuaded to whatever degree, they're not choosing that. I mean, that's just not the way rationality works. They have precisely the freedom they would have if I told them to add up a column of numbers and get to a final sum.

right if i say oh you know add two and then four and then seven and then eight right there there's literally no freedom you're you're you're free to make an error but you know you're not doing that on purpose and when you get to the correct sum you're not free to have arrived there. So you're not free. If I say to you that a certain thing is a fact or that a certain argument is valid, if you agree...

is just like adding up that column of numbers and getting the correct sum. If you disagree, it's just like adding up that column of numbers and spotting the error that I made, right? Or making an error yourself. There's no variant of any of this that gives people what they think they have, which is... This libertarian freedom that if they could rewind the movie of their lives, they could play the current scene differently.

In no sense is it true to say that if you and I could rewind the movie of our lives and have this conversation again, we could do it differently, that I would utter a different sentence in this place. I mean, the only way in which that's true is if there's some randomness involved.

And the randomness is precisely the thing for which I can take no responsibility. It is not a basis for my freedom of will, right? It's not part of my will. If I'm going to say, if I would speak this sentence differently, If we could run this experiment a trillion times, if half the time I would say something quite different here... based on everything being the same, every microstate and every synapse in my brain being the same up until this moment, which is to say if there's some...

dice rolling in the fabric of reality that's just causing me to say different things because there is no stability here. There's just this intrusion of randomness. quantum or otherwise. Okay, but that is not the freedom people think they have. That's just the rolling of dice. That's just randomness. That's just the weather blowing through. That's just things falling and breaking.

It's not you doing what you think you're doing. The you that is doing what you think you're doing is conforming to a pattern. that you recognize to be yourself. If you were randomly doing things, I mean, just to linger on this random point for a second, If you were suddenly randomly doing things, that would be precisely the situation in which you would say, honestly, I don't know what came over me. I don't know. That's not me. I'm sorry. That's not, you know.

I don't know why I said that. I don't know why I ordered that. I don't know why I reached for that. I don't know why I didn't mean to do that. That's just not me. Sorry. Somebody else is playing this part of the video game.

I'm not sure why my controller is not working, but that's not me. So as a random, this really is not what people think of as freedom. And yet it is proffered by the intellectuals who... who think that quantum mechanics offers some basis for free will, it's proffered as a basis for, a non-deterministic basis for freedom. No, it simply isn't. It's a basis for unpredictability. But in any case, if you look subjectively...

at what you're calling your free will, you'll see that just one thing happens after the next. And there's a freedom in that. I mean, this may sound like a depressing picture for people, but... On the contrary, it's totally liberating. It's liberating of the feeling you call I. It's liberating of the ego. Free will is the other side of the coin of the sense of the self that senses its separateness from...

not just other selves of the world, not just the world itself, but from experience. You know, people feel like... People feel that they're not identical to their experience. They feel like they're having an experience, that they're appropriating it from some point of view that is this unchanging self, moment to moment. And that is the construct.

that imagines that it has a will that is free, right? This is kind of this radically indigestible, unchangeable, alienated... atomized homunculus in the middle of experience that is doing the willing doing the thinking doing the appropriating that's vulnerable to to everything that might intrude upon it It's that sense of I that gets targeted in meditation and gets ultimately recognized to be spurious. And it's that when people have peak experiences...

where they sense that they've merged with something bigger than themselves. Ironically, it's this experience that is at the bottom of people's religious convictions too. Both historically, you know, this gets enshrined as a matter of doctrine in the various religions. And personally, I mean, it is the thing that...

seems to provide data for the veracity of their religious beliefs when they begin to intuit it or experience it fully. I mean, if you're in church and you're praying to Jesus and you're looking up at the stained glass window... And you're wondering if any of this stuff is real. And then suddenly you feel lifted out of your sense of separateness, right? And you feel that there's just oneness with all of reality, right?

Most Christians are going to feel that's data in favor of Christianity, whereas it's not. It's data in favor of just the very reality that consciousness doesn't feel like a self prior to self-identification, prior to this. this spurious mapping of a subject in the middle of experience that's separate from experience. But you can interrogate that directly without believing anything about the... divine origin of of specific books or the the virgin birth birth of of uh you know historical people

And if you've just tuned in, that was Sam Harris on how to torpedo a dinner party successfully and effectively. Yeah, and I think the whole...

idea that we're not in control in a sense is very uncomfortable for many people. But it is fascinating. Have I got time just to quickly probe you about Donald Trump? I think... Obviously, he is constitutionally barred. from running for a third term. I think after he didn't really concede the last time he lost the election, all bets are off. What are your thoughts on this matter in terms of will he attempt to try and run again? Yeah, I mean, I've heard...

Steve Bannon alleged that that's a serious possibility. I'm not quite sure how, barring a constitutional amendment. Yeah, I mean, you know... Like so many things with Trump, it's just an endless pattern of norm violations. You don't know what's a joke until suddenly... Real things are being broken as a result of that joke. So I don't know what to expect there, apart from the fact that it's obviously unconstitutional now and preposterous.

that doesn't mean he couldn't whip up some populist frenzy around this possibility right i mean it's just it's the man is capable of creating immense harm even when things are ridiculous That's the truly perverse and nonetheless effective quality of his... life in politics, right? I mean, the ridiculousness of the man, the ridiculousness of the movement, the ridiculousness of so many of the convictions of people.

who support him, the comedy of it, the entertainment value of it, he must be joking of it, manages to... make it much harder to deal with, you know, journalistically and politically. Even when he's creating tremendous harm, many people don't take him seriously when they should. even when the harms are obvious. I mean, it's quite strange. And so it's part of, honestly, I think at this point it's part of the fascist playbook to be a clown up until the last moment.

Right. You can clown your way into a proper tyranny. And I think, you know, I don't know how far this is going to go. I'm hopefully not. much further than it has, but I do view our democracy as being threatened by this whole... This cultic phenomenon that has subsumed the Republican Party. That's a good answer. Thanks, Sam. I really appreciate you coming on and speak to me. It's good to see you. It's good to catch up. And please keep doing what you're doing.

Yeah. Thank you, Stephen. Great to talk to you. Cheers.