Sam Harris on populism, polarization, and his beef with the left and the right
Sam Harris discusses how misinformation on social media, especially Twitter under Elon Musk, fuels polarization and prevents good-faith dialogue. He argues most disagreements could be solved with correct information, but warns that AI will worsen the problem. Harris critiques both left and right: the left's focus on group outcomes and the right's myth of the self-made individual.
Chapters
In practicing affirmative action and in following the left's identitarian politics, we are caring about race every bit as much as white supremacists care about race. We have to get to a place where skin color is no more interesting to us than eye color or hair color, right? And that may seem a quixotic dream at this point, but it's clearly possible. We wanna live in a circumstance where There's real abundance and the abundance has been spread around. We wealthy people and we lucky people should understand the pragmatism of all that, if not just the actual ethics, right? If you can't feel compassion for people who are not as lucky as you are, at least you could feel some wise sense of self-preservation that you just, you want to pay some kind of ransom to these disparities. in luck, right? Because eventually the pitchforks are coming. So yeah, I don't know what the right level of equality is, but I just know we want all boats to continue to rise with each new tide. 50 years from now, if the future is going to be better than the present, we want it to be better for everybody.
On today's episode of Upstream, our guest is Sam Harris, who needs no introduction to many podcast listeners. Sam, of course, is an author, podcaster, and public intellectual. He's known for having crucial conversations about consciousness, morality, and the pursuit of truth. In this episode, we cover Sam's most pressing concerns around populism, Twitter, navigating group disparities, and we also talk about why Sam is hated by the left and the right. Without further ado, here's Sam. Sam, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining.
Oh, thank you. Happy to be here.
So yeah, the last time we spoke was Clubhouse, uh, 2020, uh, where we had you on the, on the show then. Uh, the world has changed a lot since then, and I'm curious how you conceptualize your, uh, intellectual projects today, the big questions that you're, you're asking. And I'll take a stab at characterizing what they've been up to this point, whereas I see you doing a few different things. One is you're really trying to understand kind of the big fundamental questions of the universe, of the human mind, of ethics and morals. And you're also trying to— you have a self-betterment streak via the meditation, the psychedelics. You're not just trying to understand, you're also trying to live better yourself and also show ways for other people to do that. And then I also see you as not being afraid or being interested in kind of upleveling the conversation at large and not being afraid to expose kind of inconsistencies or harsh truths, whether it was religious extremism the past couple decades, whether it was on the Christian side or the Islam side. How would you edit my characterization of the big projects that you've undertaken or the through lines of the threads that tie your big projects together?
Yeah, well, it's really one central question which has 2 types of answers. The question is just, what does it mean to live a good life? What does it take to live a good life? How can we live the best possible life? We do this individually and collectively, right? So there are individual answers, the answers that you can apply to your own way of being in the world and your behavior and your thinking and your relationships and your career. You know, there's everything you can reach in your access to the world that amounts to a variable you can change. And then there are the things that we can only do together, right? The coordination problems, the cooperation problems that we must solve together and that no one, no matter how successful and well insulated from the vicissitudes of life, can solve for himself or herself in isolation, right? I mean, it's just so— and that goes to questions of, you know, larger questions of systems and incentives and how you build a good society and why societies fail. And, you know, what, you know, is there a version of democracy that's truly healthy and stable? And, you know, is capitalism the best way to organize an economy? And so these are all— these are much bigger questions that— we all get to vote on in some sense, if only voting by our neglect of these questions, but we can't solve these, we can't answer them in isolation. So I continue to be impressed at how counterintuitive some of the answers are in both domains and how certain forms of happiness and well-being really You know, are totally divorceable from what's happening in the world, and, and other forms just simply are not. And, and we just have to be kind of clear-eyed as we move through our lives, both separately and together, and, and try to navigate here. I, I view it all in the end, I view it as a, as a personal and collective navigation problem, you know, because this is where you bring in questions of ethics and morality and, you know, ultimately politics and law. The question we each have to ask moment by moment of ourselves and of others with whom we're living in cooperation, however fraught, is what do we do next? What do we do right now? What do we do next week? What do we do next year in light of what we know or think we know about the nature of the world?
And what are the even more granular questions or topics you're really wrestling with right now? mid-2023 in terms of what to do next or where we're going? What are the areas you're really trying to make sense of or evolve your thinking on?
Anyone who's listened to my podcast knows I've been whinging about this for quite some time, but I've been quite worried for now years about a pervasive misinformation problem, disinformation problem online and especially on social media. And I think AI is only going to compound that in the near term. Whether it helps us solve it ultimately is an open question. Really, I mean, it probably preceded Trump, but with the election of Trump in 2016, I began to feel that we just, our politics is so broken, and it's so broken on the basis of our respective siloing into echo chambers online, that We really are struggling now and generally failing to have a fact-based discussion about anything of significance across party lines, right? So we just can't converge on solutions because we can't converge on even a basic statement about the nature of the problem. And we've become mutually incomprehensible to one another. I mean, you look at what other people are paying attention to who are outside of your bubble, Uh, and the things that they're most animated by, and they just— the life choices they seem to be making and the, and the changes they seem to be urging on society. And they look increasingly deranged. I mean, we're just— we're— it's like we're galaxies that are, you know, you know, redshifted and are, are, are, you know, speeding away from one another faster and faster. And we've, we've built a, a kind of digital multiverse for ourselves where we're just not— We're not in the same space cognitively, and therefore emotionally, on so many questions. And so if we can't talk about facts, fundamentally can't talk about facts, then we can't decide whether an election was run legally and well, or whether it was just a total fraud and we've just witnessed the end of our democracy, right? We can't Decide whether there's a global pandemic, what its origins are, how big it is, what— how we should respond to it. And we're left with this kind of piecemeal response to changes as they, as they're imposed on us. And it's just, it just becomes one long emergency that we, we can't respond to well. So, uh, so I'm very worried about— The information tools we've built, the style of conversation we're having and failing to have with one another. As you probably know, I got off Twitter some months ago, and so personally, that was a— it was only a big decision in retrospect. In the moment of making it, I really gave it only like 5 seconds thought. I reached some kind of tipping point. in myself. I mean, I'd obviously been thinking about it in the background for a while, but I just— at a certain point, it was just like, okay, this is, this is now about, about as simple as taking my hand off a hot stove, right? This is just— why? What is obviously degrading my quality of life in almost every respect? Why do this another second longer? And so I, you know, I just, uh, yanked it. But, um, In retrospect, it was such an enormous change in my life day to day, hour by hour, even minute by minute, given how I was using the platform. And I really don't count myself among the most addicted pathological users of Twitter. I think I only tweeted on average once a day. And what that meant in practice was me tweeting like 3 times one day and then not tweeting anything for several days, right? So I was not an Elon Musk-like character on Twitter or anything like it. But when I look back on it, it was one of the worst things I did with my time and attention over the last decade. Almost everything that is bad that has happened to me professionally and personally in the last decade was the result of what I was doing on Twitter.
Right.
And what I was seeing on Twitter that I felt that I needed to respond to Because it was being signal boosted in that context. And I'm perfectly happy to imagine that my experience on Twitter was by no means standard, right? I'm touching hot-button issues and I'm getting lots of pushback and I'm seeing the worst in many people. And many of these issues I'm touching are explicitly political and I don't align with the left or the right, so I'm getting pain from both the left and the right. So it's not Not the standard use case perhaps, but I see many, many people whose lives are recognizably deranged by Twitter and they seem to think it's a professional necessity or a personal point of integrity that they stay on the platform and just bang it out every day with faceless strangers who don't wish them well.
Scott Alexander from Slate Star Codex had a post a few years ago called, uh, Mistake Theory versus Conflict Theory, where he says, uh, that mistake theorists are people for whom they believe that if they just had the right information or the same information, they would, uh, they would come to terms. And so the quest for a mistake theorist is how do you uplevel the conversation, the tone of the conver— the subs— so that people can— Tim Urban's new book is along these lines, uh, and a mistake theorist believes in classical liberalism and free speech and marketplace of ideas, et cetera. Whereas a conflict theorist says, hey, actually there's some fundamental conflicts in society that can't be resolved. And the more you talk about them, the more you amplify those conflicts. And so we have to kind of create clever myths to distract people from that conflict or not bring up that conflict in the first place. And I still take you as more on the mistake theorist side. You've been a big proponent of the marketplace of ideas or free speech. But perhaps some— you know, you wrote a book about how one should never, you know, should rarely ever lie. We can get away with a lot more not lying or truth-telling than we think we can. And I still believe you to somewhat believe that, but— or mostly believe that, all that stuff, but maybe perhaps a bit tempered by the last decade of, uh, of, of social media. Would you edit anything to that characterization?
Well, yeah, no, I definitely would say I'm I'm a mistake theorist mostly, to take that framing, but I acknowledge that there are people who are not really willing to play that game, right? So the people who are almost by definition outside the conversation, given their dogmatic attachments and just their style of approaching any issue. They're bad faith actors who are not actually trying to reason on the basis of—
Facts.
of better arguments and better evidence. They're just trying to win. And they're just— so yeah, so you need the table stakes for mistake theory to be true is to have good faith actors who are actually open to dialogue, not just pretending to be open to dialogue. Right. And so When you recognize that you're not in that situation and can't fight your way toward that situation from where you're currently standing with the people you're trying to communicate with, well, then you have to adopt the other theory. But it's situational. But the thing that I worry about with these tools, again, social media being the most egregious example, but perhaps not the only one, is that— Even the best-intentioned mistake-theoretic sort of people are getting driven fairly insane, at least having their capacity for communication degraded by the incentives on these platforms and by their architecture, just how they use them, the brevity of a tweet, the retweet, the effects of a retweet, the fact that everyone is talking to their own audience and only seeming to talk to the person they're talking to. The fact that it's very difficult for people to keep track of who they're engaging with and to understand or care about the implications of signal boosting people who are bad faith actors. Again, the most egregious example of this now is Elon. Elon is signal boosting QAnon lunatics. And Pizzagate lunatics and antisemites. And I mean, just, he's engaging with these people. And so, you know, do I— does he know what he's doing? I don't know. I mean, he's a very busy guy, right? He should be too busy to be doing any of this, really. But he seems to have a lot of time for Twitter, but he's not taking the time to, to see who he's lending the, the gale force winds of his reputation to. And he's not seeing how much it's filling their sails, or if he is, he doesn't care, right? So that— I mean, those are 2 different interpretations of his character at the moment. They're both depressing, right? I mean, I guess the second is worse, but they're both dysfunctional. They're both creating manifest harm on the platform, and I would argue in the world. He should get his shit together, whatever, whatever, which, which one of those is true. So.
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You know, it's not just improving the signal of bad actors. It's spreading their lies, it's spreading their conspiracy theories, it's lending his reputation to fairly crazy and divisive ideas. So that's just not good. And in the clearness of consideration, he wouldn't want to be doing that, right? Let's just give him that benefit of the doubt, that he doesn't want to spend He doesn't want to share divisive conspiracy theories. He doesn't want to get people harassed out in the real world. You know, he doesn't want people to get doxxed and inundated with death threats. And like, well, that— but that is the effect of how he's tweeting. So there's something— there's— so either it's a problem with him or it's a problem with the platform or both, or it's a problem with all of us engaging these digital tools in a way that our genes have not not prepared us for. So we're the cousins of chimpanzees armed with lots of tools, and some of the tools are leveraging aspects of our psychology that don't seem altogether healthy. And the thing that made me convinced that I should get off Twitter was not so much all of the unpleasant stuff that was coming back at me, it was my My near certainty that seeing all that unpleasant stuff was distorting my picture of other human beings. Human beings were appearing worse to me than I think in fact they are, and yet I couldn't correct for the distortion by merely just conceptually understanding that as a fact.
Right.
Like, I knew, okay, I've met this person, I've had dinner with this person, this person now appears to me to be a psychopath on Twitter. But what I was left with was just more and more the feeling that this person was a fucking psychopath, right? And I didn't want to live with that day to day, right? And it's not just one person, it's lots of people and obviously lots of strangers. And there's just not that many psychopaths in the world. And yet my own life was becoming a kind of bug light for psychopaths or seeming psychopaths because of what I was seeing on Twitter.
Continuing to set the table here, My take is that you're critiqued by the left because you disagree with some of the core tenets of increasing part of the left, which is you believe in free speech, you believe in free markets, you believe in merit to some degree at least. And you also, I remember June 2020 on the protest around George Floyd, you had a solo episode. You were one of the only people at the time saying this, like, hey, I've looked at the stats around of police brutality or crime, and they're not what the media is making it seem like. We need to be more rational here. We need to be more cogent. And that, to many leftists, is sort of an ideological commitment that they have, which is sort of the oppression on this specific axis. And my takeaway, you're critiqued by the right is because you look at the abomination that is Trump, at the people around him, at the corruption, the election denial, and you say, hey, this is not okay. This is absolutely not okay. This is perhaps even existential. I remember in a previous conversation you, I, and Antonio García Martínez, and I believe Marc Andreessen had, we were talking about religion. Antonio was saying, hey, it was some version of like, don't take the beliefs, take religion seriously, but not literally. But then I think you had a very fair response, which is, this is what they're literally saying. Look at what they're saying. Look at what they're doing. What you, Antonio, think is religion is not what most people think is religion. And so I don't want to do the same thing here when I talk about the right. So what I want to do is I want to fast forward to a post-Trump era. Maybe that's 2024, maybe it's 2028. But at some point, Trump will be expunged from the Republican Party. And, you know, there will be less election denialism, etc. And I would posit that there is actually a— I wouldn't go so far as to say I'm a conflict theorist, but there's a fundamental conflict between the left and the right. You know, Chris Caldwell wrote this book called The Age of Entitlement. And his claim is that we have 2 irreconcilable constitutions, the original Constitution and civil rights law. And the reason why they're irreconcilable is because one is about individual rights and one is about group rights. And individual rights with freedom of association and group rights, which is special privileges for groups that have been marginalized, are directly in conflict with each other. The left has adopted the group rights category. The right has adopted the individual one. There's also a broader idea, which is The right is advocating for a certain set of cultural norms that used to satisfy a majority of the country. The majority is getting smaller and smaller about whether it's which we should teach our kids about gender or race or marriage or a certain set of cultural norms. And I see the left as optimizing for the marginalized of society. How do we make life better for them? And it's kind of the fringes, and the right says, hey, that sacrifices majority cohesion, et cetera. So I feel like these are fundamental conflicts that have to be resolved one way or the other. And that's why there's a fundamental conflict. That's why the conversation is so tainted. Would you quibble with my characterization there, or do you agree with that?
Yeah, well, I haven't read Caldwell's book, but I think that's an interesting way to think about it. I mean, the way I have been thinking about it is that it's obviously ethically and politically important and valid to acknowledge our history, our very dark history of treating certain groups badly, right? So there's just no— and race is the biggest variable perhaps in an American context, but it's not just race. You know, it's religion, it's sexuality and gender and sexual orientation. And so, yeah, so like, it's not that the explosion of racial grievance after George Floyd or the overreach of— or what many of us consider the overreach of the MeToo movement You know, when it first came on the scene. It's not that those are fundamentally surprising, right? Like, we get, you know, anyone who has criticized, you know, Black Lives Matter and MeToo at any level, even just at the margins, understands the history here and the validity of a backward-looking criticism of, you know, American politics. political history, right? So, but then the question is, what is true now and what should we do now, right? I mean, what, you know, what is true about race in America and to what degree are the ongoing inequalities that are, that are discernible across, you know, racial groups a matter of active racism? Producing them. You know, it's like if we, if we could wave a magic wand today and get rid of all the racists in America, uh, and all the so-called systemic racism, right, all of the, all of the policies that, that while perhaps not at all, not enforced by any conscious racist, are in effect racist in, in their application, right, and may, may have been originally racist in their conception. Depending on the policy. If we got rid of both of those things, what would happen? Right? How many murders would there be in Chicago this weekend if there were no more racists and no more racist policies?
Probably the same amount.
Yeah. I mean, so my assumption is we would have the same amount, right? So if you share that assumption, and I could certainly argue for that assumption, then you have to admit that, okay, well, whatever the problem of— the extant problem of racism is, you know, both, you know, psychological and systemic, solving it is not the answer to what's happening in Chicago, right? And it's probably not the answer to many other things we're right to worry about, right? So what are those answers? And how do we, you know, how do we address these real problems that are getting people killed and enshrining various disparities in wealth and health and educational outcomes across generations? Right. How do we solve those basic problems? It's a totally rational position to say, for instance, that we absolutely needed the Civil Rights Act and we needed affirmative action 30, 40 years ago, but now it's actually counterproductive.
Right.
You could argue for that change. It's like there was a time for affirmative action and that time has elapsed. given the nature of society. Now, given that you need an explicitly racist policy selecting against Asians at Harvard in order to practice affirmative action for African Americans, this is becoming untenable and producing its own toxic effects, and we should figure out another solution. And there are other solutions. You could use economics as your variable, right? So you could say, well, we're not gonna dumb down our standards for anyone, The standards are the standards, but we're going to proactively look for people who are below the poverty line who meet those standards, and at every decile above that. And we're just— so if your family has never made a lot of money, you will have an advantage regardless the color of your skin, or as long as you're passing these tests, or whatever the criteria are. And If we did that, we would, as if by magic, also solve a lot of the very inequality problem that people are worried about in supporting affirmative action. I mean, you're disproportionately gonna be getting people of color if you select for poorer applicants, et cetera. So, but that would be one way of doing it that wouldn't pose the same— problems of, you know, which I view as just indissoluble. And I mean, just on its face unethical, and it'll never become ethical, which is in practicing affirmative action and in, you know, following the left's identitarian politics, we are caring about race every bit as much as white supremacists care about race. I mean, the the logical response to Black and brown identity politics is white identity politics. And white identity politics is the most odious thing we have on the political landscape, right? Why would we wanna give any energy to that? But it makes total sense in light of every other identity politics. So it's a war of tribes, right? So my view is that we have to get to a place where skin color is no more interesting to us than eye color or hair color, right? And that may seem a quixotic dream at this point, but it's clearly possible. I mean, many of us have accomplished that in our personal lives anyway, right? If you don't care about people's race, skin becomes like hair color, right? And so the question is, how do we get to a world where That is our basic attitude with respect to these sorts of variables. Again, no one has thought to ask how many blondes got into Harvard this year, right? And if we found that the number of blondes did not perfectly match the proportion of blondes in the general population, no one would allege that there's been a campaign against blondes, right? And there's this sinister animus against blondes that— that is, you know, we've just now statistically unveiled, right? And who do we fire, right? And what bureaucrats do we hire to make sure this doesn't happen next year, right? All of that would be such an awful capitulation to an ethical hallucination, right? I mean, it's just, it would be insane to manufacture that concern and then to do something on the basis of it. And yet that's where we're stuck with skin color. And that's what we're stuck with, with, you know, religion and a few other variables. And so it's, although, you know, race is obviously the biggest in America.
I mean, the fact, the reality on the ground is that there's a department in almost every major company, you know, or many major companies in America, that their sole goal, the D&I department, is, or the main goal, is to equalize group outcome, is to have equal representation in their organization, whether it's a corporation or political or government organization. And what I think to steelman, what they would say is, hey, we'll stop focusing on race once we're equal, once there's equal group representation of CEOs or product managers or investors or whatever it is. And if it was 20 years ago, we could have a more first principles of, hey, why we wouldn't do that for blondes, why would we do it on race? But these departments exist, these institutions exist. And now I feel like either something's gonna happen. One is that's going— people are going to continue to try to keep doing that, or you need to have a defense of inequality effectively. You need to have a reason, or for— this is the Ibram Kendi, right? Every disparity is, is evidence of discrimination. So you need a defense of why disparities exist. And some, some people try, you know, Thomas Sowell has the culture, uh, reasons or historical reasons that he's written across his 30 books, you know, uh, Charles Murray wrote a book last year, I think, kind of doubling down on sort of the biology or the IQ group differences on average. And I think the reason why he did it is because he said, hey, without this sort of narrative, there's no justification to disparity, and thus there's discrimination, and thus we have all these problems that we've been having. And so I'm curious how you think about that conundrum of needing an argument that Explains the disparities?
Yeah, well, I'm agnostic as to the reasons, right? I don't think we know the reasons. I am concerned about inequality of all its various flavors, you know, wealth and health and education, you know, life outcomes generally.
What is the proper amount of equality? Because if— or what is the way of balancing equality and liberty?
It could be that perfect equality is not only a fantasy, but not even a good fantasy, right? I mean, maybe we don't want perfect equality, right? Maybe there's an argument to be had that some amount of inequality is actually optimal, right? But there's clearly some amount that's not optimal, right? That you don't want a Gini coefficient that resembles São Paulo, Brazil. Brazil, right? You don't want to— no matter how wealthy and creative you are and how artfully you've curated your life, you don't want to have to live in a compound ringed with razor wire because there's so much crime on your streets. And you don't want to have to helicopter out of your compound to some safer place so that you can fly over all the chaos and mayhem and misery that is at your doorstep because— you've taken absolutely no steps to spread the wealth around. So I think what we— even the most avid fan of Ayn Rand has to admit in their more reflective moments that they want to live in a society that's just brimming with happy, creative people who are good collaborators, good customers, good— People you don't have to fear because they're so, they've been driven psychotic with envy because there's been such a mismatch between the quality of your life and the quality of theirs. And perhaps more important, the quality of your children's lives and the quality of their children's lives, right? So we wanna live in a circumstance where there's real abundance and the abundance has been spread around, right? So some form of redistribution has to be valid once you get too much of a concentration of wealth in it, which is to say too much wealth inequality in any society. And we wealthy people and we lucky people should understand the pragmatism of all that, if not just the actual ethics, right? If you can't feel compassion for people who are not as lucky as you are, At least you could feel some wise sense of self-preservation that you just, you want to pay some kind of ransom to these disparities in luck, right? Because eventually the pitchforks are coming. And so yeah, I don't know what the right level of equality is, but I just know we want all boats to continue to rise with each new tide, right? So we want, like, you know, 50 years from now, if the future is gonna be better than the present, we want it to be better for everybody, even if it's not equally better for everybody, right? So we would— I guess it's— You know, you could say, for instance, that, you know, a middle-class person in America now, whatever their unrealized hopes and dreams, they live better than, you know, virtually everyone in other countries. And certainly everyone, they live better than anyone lived in the 18th century, right? Even royalty, right? We want progress and we want progress to be shared. And I guess to wind back to how you started that question when you were talking about the people who want equal representation, it's like, okay, it's fine what you say about hair color, maybe we'll get there someday, but what we need now is equal representation for skin color, and sex, say, in all the desirable areas, otherwise it is bigotry that has been expressed there. Well, it's just not true that bigotry need be the mechanism that's keeping people out. So to take it off race for a second and just talk about sex, right? So there are fields that attract men and women in different numbers, right? It's just, it's not— our interests are not identical, right? And our— the requirements for putting in the hours at different stages in life are not identical, right? So there's— it's not an accident that— and people will worry about the representation of women in physics, say, or engineering or computer science, right? And it looks low. And that somehow looks fishy, right? There must be an old boys' network keeping the girls out. It's possible that there is in certain departments or in certain periods of history, that's possible. But it's extraordinarily unlikely to be true across the board, certainly given how proactive people have been in recent years in trying to encourage women to get into those areas. And then when you look at what's happening in adjacent fields, where you have more women than men. I mean, there are more women than men in biology now, right? And I believe it's also true of psychology. I'm sure it's true of sociology. Biology is a wonderful domain of science, right? And who's losing sleep over the lack of men in it, right? It's like the fact that it's now something like 60% women, or at least 60% girls majoring in it, last I looked. Is that a disparity that we need to worry about? And how disparate might— what's the percentage of female pediatricians to male pediatricians? I don't know, but I'm guessing there's more women, right? Now, if there are more women, do I have to worry about that? Should anyone worry about that? And is sexism the reason why guys are not making the cut somehow? You know, it's just, that's not happening, right? And it's not, so again, it's not to say that there's no sexism in the world or racism in the world that we need to worry about, but there are other explanations for many of these disparities. And again, getting rid of the sexists and the racists with a magic wand won't necessarily change those causal factors.
You mentioned that you're agnostic as to the reasons. Do you think it's productive to be agnostic in the sense that, one, you could say, hey, it's unknowable, but two, you could say it is knowable, but the truth would be just not constructive for society to know. And so it's helpful to have an air of agnosticism because it wouldn't be empowering. This is what Coleman and Charles Murray debated is, hey, even if one, it's unknowable, but even if it was knowable, on a certain dimension, how is that empowering for a certain person? And thus, we should have this air of equality of opportunity. Of course, it's a myth in the sense that if you're richer than me, your kids are going to be better off. And if you're smarter than me, you're going to marry someone smarter than me and your kids will be better off, all these kinds of ways. Going back to your lying book, I'm curious if certain myths are important for the societal fabric, or how do you think about that?
Whatever the The nature of group differences, uh, you know, if they exist and what, you know, and, and if they're genetic or environmental or, or some combination of the two, uh, they're never relevant for the individual. I'm the applicant for the next job I'm applying to, right? And it's— I get no advantage knowing that I belong to certain groups that may be advantaged in certain ways statistically. at the population level, right? So if, again, if in fact those differences are true, right? So I'm, I'm half Ashkenazi Jew, and the Ashkenazi Jews supposedly have, you know, higher IQs on average than, than many other groups. My IQ is what it is, right? It's like, I, I don't, I don't get to, to draft my, my Ashkenazi half-brothers and half-sisters and get some kind of advantage. you know, from the population-level statistics. So the ground truth is you always have to judge people as individuals, right? And that's that, I think. So taking that side of the political debate, that is a kind of ethical punchline for me. That's a— we have to treat people as individuals, whatever is true. And when we're led to not want to do that, It's because we're lazy or we have not built the, the tools, the information tools that make it possible or easy to do that, right? So yeah, we have to treat people as individuals. And, you know, this is something, you know, I got into hot water with, you know, with the world after talking to Charles Murray on this topic. Uh, you know, it really is a thankless topic to touch, but I think we, we need to admit in advance That it's extraordinarily likely that there are group-level population differences that we will discover, which is to say, I mean, the flip side of that is it would be a miracle if every group were identical, where its mean value of every measurable trait we cared about was identical to every other group's mean value for that trait. So take the 100 traits that we care most about, Intelligence is just one, right? But you got your propensity to violence and, you know, just anything. Anything that could be socially positive or negative and, you know, personally positive or negative. Whatever's measurable and whatever's not measurable now will one day be measurable, presumably, right? So in the fullness of time, we have these 100 things about human beings that we really care about that redound to their advantage or disadvantage. In a way that is just undeniable. We start measuring all of these things for every different group. What are the chances we're gonna find that— From a sample to a population. We just measure the whole population, right? We don't just take 100,000 Irishmen to judge what Irishmen are like. We actually measure every person in Ireland and, you know, who has Irish blood, right? So, you know, so, so what are the chances that the mean Irish intelligence is identical to every other group's mean intelligence across the globe, right? It, it would be a miracle if that were the case, right? So I think— and this is not to say anything especially invidious about Ireland or Irish people, I'm just picking them at random— but we just know that if we compared every group, whether, whether it's a valid group or not, I mean, you could, you could You could just take how people self-identify in bizarre ways. You could take Lakers fans against Pistons fans. And I mean, you could just— any group, right? There's no way all of these vari— the mean value of all these variables is going to be the same for those groups. So the question— let's price that in now, right? What do we make of that? My point is we need make nothing of it. Because we know how our politics should be. We know how we want to live. We know we want to treat people as individuals. We know we should treat people as individuals. It's both ethical and pragmatic. We know that knowing that a person is a member of any one of these groups gives us very little information about them, right? It doesn't tell us about their intelligence or their compassion or their interests or their, you know, gifts and weaknesses. I mean, it's just— it just doesn't. And so it just doesn't matter. And we're acting— not only are we acting like it matters, we're acting like, you know, again, this is on— this is a pathology of the left at the moment. We're acting like it is the most important thing, one's membership in these groups. Right. And again, not so much with respect to nationality, but with respect to things like race and gender and Gender identity. It's, it's a— it's a moral illusion, right? And it's, it's a, it's a mirage toward which, uh, we're hurtling. You know, we're being driven toward it by our politics, and there's nothing there, right? It's no place to live. Caring more— a way to get over racism and racial division in our country and sexism and sex and division with respect to sex, and, you know, add your other identities here, is not to care more and more about these things, right? Is to care less and less about these things. And so they're the— we're on the left, we're running the wrong algorithm.
I'm going to say some things that might be too simplistic, so feel free to edit my characterization, but my understanding is that on the left you're critiquing an ideology and on the right you're critiquing a person. or a group of people who are corrupt, but will be changed. And so people are defending the thing on the left, the things we just spoke about with kind of a religious fervor. And some people believe that that form of progressivism is kind of an evolution of a certain kind of Protestantism that dropped the metaphysics, dropped the God part, but kept the moral commitment to duty to the downtrodden or equality and created new metaphysics, which is, hey, the Ibram Kendi kind of school. And so my mental model, if I was in a coma the last 20 years, I would've said, oh, Sam Harris was one of the leaders of the New Atheist movement and he spoke against religion and they contributed to delegitimizing kind of religious— religion's handle over some cultural institutions. he might do the same thing with this new form of religion. And to be fair, and you just did it on this podcast, you certainly critique it, but it feels like it's not your central project to the same degree that it was 20 years ago, even though you've admitted that in some ways it's even more powerful. It's not leading people to be suicide bombers, but it does capture almost every major institution today and introduce a form of scleroticism or some negative impacts that that stem from that and introduce reciprocal problems on the right in the form of white identity, as you described. And so when I ask myself, why isn't Sam doing it to the same degree? And maybe I'm wrong in that characterization. I say, oh, it's because the right is equally scary, but it's around a few set of individuals and in a different way. And in 5 years, that will be, or maybe even sooner, that will no longer be a problem, but that ideology will remain. And so I wonder if that will be a new essential project of yours.
Well, I'm not sure it's just a matter of the individuals on the right. I mean, there is dogmatism on the right to which many of these individuals are anchored. And also, right and left doesn't quite capture our politics at the moment. So there's a way in which the right and the left have joined forces in certain ways, especially among people who are, quote, too online. There's an anti-establishment style of responding to everything now where the alternate explanation for any phenomenon is the preferred one, right? So this is something you— You get from podcasts and newsletters. And it's the water in which we're swimming now, but it's a kind of— at some point I called it a new religion of contrarianism. And that it does cut across both the left and the right, or the horseshoe theory does sort of get borne out here because you have people like Tucker Carlson and Glenn Greenwald becoming best friends. Right. And, and it's, uh, you know, that's weird and, and inexplicable, but for certain shared, uh, points of fixation, which is the— you, you have, you have to distrust the power of the American government. You have to distrust the power of the establishment. You have to distrust the mainstream media. Uh, they, you know, they are lying to you. Right.
The they—
there's a, there's a, there's an elevation of the they. in both these camps, which unifies their vision of the malign and sinister forces that are working behind the scenes to distort everything. And so we get a pandemic, and many, many millions of people, whether they're on the far right or the far left, begin to worry that every response to this pandemic, from masking to vaccines, is motivated not by, you know, by equal parts ignorance of what's going on plus a concern to mitigate illness and death. It is rather just this, the first move in an Orwellian effort to control control people, right? It's just, this is the, the, the plandemic, right? This is, this is something, this is coming from, from Davos, right? This is a, this is globalism, uh, uh, run amok. And, you know, pretty soon UN troops are gonna be in your town telling you you, you have to stay in your houses, right? Like that, that's the, you know, so that you have this, you have people who, again, you know, who are like far left, anti-vax yoga moms, you know, who— and then far-right Second Amendment gun nuts, like the same switch in their brain got flipped during COVID right? And they were unified on, you know, the, the contrarianism above all, uh, principle. And so I— there's a, there's a lot, you know, again, some of that's understandable. And, you know, the— our institutions certainly didn't cover themselves in glory in how they handled pandemic, much less the messaging around public health there. But it's pretty clear we need functional institutions, right? We're not going to navigate all of our collective social problems and, you know, within nations and between nations by podcast and Substack newsletter. We need institutions that are viable and that we trust and that we are right to trust. Right? Yes, we want— we don't wanna trust institutions that we shouldn't trust. We want trustworthy institutions. We want real experts, not fake experts, right? But there is— but that's just to say there really is such a thing as expertise, and there really is such a thing as a good institution that has, you know, real knowledge that needs to be preserved. And just tear it all down and just disrupt everything and just move fast and break things is not a method of improving our institutions and safeguarding them against error, right? It's just not. And so, so much of what's happening online at the level of our politics is a very— it's just an ill-considered reaction to everything everyone didn't like about what's happened in the last few years. But it's so shot through again with misinformation and disinformation that it's, I mean, it is just a kind of new religion of delusion and paranoia and strangely narcissism, right? Because all of these conspiracy theories, are really energizing to people because it puts them at the center of the action, right? And it's, you know, and there's no one to defer to. You gotta, you know, no, you have to do your own research, right? You can figure it out. You should figure out what happened on 9/11, right? It's not what it seemed, right? Those, we were, you know, it's just that Al-Qaeda wasn't involved. This is, you know, do you know the melting point of steel? And when's the last time you read an article about thermite, right? So like, get down in there. And, uh, get your hands dirty right now. And when you're done with that, do it with mRNA vaccines too, right?
Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's really interesting because in some ways— yeah, I don't, I don't mean to employ a triggering name here, but on this topic, not on the topics we were talking about before, but you seem closer to like a Matt Yglesias or Ezra Klein type than like an Eric Weinstein, uh, type who maybe you were closer to You know, sort of mood affiliation-wise a few years ago. Do you agree with that characterization? Maybe those are the wrong names, but you kind of get what I'm getting at. How do you make sense of that transformation?
I mean, there's no love lost between me and Ezra Klein, as you know, and I haven't— I'm not aware of having interacted with Iglesias, but I feel like there must be some history there that I'm unaware of. What I share with them— I'm taking your account of Iglesias more because I haven't really read him in living memory. But I mean, with Klein, yeah, I think we have more of a default respect for institutions. And, you know, if in my case, even when I'm noticing their failures, And I'm feeling something less than respect. What I'm feeling is concern for the failure of institutions. I know we need institutions. I know we need a government we can trust when the wheels are coming off. When we have a pandemic and someone gets on television and says, listen, if you don't stay inside, our hospitals are— our whole hospital system is going to fail. Right. So, you gotta stay inside for the next 2 weeks. I know we want a government that is trustworthy in a moment like that, and I know we want a society that trusts the government in a moment like that, right? We don't want delusional people in charge, and we don't want a nation of misinformation-addled hysterics freaking out at moments like that. And so it is when we declare war on another society or another society declares war on us, right? Like, or so it is when in a moment of, you know, like 9/11, where we have this, this, you know, horrific act of terrorism and we don't know who to bomb, right? We need to trust institutions. We need to, we need, so like when the, when the Middle East expert gets on television and says, yeah, well, here's, here's what's going on in Iran right now. And here's what's going on in Iraq. And here's a, We want those people to actually know something, right? We we can't call bullshit on everyone all the time in all directions and function, right? So I mean, it seems like such an uncontroversial thing to say. I would think everyone would agree, but there are people who are acting as though they effectively disagree with that statement, and that there is no such thing as expertise, and there is no such thing. such thing as valid institutional knowledge, and science journals are just like blogs. It's all just monkeys at typewriters. Go fuck yourself. People are living— that seems to be the software people have running on their brains now by the tens of millions in our our society. I get how many people got pushed there. I get how it's tempting to declare epistemological and ethical and political bankruptcy on some level. It's just like, oh, I can't. It's just, no, they're all assholes. Everyone's in it for themselves. You can't trust anybody. Prosecute Fauci, right? It's just everyone's as bad as everyone else. Maybe Putin's not that bad. Now that I think about it, maybe Putin's just a He's better than than some of these people. You know, at least he's got a sense of order, right? Right. Go Putin! You know, like who who should win between Ukraine and Russia? Oh, I don't know. You know, I mean, it's like that's where so many people are. You know, even a fair number of billionaires, you know, who are seem inclined to stick both their feet in their mouths on on any one of these topics. We so yeah, I'm I'm not. in that tribe, right? I think we need— I think there are grownups and we need the grownups in the room at least some of the time.
I can't think of a certain name of someone who you'd really respect that is a critic of these institutions, because I think what they would say, the smartest versions of them would say, yeah, we just need better people and running— we do need institutions. We just need better people running these institutions. And these institutions are dysfunctional, uh, for a number of different reasons, one of which is maybe they've been selected for loyalty to a certain tribe than actual competency. Or, uh, whether it's universities, they become a cartel, or for whatever reason, they've just demonstrated over the last few years or decades their incompetence. And we, we need real change.
Just to be clear, I totally agree with that. And but the solution to those problems is not to just tear it all down. And the solution, I mean, at a minimum, the solution is to build new institutions. When you maximize contrarianism and you maximize conspiracy thinking and you maximize do your own research, you don't get new institutions that are even better than the old ones that became sclerotic and badly incentivized and captured and You know, too woke or too something, right? You don't, you just get another podcast. You just get another, you know, another grift. You just get another. And I say this is, I mean, obviously I, you know, I'm a full-time podcaster. I'm not casting aspersions on the podcasting game. I'm just saying it's not enough, right? We need Harvard to be Harvard and not some woke church. Right? We need a journal like Science and Nature to still be the best organ of scientific communication, right? And not something that looks like it was written by a DEI admin, right? And that's what we're getting. So all the people who are freaking out about that, I get it, right? I have, whenever I decide to think about it, I freak out too. But it's just, what is the answer? And the answer is not to give up one's standards, right? It's by the standards one has are implicit in that initial reaction, right? When you see that a— I mean, to take the example that crystallizes for many people in the aftermath of George Floyd, when you had epidemiologists vilifying protesters on the right for gathering in public, because it was just this completely irresponsible behaviour that was— they're unmasked, and they're very likely to spread COVID, even though they're outside, and this is just intolerable, and this has to be criticised, and there's no excuse for it. And then when the political moment flipped, and you had all of the Black Lives Matter protests at a much greater scale, And it just, you know, much greater epidemiological implications if in fact there were any. You know, it turns out there probably weren't many, but we didn't know that yet. You have like open letters, I think it was the one open letter signed by something like 1,000 public health officials and epidemiologists saying that, yeah, this is, this is now justified because racism is even a bigger, you know, public health concern, right? So, and that was so fatuous. And so it's obviously a distortion of scientific thinking and public health information. And there were many other examples of that sort of thing. Yeah, people just went on tilt there. They said, all right, okay, this is a total betrayal of intellectual principles. But rewind to the moment when you recognized it as a betrayal of intellectual principles. Okay, let's enshrine those principles. Let's get back to institutions and professional behavior that acknowledges facts, right? Regardless of political expediency. And so there still are standards, even the tear it all down bunch were motivated by their implicit acknowledgement of standards, at least in the beginning. Yeah. I mean, now there's just, there's an appetite for, it's like every story is like the you know, did Epstein kill himself story. Like, everything has this sort of tawdry other explanation. Like, let's shine the light in some— in, into the 4th dimension on this, on this one, you know, because it's, it's possible. Um, and what I'm saying is that that's just— that's a, that's a, that's a character trait that many people have that's getting amplified and selected for in the current media environment and amply rewarded, I'm sure, by audience capture in many channels. And it's a dysfunctional one. I'm not saying no one ever conspires. I'm not saying no conspiracy theories are true. And of course, if you're a conspiracy theorist who always is going down every rabbit hole in defiance of common sense, You will be the first to, to alight upon the, the, the next conspiracy that is valid, right? You know, if, you know, if it turns out that JFK was assassinated by the CIA and we find that out next week, well, okay, everyone who devoted their lives to that is going to feel vindicated, but they're not going to be vindicated on the 100 other things they devoted their lives to that, that was just nonsense.
So I should recharacterize— you have ideological problems or quibbles with both the left and the right. The left for the kind of group rights at the expense of individual rights, and the right, it's not just you quibble with a few people who are immensely corrupt, but you quibble with populism, this idea, which is their overarching ideology.
I mean, there are a lot of demons lurking. If you push far enough rightward, you run into fascism. You don't have to look that far to find fascist sympathies, even in mainstream people on the right. I mean, again, I referenced an open-mindedness about the integrity of Vladimir Putin, right? It's amazing how many Republicans will pretend to be uncertain about what an awful human being he is and how that matters. Right. I mean, here we have somebody who's just like literally assassinating dissidents and political rivals in the capitals of Europe, right? And killing journalists. And I mean, it's just— and you just invaded a sovereign nation for no good reason, whatever his thoughts about it. I mean, he was like, he was the aggressor in the war in Ukraine, right? So it's just whatever the failings of of Ukrainian, the Ukrainian government might be. We know who started it and we know who could stop it and we know who's fighting for their lives, right? So the idea that it is a fairly mainstream position among Republicans now that it's, whatever you think about the level of support we should be giving, There's still, there's a fondness for Putin that gets expressed, right? And that's, yeah, I mean, there are not too many steps between that and wanting to live under a Putin-like figure.
Maybe I'm too charitable, but Bryan Caplan has this line. He says the left hates markets because markets lead to inequality and the right just hates the left. I do agree at least with the latter part in the sense that I guess my charitable view is that the left was pro-Ukraine and the right's just anti-whatever. the left is excited about. But I don't mean to dismiss how concerning those sympathies with Putin are. But going back to the institutional point, it's interesting because smart tech people, they want valid institutions too. And there are 2 models. You can either retake them or you can start new ones. And my friend Balaji is much more in the camp of you need to start new ones. Going back to even thinks you need to start new countries. And where I've been pushing back a little bit is, Say what you want about the outcome. I think Elon Musk proved that you could actually take a massive institution that was operating one way and change it significantly. Say what you want about those changes, but it was proof that that's an institution that can be taken. Now, not everybody has $44 billion lying around.
You're talking about Twitter?
Yes, with Twitter. That's one example, say what you want about it, of institutional reform, just showing that it's possible. Because a lot of people in tech will say, hey, these institutions are too far gone. That's why you need to start new ones. But you're not gonna start a new government. Like, there, you know, like, some institutions are so cemented that you just need to win them over. Some, if it's a corporation, maybe you can do what Elon did. Others, you need to run and, you know, get elected and things like that. But, you know, Marc Andreessen recognizes the need for important institutions, for smart people in those institutions. You know, he believes in expertise. I think, you know, he's someone you respect as a smart person. Where do you think the crux of where you guys see things differently is, if you had to say?
Well, I mean, Elon is very much his own creature. I mean, he's, you know, it's his— the thing I object to in what he's doing now is not how he's changed Twitter as an institution or as a platform, but just how he behaves on the platform. You've got 130 million people following you, and you tweet that your former head of trust and safety is a pedophile, right, on the basis of no evidence, and, you know, with predictable results, right? Then he just— he and his family get their lives totally disrupted by that in terribly unpleasant ways. And you take no responsibility for having done that, right? And so, or you tweet that, you tweet a link to a trash article from a trash website alleging that Paul Pelosi was attacked not by a maniac with a hammer, but by his gay lover who, and so this is a tryst gone awry and not at all what it seems, right? And this is what a conspiracy theory that was blowing up on the QAnon front of the right. And then when it gets revealed that that website you linked to, again, in front of 100 and— it's probably 110 million people at that point. That's a website that published that Hillary Clinton was dead and a body double was campaigning in her place back in 2016. What you do is you just delete the tweet and you offer no apology, no correction, no nothing. You just take no responsibility. That's bad for the world, right? And I would argue it's bad for Elon. It's bad for his brand. It's bad for his reputation. It's bad for his relationships. It's just bad, you know? And so why do it? So that's the— there's a kind of adolescent engagement with real issues that is troubling there, right? It's like it's all for the lulz, right? It's like I can say whatever I want. It's just Twitter, right? We're just shitposting. It's just, it's all Pepe the Frog, right? It's like the spirit of Pepe the Frog as it's kind of moved into tech and into the brains of some very wealthy connected people is bad for the world, right? It's not to say it's never funny, right? It's like, it is, you know, memes are funny. I don't know what it is. I mean, there's like a neuroatypical obliviousness to the ethical costs. of behaving certain ways that I really worry about, right? And maybe calling it neuroatypical is the wrong framing, but I wouldn't be surprised if that were part of the story in many cases, right? I mean, there are some very smart people who are doing very interesting things, who to my eye do not have their heads screwed on straight ethically and with respect to how they engage problems of real social consequence. And Elon is the paradigmatic case of that at the moment. But obviously I have a tremendous amount of respect for what he's built. And I mean, there's no— it's almost impossible to exaggerate how interesting and productive those projects have been on other fronts. It's just should give him all the more reason not to screw it up, wasting his time shitposting about real problems on Twitter. I mean, so with Marc, I mean, Marc's been on my podcast. I think Marc is more pessimistic, perhaps even cynical with respect to the possibility of fixing certain problems. It's not to say he's wrong. He may be right. He may be better informed about what it would take to fix some of these institutions than I am. It would just be interesting to debate, and it would be probably a case-by-case question of what is true case-by-case. But again, with someone like Mark, the allergy to the derangement of the left and the moral panic of identitarian politics on the left, I mean, that is so front and center, and I completely share it. Right. Like, I just, I hate what has happened, uh, to mainstream institutions under the, the aegis of, of wokeness. I got, I have to think the pendulum is swinging back now and it's, it's not as bad now as it was yesterday. I mean, I, I really do feel like that's, we, we, we reached some kind of tipping point, but, you know, I, again, I'm not sure, but I do see some signs of that. One of the pathologies, uh, of the right and/or the libertarian variant of the right is it's a kind of just a lack of compassion for the disparities in luck I spoke about earlier, which lead to inequality in all its forms. Right. It's just the myth of the self-made man is such colossal bullshit. And it does so much work. It does so much pseudoethical work for people right of center, right? It's a total fiction. No one made themselves. No one picked their parents. No one can account for how they were lucky enough to be born where they were and who they were so that they succeeded, right? And whatever story they have about being self-made, they didn't— they're not responsible for their intelligence. Right? The fact that you weren't born with brain damage is pure luck. And somebody is being born with brain damage right now in a hospital near you. So what do we do for that person? Right? So it's just, it's a total failure, not of just compassion, of just, you know, basic awareness of terrestrial facts to feel that something important is anchored to this myth of the self-made person. Right. So if you're self-made or not, you know, whatever your story about how you succeeded, if you've succeeded, if you're happily married and you've got a lot of great friends and you're healthy and you're living in a great house in a great city and you've never been the victim of anything especially horrible and you just are living a beautiful creative life and you've got as many zeros as you want after, you know, the first digit of your net worth, you're incredibly lucky, right? I mean, there's just, you won the fucking lottery, right? And so what you should feel, the only appropriate emotions to feel after you take stock of your situation are gratitude and compassion. Gratitude for all that you're enjoying, given the odds stacked against it and compassion for everyone else who's nowhere near where you are, right? Who would consider their prayers answered if they could be you on your worst day, right? The worst day you've ever had. There are billions of those people across the globe. And so the project for us collectively is to remedy those disparities to some degree. I'm not saying that we all have to live— we all have to become poor in order to help the poor, right? I'm not, I'm not, you know, I don't even think— even if that were ethically true, even if that was the right answer ethically, pragmatically, I think it, it is almost certainly not the right answer. And therefore, you know, it would— the ethics of it would unravel, right? It's like, it's, it's It's not that we— we want thriving cities in the first world where everything is very expensive, you know, because it costs a lot of money to do new and interesting things, right? We want to, you know, I share the aspiration that, you know, the future should be inconceivably better than the past. Right. And that's going to take a lot of hard work. That's going to cost a lot of money. And we need to power all of that with clean energy. And let's make all of the innovations that Elon and every other techie wants to make. Right. As you go right of center, there is a palpable detachment from the ethics and In The Limit, you have a lot of rich people just with their bug-out bags. And inside your bug-out bag might be a compound in New Zealand, right? Where the final game theoretic problem you're mulling over is how you can keep your bodyguards from killing you and taking your stuff and raping your wife, right? It's like, how do you protect yourself from the people you've hired to protect you when everything falls apart, right? That's what you're going to start reading books about now, really. Both the left and the right are fairly crazy in the way they've been anchored. And again, left and right don't fully capture the dimensionality of our situation now.
Gearing towards closing here then, I'd maybe offer one alternative theory of polarization I've heard, which is While on an individual level, it is corrupting and you might be better off Twitter, the alternative of no polarization means that one side won. If you believe that there is really a fundamental conflict, then what polarization means is that these 2 forces are competing with each other and maybe balancing each other out. And that would also be a steelman as to one positive thing Elon has done is he has revived sort of, uh, you know, more conversation on, on the right perhaps, but all these people that were banned. Now Twitter is a cesspool, it's, it's a civil war, um, but the alternative is a one-party state. Do you sympathize with any of that or not really?
Well, I, I just don't think that the solution could possibly be a balancing act between 2 totally dysfunctional political religions, right? It's like we have the Catholics and the Protestants successfully at a stalemate, right? But both are insane, right? Both believe pure fictions that are divisive. And so it's just, I think the solution space is elsewhere, which is we would navigate to it on the basis of some of the principles already discussed, which is to acknowledge the reality of luck, right? To acknowledge the real disparities in our world, but also to acknowledge that we have to treat people as individuals, right? And to acknowledge that so often we're faced with not one clear right answer, but we're faced with trade-offs, right? It's like they're mutual incompatible goods.
Right.
or mutual incompatible lesser evils in various situations. And we have to navigate to one or the other. They're mutually exclusive. If you're gonna make a left turn, you're not making a right turn. And so, I mean, we just have to be realistic about the situation we're in. Yeah, I feel like we have to find ourselves into a in a spot where we acknowledge that we're on the same team with respect, certainly with respect to the biggest problems, right? So, I mean, take a global pandemic, right? Like, that is, you know, that's the equivalent of, you know, being attacked by, you know, aliens from outer space. Like, humanity needs to unite at a moment like that, right? We can't be fighting over PPE and Clearly, we need— clearly, there are global problems that we confront or will one day confront, which demand a global solution, a coordinated global solution. And it's pretty clear we do not yet have the political and economic and legal tools to effortlessly accomplish that, right? I mean, we're just, we're stuck and we want, we need to get unstuck in light of the those persistent threats. I mean, again, if there's going to be another pandemic and eventually there'll be a pandemic that'll be way worse than COVID, right? I mean, I view COVID not as the worst thing that's ever happened, but a dress rehearsal for the worst thing that may ever happen. And it will one day happen. And we screwed up the dress rehearsal. I mean, we really screwed it up. And I'm not even sure we've learned any indelible lessons on the basis of our screw-ups. I don't know this. I hope this is not true at the level of the institutions that will, you know, that we have now and that we will have then, but I feel like on some level, you know, we're even less sure about what to do in the face of the next pandemic. It's just, it's, it was so— You know, the response to the response has been so divisive and crazy-making that it's— yeah, I don't know. It'll be interesting to see how it shakes down. But in any case, we need to solve these coordination problems. And it's not just balancing between maniacs is not going to be the jig we do that accomplishes that. I mean, we need a We're preparing for the pandemic Olympics, right? And we can't just have a bunch of out-of-shape people who've been preparing for something completely different, a completely different event, but in opposite ways. They're not going to coordinate their mutual antagonism to one another in such a way as to get us You know, through the 100-yard dash in record time or whatever it is. You know, it's just not— we need a different set of tools.
Another, I mean, essential disagreement that is happening and only going to happen more and more, it seems, as we have these global problems is one group of people believes we need global governance and it needs to be effective, but that's what's needed. And another group of people says, hey, this is inherently, you know, It's too big of a risk factor to have global government, and we need more factions such that we don't centralize, you know, have, uh, just one centralized org that can cause a lot of damage, um, and we need to balance out power.
Yeah, and also a single point of failure. And, uh, well, so there's, there's something to that, and I think there's— I mean, so, so one argument in favor of, of decentralization is that we can, we can run 100 experiments simultaneously and see what works or what works better than than, you know, other approaches. But it, it just seems obvious that they're in the limit. There, there are certain problems that we're only going to solve globally, you know, like, like climate change. You know, it's like even if we put— if we Americans put our house in order totally, which would be great, it's not going to mean much if China and India and every other country just goes back to the 19th century. How do we do that? Yeah. And I understand the fear of, you know, the consolidation of power because there's so many examples of, you know, bad people and bad regimes misusing that power. Right. But we need, and it may be that many of the solutions are centralized but not political, right? Maybe it's technological, you know, but again, people are worried about big tech also abusing its power, right? Or getting captured by political ideologies. And again, that's a real worry, but it's pretty clear that we need a pharmacist. Let's take one piece of this. We need a pharmaceutical industry that we can trust, right, globally, right? And we don't have it. We don't have it for name-brand pharmaceuticals. We don't have it for generics. We have, you know, we have fake drugs and, and frank poisons getting, you know, put in pill form. You know, I mean, there's some— there was, I think it was like a Katherine Eban article in Vanity Fair a few years back, and, and Peter Attia did a podcast with her. soon after that, just talking about the fact that something like 40% of our generic drugs aren't what they say they are, right? They're like either have none or only part, you know, you know, none of the molecule advertised or, you know, or that molecule, you know, riddled with contaminants, right? How is it that we're living in a world— I mean, just to take— let's take this, the selfish first-world parochial attitude about this. Like, how is, how is it that in America we're reliant on bogus Indian labs producing generic drugs that we can't trust, right? I mean, we're— you may have heard this, but it was reported in the last 24 hours that we're rationing cancer drugs in the US because we just can't get enough of them. Like, we just— we name both name brand and generic, right? Like, well, we're not producing them because, again, we're totally reliant on India and China. And, you know, if not for the drugs themselves, the precursors. How do we get ourselves into that situation? You know, it's totally untenable, even if you're just going to pull up the drawbridge and say, you know, fuck the world, it's all about America first, you know, I don't— we don't care, right? We can't supply— as of today, we can't supply our own pharmaceuticals in a way that anyone should trust, right? That's complete— that's totally shameful. But what is the remedy for that?
Right?
The remedy is to really drill down on every aspect of that problem and incentivize institutions so that they effortlessly have more and more integrity. Right? I mean, so yeah, so there's a lot to think through here. It's like, it could be that capitalism falters on specific fronts, right? I think, I think medicine is, is, uh, a very likely candidate for this. Like, the profit motive in drug design and in the distribution of, of pharmaceuticals is something that— it may be intrinsically corrupting of the whole enterprise, and it may be something that we, we can never trust, right? I mean, maybe, like, the fact that you have CEOs of pharmaceutical companies thinking about the bottom line in the same way that CEOs of entertainment companies think about the bottom line, that doesn't map very well, well onto the human suffering that is the target of all of those molecules, right? It's just like we may, you know, it, again, I'm not, I, I think, you know, capitalism is the only answer we've got to how to run an economy, but there could be exceptions, and this might be one. I mean, maybe we, you know, maybe 20 years from now we'll realize, you know, actually, this should just be a line item for the government, and the government should be in the drug design business, and, and, or at least create a guaranteed market for all these drugs. And it's not a matter— like, we're just going to pour enough money into this That we'll be creating everything and designing everything and innovating in all the ways we want, but nobody's getting rich. And it's just not— they're not going to get quite as— they're going to get rich differently. Again, you have to figure out how to attract the talent and how to get someone to decide they don't want to work for Goldman Sachs, they want to work for this good cause. But again, I just think all of these problems have to be solvable. without us totally balkanizing into, you know, just basically Alex Jones's universe, right? I mean, that's the thing that I'm most worried about. We're just— people have so much time for frank delusion because it's entertaining, because it's— because, you know, our mainstream organs of information have have obviously failed us and been somewhat corrupted by ideologies. So, okay, Fox News is just as good as any other, it's the New York Times, right? It never was the New York Times. It never aspired to be the New York Times, right? And this is an asymmetric allocation of outrage, right? The people who are outraged over the New York Times are watching Fox News as though it's news, Right. The New York Times has only suffered reputational harm by comparison with prior versions of itself and its own self-proclaimed expectations for itself. By the standards of Fox News, you know, the New York Times is perfect and always was and always will be, right? So it's just, you have to calibrate your outrage machine and and acknowledge the real differences that still exist, even when everyone is behaving badly.
I think this is a good place to wrap. I like the note you had earlier where you said, you know, the answer can't just be 2 political parties gone insane, just duking it out. That's a recipe for not solving the competence problems that we have at major levels of our institutions across the country. You just mentioned the most recent one. With, or most recently mentioned in healthcare and drugs and pharmaceuticals. And deradicalization is crucial to being able to be more sober and resist these ideologies or religions that seem to be so attractive to us. And I see your podcast and the podcast ecosystem, or a number of them, as contributing to that deradicalization by helping rewire some of the trigger points on both sides, even if it earns you a lot of critics in the process. And, you know, it may not be much, but it's honest work. And I've been a longtime fan and appreciator and listener. So I'm grateful for you coming onto this podcast and having a great conversation.
Yeah, thank you. Well, welcome to the podcast game. Best of luck with it.
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