Lex Fridman Podcast
#365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs
14 Mar 2023
Sam Harris is an author, podcaster, and philosopher. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - Notion: https://notion.com - Indeed: https://indeed.com/lex to get $75 credit - MasterClass: https://masterclass.com/lex to get 15% off EPISODE LINKS: Sam's Website: https://samharris.org Making Sense Podcast: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes Waking Up App: https://www.wakingup.com Sam's YouTube: https://youtube.com/@samharrisorg Sam's Instagram: https://instagram.com/samharrisorg PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: - Check out the sponsors above, it's the best way to support this podcast - Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman - Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman - Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here's the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) - Introduction (09:25) - Empathy and reason (17:17) - Donald Trump (1:00:11) - Military industrial complex (1:04:45) - Twitter (1:28:52) - COVID (2:12:35) - Kanye West (2:29:11) - Platforming (2:47:07) - Joe Rogan (3:03:59) - Bret Weinstein (3:17:38) - Elon Musk (3:29:45) - Artificial Intelligence (3:45:48) - UFOs (3:59:03) - Free will (4:26:17) - Hope for the future
Chapter 1: What is discussed at the start of this section?
The following is a conversation with Sam Harris, his second time on the podcast.
As I said two years ago, when I first met and spoke with Sam, he's one of the most influential, pioneering thinkers of our time, as the host of the Making Sense podcast, creator of the Waking Up app, and the author of many seminal books on human nature and the human mind, including The End of Faith, The Moral Landscape, Lying, Free Will, and Waking Up.
In this conversation, besides our mutual fascination with AGI and free will, we do also go deep into controversial, challenging topics of Donald Trump, Hunter Biden, January 6th, vaccines, lab leak, Kanye West, and several key figures at the center of public discourse, including Joe Rogan and Elon Musk, both of whom have been friends of Sam and have become friends of mine.
Somehow, an amazing life trajectory that I do not deserve in any way, and in fact believe is probably a figment of my imagination. And, if it's alright, please allow me to say a few words about this personal aspect of the conversation, of discussing Joe, Elon, and others.
What's been weighing heavy on my heart since the beginning of the pandemic, now three years ago, is that many people I look to for wisdom in public discourse stop talking to each other as often, with respect, humility, and love, when the world needed those kinds of conversations the most. My hope is that they start talking again. They start being friends again.
They start noticing the humanity that connects them that is much deeper than the disagreements that divide them. So let me take this moment to say with humility and honesty why I look up to and am inspired by Joe, Elon, and Sam.
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Chapter 2: How does Sam Harris define empathy?
I think Joe Rogan is important to the world as a voice of compassionate curiosity and open-mindedness to ideas, both radical and mainstream, sometimes with humor, sometimes with brutal honesty, always pushing for more kindness in the world.
I think Elon Musk is important to the world as an engineer, leader, entrepreneur, and human being who takes on the hardest problems that face humanity and refuses to accept the constraints of conventional thinking that made the solutions to these problems seem impossible.
I think Sam Harris is important to the world as a fearless voice who fights for the pursuit of truth against growing forces of echo chambers and audience capture, taking unpopular perspectives and defending them with rigor and resilience. I both celebrate and criticize all three privately, and they criticize me, usually more effectively, from which I always learn a lot and always appreciate.
Most importantly, there is respect and love for each other as human beings, the very thing that I think the world needs most now, in a time of division and chaos. I will continue to try to mend divisions, to try to understand, not to ride, to turn the other cheek if needed, to return hate with love. Sometimes people criticize me for being naive, cheesy, simplistic, all of that. I know. I agree.
But I really am speaking from the heart. And I'm trying. This world is too fucking beautiful not to try. In whatever way I know how. I love you all. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Notion for AI-powered note-taking and team collaboration.
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This show is brought to you by Notion. a note-taking and team collaboration tool, my favorite note-taking and team collaboration tool, and they have a new feature, Notion AI, that I've been using and loving, and this thing is probably the best
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So just to list some features, they can edit the voice and tone of the text you already wrote so they can rewrite it in a different tone. They can make the text, which I love, they can make it shorter or longer. Also, they can simplify the text, which to me is at the core of the writing process. make things as simple as possible, but not simpler, as Einstein said.
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Chapter 3: What are the implications of empathy versus reason?
I mean, there's so many just amazing features. I love it when great, powerful language models or any idea in AI is then injected into a tool that's actually usable and useful and powerful across a number of use cases to a huge number of people. I mean, this is really, really, really exciting.
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One of the people I just recently talked to is Chris Voss. He is a former FBI hostage negotiator. Brilliant guy. Off the mic, I really enjoy talking to him. There is... Kindness, camaraderie, thoughtfulness, humor, wit, also a certain sort of cultural density and complexity. Hailing from New York or whatever that rich, sexy accent is from.
It's just really fun to listen to him discuss what he's really good at. That was true on the podcast and that is very much true in his masterclass where he really systematically breaks down his ideas of what it takes to negotiate terrorists.
negotiate with hostage takers, negotiate with bank robbers, but I think the most important thing is negotiate in everyday life, to negotiate in business, relationships, all of that. It's just a really brilliant, concise, clear, actionable advice that he gives. And that's true for almost every single masterclass they have, and you get access to all of them.
Get unlimited access to every masterclass and get 15% off an annual membership at masterclass.com slash Lex. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Sam Harris. What is more effective at making a net positive impact on the world, empathy or reason?
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Chapter 4: How does the discussion on Trump reflect on broader societal issues?
We find stories with a single identifiable protagonist who we can effortlessly empathize with far more compelling than data, right? So if I tell you, this is the classic case of the little girl who falls down a well, This is somebody's daughter. You see the parents distraught on television. You hear her cries from the bottom of the well. The whole country stops.
I mean, there was an example of this 20, 25 years ago, I think, where it was just wall to wall on CNN. This is just the perfect use of CNN. It was 72 hours or whatever it was of continuous coverage of just extracting this girl from a well. So we effortlessly pay attention to that. We care about it. We will donate money toward it.
I mean, it's just, it marshals 100% of our compassion and altruistic impulse. Whereas if you hear that there's a genocide raging in some country you've never been to and never intend to go to, the numbers don't make a dent. And we find... the story boring, right? And we'll change the channel in the face of a genocide, right? It doesn't matter.
And it literally, perversely, it could be 500,000 little girls have fallen down wells in that country and we still don't care, right? So it's, you know, many of us have come to believe that this is a bug rather than a feature of our moral psychology. And so empathy plays an unhelpful role there. So ultimately I think
when we're making big decisions about what we should do and how to mitigate human suffering and what's worth valuing and how we should protect those values. I think reason is the better tool, but it's not that I would want to dispense with any part of empathy either.
Well, there's a lot of changes to go on there, but briefly to mention, you've recently talked about effective altruism on your podcast. I think you mentioned some interesting statement. I'm going to horribly misquote you.
but that you'd rather live in a world, like it doesn't really make sense, but you'd rather live in a world where you care about maybe your daughter and son more than 100 people that live across the world, something like this.
Like where the calculus is not always perfect, but somehow it makes sense to live in a world where it's irrational in this way, and yet empathetic in the way you've been discussing.
Right. I'm not sure what the right answer is there, or even whether there is one right answer. There could be multiple. peaks on this part of the moral landscape. So the opposition is between an ethic that's articulated by someone like the Dalai Lama, or really any exponent of classic Buddhism,
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Chapter 5: How does empathy influence public discourse?
So let me say just a couple of things. So one, my belief at the time was it doesn't. It decreases it. Showing empathy while pushing back. decreases the likelihood of that. It might on the surface look like it's increasing it, but that's simply because the anti-Semitism or the hatred in general is brought to the surface and that people talk about it.
But I should also say that you're one of the only people that wrote to me privately criticizing me out of the people I really respect and admire, and that was really valuable. because I had to think through it for a while. It still haunts me because the other kind of criticism I got a lot of, people basically said things towards me based on who I am that they hate me.
Just- You mean antisemitic things?
Chapter 6: What are the implications of antisemitism in today's society?
Yeah, antisemitic. I just hate the word antisemitic. It's like racist.
But here's the reality. So I'm Jewish, although obviously not religious. I have never taken... I've been a student of the Holocaust, obviously. I know a lot about that, and there's reason to be a student of the Holocaust. But In my lifetime and in my experience, I have never taken anti-Semitism very seriously. I have not worried about it. I have not made a thing of it.
I've done exactly one podcast on it. I had Barry Weiss on my podcast when her book came out. But it really is a thing, and it's... it's something we have to keep an eye on societally because it's a unique kind of hatred, right? It's unique in that it seems it's knit together with, it's not just ordinary racism, it's knit together with lots of conspiracy theories that never seem to die out.
It can by turns equally animate the left and the right politically. I mean, what's so perverse about antisemitism, like look in the American context, with the far right, you know, with white supremacists, Jews aren't considered white. So they hate us in the same spirit in which they hate black people or brown people or anyone who's not white. But on the left, Jews are considered extra white.
I mean, we're the extra beneficiaries of white privilege, right? And in the black community, that is often the case, right? We're a minority that has thrived. And it seems to stand as a counterpoint to all of the problems that other minorities suffer, in particular African-Americans in the American context. And yeah, Asians are now getting a little bit of this, like the model minority issue.
But Jews have had this going on for centuries and millennia, and it never seems to go away. And again, this is something that I've never focused on, but... This has been at a slow boil for as long as we've been alive, and there's no guarantee it can't suddenly become much, much uglier than we have any reason to expect it to become, even in our society.
And so there's kind of a special concern at moments like that where you have an immensely influential person in a community that who already has a checkered history with respect to their own beliefs about the Jews and the conspiracies and all the rest.
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Chapter 7: What responsibilities do public figures have regarding misinformation?
And he's just messaging, you know, not especially fully opposed by you and anyone else who's, who's given him the microphone at that moment to the world. And that, so that, that, made my spidey sense tingle.
Yeah, it's complicated. The stakes are very high. And as somebody that's been, obviously, family and also reading a lot about World War II, and just this whole period, it was a very difficult conversation. But I believe in the power, especially given who I am of, not always, but sometimes, often turning the other cheek.
Oh, yeah. And again, things change when they're for public consumption, you know, when you're, it's like, I mean, the cut for me that, you know, has just the use case I keep stumbling upon is the kinds of things that I will say on a podcast like this, or if I'm giving a public lecture versus the kinds of things I will say at dinner with strangers or with friends.
Like if you're in an elevator, like if I'm in an elevator with strangers, I do not feel, and I hear someone say something stupid, I don't feel an intellectual responsibility to turn around in the confines of that space with them and say, listen, that thing you just said about X, Y, or Z is completely false and here's why, right?
But if somebody says it in front of me on some public dais where I'm actually talking about ideas, that's when there's a different responsibility that comes online. The question is how you say it, how you say it. Or even whether you say anything. I mean, there are definitely moments to privilege civility or just to pick your battles.
I mean, sometimes it's just not worth it to get into it with somebody out in real life.
I just believe in the power of empathy, both in the elevator and when a bunch of people are listening. That when they see you willing to consider another human being's perspective, It just gives more power to your words after.
Yeah, but until it doesn't. Because you can extend charity too far. It can be absolutely obvious what someone's motives really are. And they're dissembling about that. And so then you're taking at face value their representations. It begins to look like you're just being duped and you're not actually doing the work of...
of putting pressure on a bad actor, you know, so it's, it's, and again, the whole, the mental illness component here makes, makes it very difficult to think about what you should or shouldn't have said to Kanye.
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Chapter 8: How do we navigate the challenges of AI and superintelligence?
Is genocide really happening? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like 42, 43?
No, no, no. If you're on the cusp of it where it's just, he's someone who's gaining power and you don't want to help facilitate that, then there's a question of whether you can undermine him while pushing back against him in that interview. So there are people I wouldn't talk to just because I don't want to give them oxygen. And I don't think that in the context of my interviewing them,
I'm gonna be able to take the wind out of their sails at all, right? So it's like, for whatever, either because an asymmetric advantage, because I just know that they can do something within the span of an hour that I can't correct for. It's like they can light many small fires and it just takes too much time to put them out.
That's more like on the topic of vaccines, for example, having a debate on the efficacy of vaccines.
Yeah. It's not that I don't think sunlight is usually the best disinfectant. I think it is. Even these asymmetries aside, I mean, it is true that a person can always make a mess faster than you can clean it up, right? But still, there are debates worth having, even given that limitation. And they're the right people to have those specific debates.
And there's certain topics where I'll debate someone just because I'm the right person for the job, and it doesn't matter how messy they're going to be. It's just worth it because I can make my points land at least to the right part of the audience.
So some of it is just your own skill and competence and also interest in preparing correctly?
Well, yeah, and the nature of the subject matter. But there are other people who just by default, I would say, well, there's no reason to give this guy a platform. And there are also people who are so confabulatory that
They're making such a mess with every sentence that insofar as you're even trying to interact with what they're saying, you're by definition going to fail and you're going to seem to fail to a sufficiently large uninformed audience where it's going to be a net negative for the cause of truth, no matter how good you are. So like, for instance, I think...
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