Difference between revisions of "11: Sam Harris - Fighting with Friends"

'''Eric:''' Well, occasionally I get a call from you and you say, I'm thinking about getting all of the following form of trouble. Talk me out of it. Try and if I, if it happens that I'm not there for an hour and a half, I get another call saying "too late".

'''Eric:'''You gotta be kidding! This-this has never happened.  

'''Sam:'''  00:03:21  No, I don't mean like World War II was about to happen, you know, or World War III is happening, but the, um, I do feel like we are witnessing several sea changes, which I couldn't have honestly said that, you know, 15 years ago or 20 years ago, I mean, something has changed and it's, some things have clearly changed, changed for the worse and maybe, maybe there's a silver lining to this chaos, but I would be hard pressed to find it at the moment.  

Eric:   Well, so when I'm starting to think about what kind of chaos we're in and using the fact that you and I agree on a lot, which I think makes our disagreements more interesting because I don't like the ground level he said/she said kinds of disagreements. I don't think they're that interesting. For me, the big thing that's really new, um, is that I can't think of a single institution I trust. There's no place that I can go to for ground truth.

'''Sam:'''        00:04:09      Like this is an example, so you take the New York times and you and I whinge about the New York times a fair amount...

Eric    I've been watching you transition

Sam yeah I've grown pretty dark about the paper record

Eric  That's new

Eric  ike years ago you were somewhere else,

yeah yeah but I guess I'm wondering whether the cohort before us 20 years ago had this same litany of complaints about the New York times or whether it's something fundamentally has shifted

so you were early to this party.  

I was very early to this party for...

but something has changed. So it's this, is this worse than the 80s?

It's a good question. Depends. Worst isn't the right word in my opinion. The way I would play with it is I'd say that it's problem has always been the same, which is narrative-driven journalism.

Sam how old are you? You're not that much older than me. laughter

I"m 53 sir

I was still in my diapers.

No, no, no, no, no. I don't remember this as a three year old

it was 69? or,  

something like that

laughter strangely, that's a bias that I now share. I, I, At one point, I had a, I, there was a point in my life in my, in my twenties where I kind of recapitulated the 60s for myself

ok

  Okay. Okay.  

The, what I recall of the story was, is that the times that told the reporter what sort of story to file, and the reporter called up the times and said, I refuse, I'm seeing something different. I'm seeing something inspiring and heart opening and I'm not going to file that story. So if that's what you want, how  

and I have have cholera?  

'''Eric:'''    00:07:24      So I think that has always been present. And there are particular kinds of stories that the times writes that I find Absolutely I mean I'll go so far as to say borderline evil. And what they do is they crowd out whatever natural inquiry process would be happening.

So I'm happy to get into a couple of examples about that. But I would say I think that the problem has been there at the New York times All along. There are some new things that I see as happening there, like a conflict between the old line journalists with the new line of sort of, you know, Brooklyn based writers who are telling us how to, how to think. Yeah. What do you make of it

'''Sam:'''        00:08:08      I don't know if this the time is maybe an exception here, but I think generally what's happening in journalism, there's just been a clearing out of real journalists, right? I mean, the business has gotten so bad and again, the Times and the Post and the Atlantic, there's a few outliers here that are doing well in the age of Trump at least, you know, sort of, well,

Trump is saving their business.  

Yes. Yeah. I mean they were actually there, they weren't doing great before Trump, but now they're doing okay. But the rest of journalism has been gutted. And now we basically have the blogosphere and you know, kind of what the Huffington post did to the landscape where you just have a lot of people blogging for free propping up a, a an ad based clickbait business model.

  Sure. but again, that the, I, I guess what I want to play with is, is there something special about institutions? Imagine that you can get all of the interesting articles that you like somewhere and somebody's saying something interesting, you can piece them together. But the fact that there's no institutional home where you can trust that, like, the office of management and budget or something or,

  but it's not what I'm saying to be bad for journalists about journalism in general. Is that what you think of as the institution? I mean, just like the veneer, the front facing website is not even an institution in many cases. It's like it's a hard to differentiate what is a blog and what is an actual journalistic resource that has editors and fact-checkers and copy editors. And you know, for certain sites, the distinction is, is apparently non-existent. I mean, so like, you know, people used to think salon was real journalism or out with the guardian. I mean, the guardian has like a kind of the blog side and the the guardian side and you can't tell the difference. You're just reading what somebody wrote and well,