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

'''Eric:''' Exactly. so we're, we're trying things, I'm learning a little bit. But first of all any, anytime you want to flip the tables on me, I'm game, too. What is top of mind for you at the moment or should we, should, I can go into some topics that I'm curious about?

'''Eric:''' Okay. So one of the things that I'm starting to think about is doing a little bit of retrospective work, trying to think about where our world, our country is, we're going into another electoral cycle. And I just think this is the most bizarre age imaginable. It doesn't behave like any previous time. And I hear that we're at peak this and peak that, but I don't see any signs of the, what I increasingly see is the incoherence, slowing down. Are you also perceiving a world that is kind of intellectually unraveling or are you seeing new kinds of formations that give you the idea that something is actually filling the, um, voids that have been opening up when it comes to coherence?  

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

'''Sam:'''        00:03:00      Yeah, yeah, I mean no, no, this is, there's gotta be some name for this where it's just, you know, it's some kind of recency effect or, I mean, clearly there have been periods in history where things really have been on the brink in some new way.  

Eric:  Well, so 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  Yeah I've grown pretty dark about the paper record.

Eric  Like years ago you were somewhere else,

Sam  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?  

Eric  Well I was on, I've been on the New York times since the 80s  

Eric  I was very early to this party for...

Eric  It's a good question. Depends. Worse 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. And the first clear indication I have of this, I think, was a story about Woodstock in which the paper told the reporter..

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

Sam  It was 69? or, something like that?

Sam  (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.  

Sam  And had nothing but, you know, nostalgia for the 60s that I missed. But now I have a fairly Joan Didion look at you know, the, the "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" moment. That was a, it was just the level of dysfunction and the non-acknowledgement of dysfunction.  It was pretty shocking.  

Sam  Okay. Okay.