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

'''Sam:'''        02:11:31      Right? And we believe, you know, I don't know if the data has changed on this, but as of, you know, 20 years ago or whenever this was done, I think this was in it might've been an in Cialdeni's book, Influence (Influence: The psychology of persuasion) plane crashes go up and the interpretation of that is that some number of airline pilots commit suicide with everyone on board. Right? You know the, I mean we know that's happened before. There's, there's one famous case of that but you know, it just added these statistics that seems to be suggested. But so, what do you do when Anthony Bourdain commits suicide? How do you cover that story? There's got, there has to be some style guide around how you cover it and it's not an at one point it could look like an unwillingness to actually get at the truth, but what's your, what, what's your, what's actually motivating you is not an unwillingness to get to the truth. It's just you, you're, you're aware of the potential contagion effect here depending on what the, what the actual story is.

'''Eric:'''    02:12:36      So I can't figure out where our energy differs. I agree with you that in theory, strategic silence, like don't publicize things where the benefit is very slight. Right. And the cost is enormous. I get it. But right now, we're in some different place, which is that a lot of us, I mean, just don't trust any of the gatekeepers. Like there's not one gatekeeper that I want making that decision for me at the moment. And you know, in particular, it's very weird that I like, I get the concept Dana, but I don't trust you because you came out with this alternative influencer network thing, to zero methodology on it. So, you're volunteering  

'''Eric:'''  02:13:32 And you know Noam Chomsky talks to Stefan Molyneux and he's not included. It's total nonsense. And the person who wrote it has been herself as a complete activist rather than a researcher. So, there's a total breakdown on that thing. What I'm confused by is the more of this kind of shielding that we have, the more likely we're going to have four more years of Donald Trump. And I can only imagine what's going to happen after an eight-year Trump presidency. Are we going to move to the next level of really unexpected candidate? We've got to realize that we're making for the most shocking Rose ceremony ever. We, we've got to realize that what we're doing is we're making people crazy because they can see that it's the Truman show. So, if we had a discussion where we like, had you heard strategic silence before? I think I'd do it for me. I know. Yeah. I think I'd heard the phrase but, but the [inaudible] national discussion and coming to a national consensus about this or we're going to use strategic silence when it's Jihadi violence, right?

'''Sam:'''         02:14:28      And we're not going to use it when it's white supremacist violence in a different way or we're going to leak particular information provided it goes this way and not that way. That's what's going to cause an infinite series of trumps. Well, yeah, and more importantly for this topic, I think it's, it's imperative that we understand what is actually going on and what, why people are doing what they're doing and what the, what the, the, the scale of the, the relative risks are and just how big a problem is. I met my, my last podcast, which I haven't released yet, is on this topic, just talking to someone who's written a history of white supremacy and white power in the U S and I'm just trying to get a handle on how big a problem it is. And I, and I came away from that podcast convinced more or less that nobody knows how big a problem it is.

'''Sam:'''         02:15:16      Right. So, but there's, there's a, there's a, in this particular space, there's the possibility of conflating the new mimetics of four Chan and a Chan where, where you have in cell teenagers trafficking in Holocaust imagery and you know, and lynching photos. Exactly right. Just to get a rise out of the normies right. Where it's not actually the, the ideological software program that we're worried about when we're worried about the KKK and neo-Nazis and their sincere attempt to, well there's that, call it a in the U S right. I agree with that. And then we also have this very different situation in which we have a problem on the left where I don't think that the left is as yet has the same propensity for violence that the KKK style white supremacists had. Right. But it's been totally normalized this far left woke destruction of the basic ability to think inside of the sense-making organs, whereas there's no normalization of Stormfront. Right. And people are going to try to say that the president, you know, is the normalization

'''Eric:'''     02:16:30      Of that. And I agree there are a lot of problems with the presidency, but I don't think that that storm front. And so, in that picture, I think what I'm increasingly coming to the conclusion of surrounds the idea that we're trying to have very low-resolution conversations, which is what the baby boomers and the traditional media taught us to do. We had to be these very small soundbites. And then do you think the left is worse than the right? Are you kidding me? Well, there's no way to square that because it's multi-variate and it depends which way you compressed worse or better to say which thing. Actually, you know, you talking about potential energy or you're talking about realized energy. Yeah. Yeah. And also, there's just,

'''Sam:'''         02:17:12      The fringe is not the same. It's not the same thickness on the far left in the far right like that. The far the far-left fringe has much more of effect, much more than the fact on the mainstream than the far-right fringe does. I mean the far left fringe has affected how the New York times does its thing and how tech and how it, and you know, you don't have, if we had members of the KKK determining what gets published on the opinion page in the New York times, right, that would be the analogous problem. Right. And that's,

'''Eric:'''     02:17:50       We don't see it. We don't see it now and we can't discuss it in my opinion because of the, the key thing that we were supposed to do with long form stuff is to raise the level of resolution possible in the discussion. We didn't push out enough terminology, enough sort of new patterns of thinking. And that's the work left to be done. Can I ask you one or two last questions and then, yeah?

'''Sam:'''         02:18:11      But here you are now at war with the capacity of a human bladder. So, is that right? That, that's the ultimate gatekeeper.

'''Eric:'''     02:18:16      So this is like sort of a personal question and it has to do with the fact that, I know you've reviewed some of the episodes of the show that you've been partially responsible for helping birth. Do you have any feedback for me as to what's worked? What hasn't? I can sort of talk to you a little bit about where I'm thinking about taking the show and are you happy with it or what would you like to see from the portal? I have not, I don't think I've asked this from anybody else.

'''Sam:'''        02:18:46       Just I'm incredibly happy you're doing it. I think it's, you're the right man for the job. So, you should be onto the, you'd say that you should be I'm just, you know, it's about time, right? Like I've been waiting, I've been nudging you.

'''Eric:'''     02:18:59      You have been nudging, but it's a little bit intimidating to, you know, for some reason I, I broke into this sort of top echelon of people, did enormous audiences and really professional content. So, it's a, yeah,

'''Sam:'''         02:19:12      No, but what I, what I think you're doing is a novel in that Y so you, you only have so much control over what you get because you don't, the other person has to show up and you're not quite sure in many cases what they're going to bring. But like in your case, you had a conversation with David Wolpe, right, who I've debated several times, both in public and in private. And you had a great conversation with him. Right? So, you had a very, you had a much better conversation with him than I've ever had with cleft fair. Well, it's fair. No, it's true. No, because that conversation wouldn't have happened if I hadn't observed your conversations with them and I sort of watched, but I've observed my conversations with him and I guarantee you the next conversation I have with him will still be worse than the conversation you had with him.

'''Sam:'''         02:20:08      Right. Because cause I'm going to feel like I need to fight certain battles, right? Like I, I'm not going to let him get away with certain things, which you are right to let him get away with one because you honestly feel like you're not, you're not, you don't occupy precisely my position with respect to those points. So, you're not being dishonest. You just see it differently. But two, you also are trying to have a different conversation. You're not trying to pressure test all of his ideas. You know about God whenever they surface you. Although you did go in that direction a little bit, you were actually trying to have a conversation about the, the richness of Judaism without coming in with my agenda, which is clearly we have to get past this, this parochial you know, balkanization of our, of, of, of humanity based on these, you know, iron age philosophies, right.

'''Sam:'''         02:21:04       We have to find some new modern non-sectarian equivalent to everything we think we care about in religion. That's not your game. And because it's not your game. You had a much better experience of David Wolpe then I, I get so that, that's it. And he was a conjecture that there was more there. Yeah. You know, in part born out. Well, it was born from watching you guys interact and figuring that in fact, I don't think David was particularly attached to the rigid interpretation of the text. In a literal sense, nor even to the concept of an anthropomorphic like deity. Oh yeah. I know he's not. And I mean, the first time I debated him, maybe it was the second time with hitch in one of the, in the middle of one of those debates, I was sort of blindsided by his, his lack of commitment to a personal DNA because I said something that presupposed that he believed in a God that could hear our prayers.

'''Sam:'''        02:22:05      And he said, why would you believe that? What makes you think, I believe in a God who can hear prayers, right? And you know, he's a conservative rabbi. So, this is, you know, this is a, this was a surprise to me. But anyway, I've, I've changed my view of what, what to expect there as a result of that. But still there are things he would say that would get bogged down in the way that I got bogged down with Jordan Peterson in our first podcast, a big debate, a two-hour conversation about the nature of truth. Right? And so, with Jordan, I had to decide, okay, because we, we've just put a bunch of live events on the calendar and we need to find a way to have a, an enjoyable conversation in addition to disagreeing where we're going to disagree. I have to, there has to be a different geometry to it here.

'''Sam:'''         02:22:52       It just can't always just dive straight to the, you know, the, the into the, the true basin of attraction, which is, you know what, let's figure out exactly what you mean because I smell something fishy. Right. So, but so I thought it was great. Your conversation with David and I really enjoyed it. I learned a lot, you know, so like I learned stuff from him that I wouldn't learn had I been having the conversation because I would've had an, I can't tell you how much that means to me. Thank you. Yeah. So, so I had no, I think what you're doing here is a bound to be super unique because you're I mean there's not, I mean, Europe, you are a, a real polymath doing this and they're not a lot of people who are doing podcasts with the same kind of wealth of information you have on so many fronts. So

'''Eric:'''     02:23:40      I'm flattered and I really appreciate what you're saying. The odd thing is, is that it's not really supposed to be an interview show and we've done a bunch of interviews in part, you know, Joe said something, Joe Rogan said something to me early on. He said, look at my earliest podcasts. He's like, stop worrying about whether it's perfect. I was just climbing around with my friends with a webcam and I went back to the original Joe Rogan experiences and he's not kidding. I haven't done that. I enjoy it. The problem is, is that people are really angry about everything that happens. As I'm beginning, I was like, you know, why, why, why is the glass on the edge of the table? And you know, the, the plosives are too loud and you know, there's like a lot of stuff that is there, there is no introductory period because weirdly this thing was discussed and on the Rogan program.

'''Eric:'''     02:24:33      And so it would be viewed on Apple because of their ridiculous algorithm and number one, 100,000 podcasts. And you were number one exactly. Which I've never been remotely close to since. And even though the podcast has grown in listenership. So partially what's happening is that we're just trying to find a format and to get comfortable with the idea. But a lot of what it's supposed to do is to go into intellectual territory that isn't based on an interview with a guest to see whether or not we can bring an enormous number of people closer to the most transcendent, solid intellectual achievement that is on offer. Because in general it feels to me like there's this monastery where all the good stuff is kept and almost nobody ever visits or reads any of it. Right. And so, you're saying you're speaking specifically of your wheelhouse of physics?

'''Eric:'''    02:25:28      No. Or just anything that interests you that biology has music? Yeah, but language, but there's just to make sure that I understand what you're saying. You're saying that you're envisioning many podcasts being just you and a whiteboard or something where you're some kind of graphics. I think graphics are going to be important. I think they're going to be some difficult topics that are going to be pretty heavy going intellectually that I'm going to try to make it as easy as I can. But to partially leverage the fact that, and this is kind of a, a theme running below the surface, which occasionally like magma comes up through, through the crust. Because it was so difficult for me to understand anything that was going on in my junior high school and high school years because of symbolic issues and learning, learning style differences.