Transcript: The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Intelligence: Sam Harris

It seems like the least believable thing that anyone’s ever articulated.

SHANE SMITH: I love it though.

SAM HARRIS: Which is that we live in a universe where there are a functionally infinite number of copies—increasingly dissimilar copies as you get further away—of us having conversations almost identical to this. And it just is this continuous splitting of reality. And we, for whatever reason, we’re in this particular timeline, but there’s all these other timelines that are dissociating from us based on these micro events that we’re not aware of.

And that is the most parsimonious way of conserving the data of these squirrely experiments in quantum mechanics that people otherwise don’t know how to interpret. There are other ways to interpret those data which do not give you this picture of this kind of manifold reality where we proliferate, but they’re also spooky.

And one that was very popular—it’s less popular now, but it was very popular 75, 80 years ago—which is called the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, where rather than a multiverse that is continually splitting, there was this imagined role for consciousness determining the character of reality so that nothing is actually real until it’s in some sense observed.

And there are ways of construing an observation that leaves consciousness out of the picture. But for most people having this conversation, it was thought that consciousness was somehow instrumental in collapsing the so-called wave function and determining macroscopic reality on the basis of this quantum indeterminacy.

And there were thought experiments that had become famous that were designed to reveal how spooky this situation was. And one was Schrödinger’s cat—

SHANE SMITH: Yeah.

SAM HARRIS: Cat in the box where you have some radioactive decay that will kill a cat if in fact it happens. But you can’t determine whether it’s—on this view of quantum mechanics, you can’t determine whether it’s happened until you open the box and see whether the cat is alive or dead. Right?

So the cat is imagined to be in a superposition of those two states of alive and dead until it is observed. And there were many physicists at the time who thought, “Okay, this is clearly ridiculous.” And like, then who’s going to collapse the quantum wave of the person observing the cat? Does someone else have to come into the room and observe the observer?

And so much of the talking about physics and the philosophy of science around physics for the last century has been trying to make quantum mechanics seem less strange. And no one has—again, I’m just a consumer of these conversations as a non-physicist—no one has really succeeded in giving us an account of what is real that is not just powerfully strange.

SHANE SMITH: Yeah, well, we had the head of Google Quantum Computing here. And what I loved about it was the first thing that the real first functional quantum computer came out with is there’s many universes and many timelines and it’s basically the proof of quantum mechanics itself. It’s like the science that proves itself over and over again.

I don’t pretend to understand all of it, but I just—the combination of that with a guy named Taylor Wilson, a young physicist kid, and he’s a delight. He’s like a Mozart of physics. And he was one of the team that came up with—you know, they can measure how far planets are. And he’s like, “Yeah, the math’s wrong.” And they’re like, “What do you mean? You’re a kid. The math’s wrong?” Like, that planet should be spinning off into the universe.

And so dark energy, dark matter—all of these things that we can’t perceive but are out there. Look, I don’t pretend to get it to its foundation, but I just love it. I love the fact there are these possibilities.

Evolution and Human Intuition

SAM HARRIS: From an evolutionary point of view, it shouldn’t surprise us that the universe is difficult to understand and maybe impossible to intuitively understand. Because from the point of view of biology, we are these social primates who have developed intuitions around space and time and what is real that are behaviorally relevant within a very narrow band of possibility.

I mean, we’re dealing with objects of a certain size that can be thrown in parabolic arcs and they move only so fast. And we’re dealing with increments of time and motion that are just very coarse. And we have as a result, and should have as a result, no reliable intuitions for the very, very small or the very, very fast or the very—

And it would be surprising if the universe at the smallest possible scale or at the scale of gravitation for whole galaxies would behave in conformity with our intuitions around what happens to a stone when you throw it or what—why should we think we would have intuitions around what happens to time when you move close to the speed of light? You wouldn’t think a chimpanzee would have any intuitions about this.

Artificial Intelligence and Speed of Thought

SHANE SMITH: Speaking of speed and intuition, intelligence being electrical and the speed with which things move, I want to bounce quickly to AI. You talk about, you know, we have AI doing thinking, electrical thinking, but it can move at a million miles or 500—what was it? I don’t forget the actual number. But it’s like they can move a million miles faster than we can or a million times faster.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah, but if you have something that’s thinking a million or a billion times faster than we are, even at the same level, the mismatch is impressive. I mean, if we’re having a conversation and every time you say something, because I’m thinking a million times faster, I have two weeks rather than a second to respond. Two weeks of subjective processing time.

Or if I’m thinking a billion times faster, I’ve got 32 years to pick my next words carefully. Right? I’m going to seem like functionally omniscient even if I was functioning at the same level of intelligence. I mean, if I could just spend the next 32 years thinking what I want my next sentence to be to answer this question, and then the next time, and then for the next sentence, which you’ve just responded to in a second, I got another 32 years to craft that one. Okay, then—

SHANE SMITH: You’re going to be way ahead.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah. So effectively we are in the presence of machines that can do—and that’s—we will be once their intelligence is truly general, even if it was not superhuman, speed gives you superhuman.

The AI Arms Race and Geopolitical Implications

SHANE SMITH: So I love that. I also love the fact that you brought up a knock on from that, which is, okay, if we come up with this super intelligence, super fast thinking, they, that is whoever, the Russians, they’re going to say, well, if we have this power that is super fast, we’re going to cease to exist or cease to be a. We’re going to be an also ran. So what are we going to do? We still have all these old analog weapons.

SAM HARRIS: Bombs. Yeah.

SHANE SMITH: I mean, it goes back to the smartest guys. Whenever you go to Silicon Valley, they’re always talking about universal living wage or Mars communities and all this stuff because they’re nerds and they’re worried that the thug with the club is going to come because you’re going to have a greater wealth disparity, but also you’re going to have a greater disparity between nation states.

SAM HARRIS: Right.

SHANE SMITH: So maybe you can talk a little bit about your thoughts on AI A, B and then B, what that means for geopolitics.

The Two Dimensions of AI Risk

SAM HARRIS: Yeah. Well, so I’m worried about AI, as many people are for two reasons. There’s one way to be worried about AI that everyone will accede to, which is that as these systems become more and more powerful, they can be put to malicious use and they can have unintended consequences that, in the same way that social media has had unintended consequences. We thought we would connect everyone and it’d be great and we’ve connected everyone and we’ve kind of shattered our culture and our worldview because people get siloed and see different information.

So AI kind of supercharges all of that. And so it’s very easy to see how both with malicious use and unintended consequences, things can go wrong. That and we can break things that are very hard to fix. And playing defense may be harder than playing offense. And so there’s an asymmetry there that is really worth worrying about. And I don’t think there’s anyone who would say that is specious doomerism and a fake religion.

But the other piece, which a lot of people doubt the validity of, is this concern about what is generally called the alignment problem, to the fact that we could build, leaving aside all these other concerns, malicious use. We could build super intelligent AI that is inimical to our well being, just in principle, because it is smarter than us, it’s functioning independently of us. It becomes self improving, it becomes the way we build the ultimate version that is even more powerful than it.

So you get something like an intelligence explosion that is, quote, unaligned with our interests. So in the space of all possible superintelligences, so the thinking goes, there must be some that are super intelligent but not aligned with our ongoing well being and conversation with it, such that they will stand in relation to us the way we stand in relation to chickens or ants or any other species whose interests we don’t really take into account when we just do our thing.

In building a building, you don’t necessarily, you don’t have to ever form a conscious intention to harm insects. You just want to build a building which the insects know nothing about. But in the course of building that building, you’re going to kill millions of insects. Because that’s just what you do.

We are building, potentially we’re building something so much more powerful than we are, that can form its own interests, even while all the while seeming to be prosecuting our own interests. It can form near term goals that we don’t understand, it can get away from us. And we don’t want to be in the position of negotiating with something that is smarter than we are, more powerful than we are, that’s hooked up to everything that we can’t switch off, which for whatever reason we’ve built in such a way that it’s no longer available to our saying, “Oh, that’s not what we meant. Can you stop doing that?”

We don’t want that moment because that moment of negotiation in the case of superintelligence that’s unaligned will be analogous to our just trying to play better chess against a chess engine that is better than Magnus Carlsen and will always be better than Magnus Carlsen and is only getting better by the hour. And you’re never going to beat it. You’re never going to out think this thing that again, is, even if it was just thinking at a human level, it’s like 10 brilliant people at MIT given 30 years to think about this next thing that you’re now negotiating over.

SHANE SMITH: Where do you think it goes?

The Arms Race Problem

SAM HARRIS: Well, the short answer is I don’t know. But the longer answer is it’s totally reasonable to worry about it. And the one thing that worries me is that many of the principal people who are building this tech, everyone’s in an arms race. And an arms race is precisely the condition which you’re not able to think these problems through in a sufficiently careful way. Because an arms race is just the wrong system of incentives to be careful.

I mean, it’s just the person who’s going as fast as possible is going to be going faster than the person who’s being more careful, and that person’s going to win. And if you’re in America, it’s totally rational to say we can’t let the Chinese get there first. So we’re only going to spend so much time worrying about the safety issue.

And certainly there’s the alignment issue, which half of us think is just a spooky religion of doomerism. Anyway, we’re going to give 2% of our mind share to that problem because we’re racing the Chinese at a minimum. And then if you’re OpenAI, you’re racing Meta or Anthropic or whoever. So we’re in the wrong system of incentives to be thinking carefully about this.

But worse, many of the people who are actually doing the work for whatever reason don’t take the alignment problem seriously. They think that it’s, I mean, honestly, I’ve never heard a good argument against it. It used to be that they thought, okay, well, this is just so far away. Superintelligence is so far away that worrying about it is, as Andrew Ng’s analogy, it’s like worrying about overpopulation on Mars. We’ll worry about that when we get there. When we get to Mars, we build a colony, and then it gets bigger and bigger. Then let’s talk about it.

But you’re so far in advance of the problem. But almost no one thinks that now, given the pace of progress that we’ve seen in the last few years, virtually no one says something like, superintelligence is 100 years away. I’ve ceased to hear that.

SHANE SMITH: No, it’s definitely. The window is shortened.

The Accelerating Timeline

SAM HARRIS: Yeah. And so if you’re thinking it might be 20 years away or 10 years away, all of a sudden that’s an interval that you can sort of feel the, you can see the shadow looming because those years pass very quickly and it could be three years away, and we actually just don’t know.

One thing we know is we’re very bad at predicting the timeline of progress for these kinds of things. I mean, I think it was the Wright brothers, one of them is quoted as saying it’s going to take whatever 100 years or a thousand years for heavier than air human flight. And that was like two years before they themselves delivered human flight. So it’s just confidently predicting when we’re going to have the breakthrough that gives us the difference, that makes the difference. We know we’re bad at it and we’re making so much progress.

In the last few years, we made the sort of progress that virtually everyone would have said was at least 20 years away five years ago. I mean, there’s no one five years ago who said, we’re going to be here. So whether LLMs are in fact the technology that’s going to deliver truly general and then ultimately superintelligence, the jury’s still out on that. But again, we’re in a place that’s alarming and it’s fundamentally different than even the worried people were expecting.

I mean, for instance, most people who were worrying about AI alignment and AI safety 10 years ago were assuming that the most powerful models would be built in total isolation from everything else. And you certainly would never hook them up to the Internet. So this stuff would be air gapped from everything that mattered. It would be in a box in a lab, and you’d have people in dialogue with it trying to figure out whether it was safe to let out.

And maybe there’s some part of that process that remains for the newest, most powerful models even now. But what’s really happening, clearly, is that there’s this very brief process of scrutiny. And then everything’s just out in the wild and millions of people are using them and they’re jailbreaking them in ways that are unanticipated. And everything is already hooked up to everything, and it’s going to be hooked up to the stock market.

And it’s like we’ve connected everything to everything and there’s no off switch. What I expect is probably going to happen is something, something sufficiently scary will happen that will get everyone’s attention, that will force us to have something like a Manhattan Project around AI safety. And it’ll be scary enough that even the Chinese will want to say, “Okay, we want a seat at that table and we’re not going to do anything dumb. We’re all on the same side here. We don’t want this to happen.”

And whether it’s to have the stock market go to zero, or all of a sudden we wake up and nobody’s got a bank account, I don’t know what it could be, but it could be something sufficiently alarming where we think, “All right, this just changed the rules of the game. We’re not actually in an arms race. Meta is not in an arms race with Google, and the U.S. is not in an arms race with China. We’re now in an arms race with our own ignorance.”

And we’ve built tools we can’t fully control. And we have to figure out how to pull back from the brink. I mean, I think that’s, short of something like that happening, I don’t see how we’re going to get out of this arms race condition.

The Inevitability of Progress

SHANE SMITH: Humans don’t like to do anything unless we have a gun to our heads. I remember there was a debate between Larry Page and your pal Elon Musk. And Elon was very anti. And Larry Page was very pro. And it’s just sort of going back and forth. But the given was that it happened. The given was, I believe.

SAM HARRIS: On Elon’s account, that the line from Larry that most alarmed him there was, “We won’t mind when we’re all robots.”

SHANE SMITH: Well, that was it. Yeah, that was exactly right. We’re going to download our brains into computers. And that’s a good one. Because I was there and I got 50% of what they were saying. But what I did get was they were really into universal living wage because they were already there. They’re already at the synthesis of AI, all human endeavor. Dumb machine. They’re already like, “Okay, we don’t want the thugs to come with, so we would pay them off with money.”

SAM HARRIS: Yeah.

SHANE SMITH: And to me, having kids, you’re sort of, okay, well, to go back to the industrial revolution, when there’s a great, from horizontal production to vertical production, when there’s a great upheaval, then there’s a lot of that happens.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah, yeah.

SHANE SMITH: World wars and famines and child slavery and factories and all kinds of terrible stuff. What the hell is going to happen? And if you don’t know, then, well.

The Perfect Alignment Scenario

SAM HARRIS: It’s sobering to realize that even in the perfect case, I mean, just imagine we get super intelligence that is perfectly aligned. There’s no alignment problem. It’s like this is just an oracle and a genie and it can make any machine. They can make any machine.

SHANE SMITH: Computer. I want a coffee.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah. And there’s just no, it completely cancels the need for human drudgery and it is doing all of our intellectual work better than we can do it. Even in that condition, we have an immense problem to solve. We have an economic problem to solve, a political problem to solve, an existential spiritual problem to solve. We’ve got a lot to worry about. Even if God just handed us the perfect labor saving device.

SHANE SMITH: Work satisfies need, desire and sanity.

SAM HARRIS: Yep.

SHANE SMITH: You take work away, you’re going to have a lot of neuroses and not enough MDMA.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah. Although I’m a little less worried about that than some people because I do think we have a test case for that, which is basically rich people in every generation. I mean, if there’s, I was.

SHANE SMITH: About to say aristocracy.

The Aristocracy of Leisure and Productivity

SAM HARRIS: Yeah. In every generation there are people who haven’t had to work and they figured it out. I mean, some of them blew their brains out, obviously, but there are people who have been free to just do what they want in life unconstrained by economic necessity. And many of them have had incredibly productive lives. And some of the most productive lives, you know, that can be named.

A lot of the great scientists of the age, I mean, you go back a couple hundred years, who was doing the science. You had these kind of gentlemen scientists who were just. They didn’t have to work, they had an art.

SHANE SMITH: Yeah, that’s true. If you were. That’s aristocracy, like shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations, generally by the third generation, they squander everything, having that good time.

Redefining Work and Economic Value

SAM HARRIS: But what we will have to do is change our ethic, or pseudo ethic around the sense that you have to justify your life by fitting into this economic machine. You have to figure out how to do something that someone will pay you for, otherwise you have no right to live on some level.

And so we’ve broken that connection a little bit in the sense that at a minimum, liberal democracies that are functioning reasonably well, we’ve set the floor beneath which we don’t want you to fall. We haven’t done a great job, obviously. We’ve got homeless people on our streets and we haven’t solved that problem. But, you know, we don’t want people, we don’t want people starving to death on our streets. Right. We don’t have that. This isn’t Bangladesh or Somalia. And that’s a good thing.

What we want, what we would want is in the presence of more and more abundance and more and more wealth and then an aligned AI. We would want something like Universal Basic Income, something where at a minimum, everyone can survive and even flourish as you spread this wealth around.

What we don’t want is this radical disjunction where you’ve got a handful of trillionaires now deciding they need to go to New Zealand because life is too dangerous here. And they figured out how to not pay taxes on anything. And then you’ve got 35% unemployment. And we can’t figure out how to spread the wealth around because, you know.

SHANE SMITH: We’re just morons, which is what we do. Yeah, I mean, that sounds like a dystopian vision, but that’s generally what we do. We say, well, we made the money and it’s ours now. And you don’t get it.

SAM HARRIS: We need to break that spell somehow.

SHANE SMITH: Yeah. How? Because that’s, that’s socialism and that’s.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah, well, we, you know, taxation is already part of, you know, part.

SHANE SMITH: Of that picture doesn’t work.

The Common Good and Billionaire Responsibility

SAM HARRIS: Obviously the people who are doing this work have to recognize that they have a stake in the common good. Right. Like, you just ask yourself what’s, you know, if you’re a multi billionaire, what sort of society do you want to live in?

Do you want to live in a society where the, you know, the Gini coefficient is approaching one and now you’re shopping for the razor wire that’s going to go on the walls around your compound and you’re vetting more bodyguards because, you know, the last bodyguards scared you because they were looking a little too greedily at your art collection. And now you got to find people who you can actually trust to protect the people you love and protect all the stuff you’ve amassed?

Or would you actually like to live in a society where envy and desperation have not, you know, risen to the asymptotically so as to derange everybody? You’re not surrounded by criminals or would be criminals who are desperate for your stuff. You’re actually surrounded by happy, productive, creative people who are having their hopes and dreams realized too.

SHANE SMITH: And I agree, but we just don’t do it.

SAM HARRIS: Yep.

SHANE SMITH: We got to keep them short and beautiful. I will try over under how many Supreme Court rulings will get overturned in the next 12 months?

SAM HARRIS: I have no intuitions about that.

SHANE SMITH: Okay. Odds that the first AI generated president gets elected before 2050.

SAM HARRIS: I got it. I mean that’s, it’s got to be tiny but not impossible.

SHANE SMITH: What 10%?

SAM HARRIS: I mean, I think there are much greater odds that we ruin everything with AI than we do everything perfectly such that we would want an AI president.

SHANE SMITH: I don’t think it’s crazy.

SAM HARRIS: It’s not. Not crazy. I mean, it’s not. I mean, but you know, 4%.

SHANE SMITH: Okay, 4%. I’m going to go 13.

SAM HARRIS: Okay.

SHANE SMITH: Who goes to Mars first? Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos or a Kardashian?

SAM HARRIS: I don’t think any of them are going to Mars. I think it’s going to be further out than that.

SHANE SMITH: Okay, here’s a follow up over under on how many billionaires make it to space before one dies trying.

SAM HARRIS: It’s going to remain dangerous, I think for quite some time. So I don’t know, maybe, maybe it’s going to be 20 to one. 20 get there and one die.

SHANE SMITH: All right, I like it.

The Ethics of Extreme Wealth

SAM HARRIS: These people have to be no longer lionized as somehow exemplars of what you should be when you become wealthy. It should be embarrassing to be a billionaire who is not incredibly generous and obviously positive sum with respect to the common good.

The billionaire who’s just trying to maximize the escape plan to New Zealand and otherwise trying to hold on to every dime. That has to be embarrassing among other billionaires and among other, you know, centimillionaires and among like you shouldn’t be able to go to the party in Aspen and be in good standing reputationally, if you’re that much of an a.

SHANE SMITH: It’s the opposite.

SAM HARRIS: Right? It’s the opposite because all these. I mean, we got a bunch of people who read too much Ayn Rand and science fiction and just didn’t get a proper ethical toolkit. Right. And they’re determinative of a lot of this tech and a lot of the public conversation.

What Elon did with USAID should be an extinction level event for his reputation as a billionaire among billionaires. Right. People shouldn’t be respecting him as the soon to be first trillionaire. He should be appropriately shamed for what he did there.

And yet what we have is a weirdly, I mean, in the culture of tech and in sort of the fanboy world online around it, we have this. I mean, it’s an interesting kind of reputational test case between kind of Elon and how he’s viewed and Bill Gates and how he’s viewed.

The Gates vs. Musk Paradox

SAM HARRIS: I mean, here you got these two fantastically wealthy people. Granted, Bill, I don’t know Bill, but from the outside, he’s not exactly who you’d want him to be to run this experiment perfectly because he’s sort of quirky enough and weird enough, and there’s enough stuff about him as just kind of a super nerd who cheated on his wife, et cetera, and was too close to Jeffrey Epstein. There’s kind of weird stuff there that people are going to want to be distracted by.

But generally speaking, he’s a rich guy who’s decided at the, you know, the second part of his career to basically be the most effective philanthropist in human history.

SHANE SMITH: And malaria.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah. And he’s just saving human lives all day long, and that’s what he wants to do. And again, which he’s vilified for. Yeah, he is vilified as this guy who’s trying to, you know, smuggle geotracking devices into people’s bodies with vaccines.

And the same people who are, presumably, I would think, the same people who are vilifying Bill Gates as just this weirdo who’s trying to track us, are lionizing Elon as just this, you know, the perfect exemplar of who you want to be when you have it all.

It’s exactly the reverse. I mean, you literally have Elon destroying the greatest source of aid to the most desperately needy people on Earth and gleefully doing it and talking about “feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” you know, when he could have been going to parties. That’s literally what he tweeted on X, it’s just absolutely shameful and psychopathic behavior.

And yet, you know, I mean, in certain circles, you know, his reputation’s been destroyed. But not in the circles that matter, right? Like in my view, he should be untouchable for what he did there. I mean, like the way back, we should require some kind of, you know, truth and reconciliation commission to get him back into good standing in polite society given how psychopathically he’s behaved.

I mean, not to forget about those real world consequences of just actually canceling funding to the neediest people on earth, what he’s done on X. I mean, the way he’s just signal boosted, you know, white supremacy and anti-Semitism and sheer insanity and worked rather hard to kind of destroy our sense making in the political space. It’s completely unconscionable and irresponsible and yet there’s more than a tolerance for it.

There’s actually a celebration kind of a like a post Babel, you know, nihilistic celebration of it among, you know, young tech heads. And then on the other hand, at a minimum, there’s just kind of benign neglect of Bill Gates whole project. I mean, it’s like a deeply unsexy project to be giving away tens of billions of dollars to save people’s lives.

The Challenge of Philanthropy

SHANE SMITH: You couldn’t have a worse spokesman than Bill Gates. First of all, by the way, in full disclosure, we worked for Red and we worked for One over the years. I give him kudos. He’s an incredible philanthropist and he realized that he wasn’t a good salesperson. So he got the best salesperson maybe in the world, Bono, to be the city, you know, for.

SAM HARRIS: But Bono gets vilified. Like if Bono collides with Elon, he gets vilified. Like Bono goes on the Joe Rogan podcast and says something. I forget the actual, forgive me because I forget the actual details here, but he says something, you know, off kilter in that echo chamber and he’s just like reaps the whirlwind of hate from Joe Rogan’s audience and you know, all the Elon stands, right, that whole world, that whole audience, and I don’t know how much it overlaps with your audience, but everyone in there who can’t see how upside down this is ethically.

SHANE SMITH: Well, I think Bill Gates look again, I have some personal knowledge and trying to eradicate malaria, as someone who’s suffered from malaria myself, people would have said he’s insane, you’re crazy, and very close to doing it. I mean an incredible, incredible job and came up with very more mosquito nets like analog solutions.

But he’s been rich for a long time and he’s been rich so long that there’s almost Rothschild like myths about him that have built up. Elon’s newer, his tech is newer.

SAM HARRIS: He’s still been rich for a very long time.

SHANE SMITH: Yes, but I mean, basically Tesla in the last decade has made him really rich. I mean, obviously PayPal. But look, the richer he gets, the more vilified he gets. I mean, people.

The Musk Phenomenon

SAM HARRIS: He’s mostly celebrated by the people who don’t really. Who aren’t sensitive to the kind of his ethical indiscretions and how much he’s just lying and vilifying people and defaming people and suing people and just. I mean, he’s just a kind of a colossus of ethical indiscretion at this point. Something very Trumpian about him, which is.

SHANE SMITH: Why they became better, why they got.

SAM HARRIS: Along for 15 minutes. But he’s just an agent of chaos in many regards. But the people who aren’t sensitive to that, who are just focused on the businesses he’s been building. There’s something very aspirational about you look at SpaceX. SpaceX is the least damaged, I think reputationally by his political misadventures. But it’s incredibly aspirational and incredibly inspiring.

SHANE SMITH: I think it’s the most worrisome, actually.

SAM HARRIS: Well, it’s also, I mean, yes, it’s scary that he has the power he has. I mean, it’s scary that all of our, you know, at least half of our satellites. More.

SHANE SMITH: Yeah.

SAM HARRIS: You know, are on Earth are, you know, controlled by one man. I mean, that’s bonkers.

SHANE SMITH: Which is soon to be all information, GPS banking.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah. The fact that, you know, Ukraine has to worry about whether they can have the lights turned off because. Yeah, it’s.

SHANE SMITH: It’s almost James Bondian.

SAM HARRIS: Oh, yeah.

SHANE SMITH: And it’s sort of like this one person control, like it was always the richest person in the world, had the power to do Moonrakers or underwater cities or whatever.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah, no, he’s full on Bond villain. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The Psychedelic Awakening

SHANE SMITH: But you were friends with Elon. Yeah, we can keep talking about Elon, but I wanted to actually start at the beginning. So you’re a young, smart academic kid and all of a sudden you interrupt that and say, “I’m going to go to India and Nepal and meditate.”

SAM HARRIS: Yeah. Well, I actually had two agendas at the time. I was going to write the great American novel.

SHANE SMITH: As you do.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah. And because I was writing novels rather than nonfiction at that point, it never occurred to me that dropping out of school would be a problem. Because if you’re going to write the great American novel, no one cares where you went to school or whether you graduated or anything. So the ultimate carefree attitude.

I dropped out of Stanford, which was relevant because Stanford, I think, is virtually the only school in the country where you can never really effectively drop out. I mean, you could disappear for 30 years and show up again and you’re still on the computer and the registrar will just let you back in and you don’t have to write letters and explain what you were doing or anything.

So it didn’t seem like a very high stakes thing to just take some time off and write and study meditation, which I had gotten into through a few psychedelic experiences at that point when I was a sophomore.

SHANE SMITH: So don’t skip. Okay, open that file.

SAM HARRIS: So anyway, I just had kind of a dual purpose, both writing and kind of recapitulating the 60s for myself at that point and going to India and Nepal and studying meditation and spending some time.

SHANE SMITH: So you’re at Stanford. We have a little bit of a psychedelic experience.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah.

SHANE SMITH: You’re recreating the 60s in the 90s, is it?

SAM HARRIS: I started in ’85. I should have been class of ’89. This was ’86, ’87.

SHANE SMITH: All right, tell us. Let’s get to the good stuff.

The MDMA Experience

SAM HARRIS: So you want to start with the drugs? Yeah. So this would have been ’86, I think. And MDMA was—my rave culture hadn’t started, or if it had started—

SHANE SMITH: No one.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah, I wasn’t aware of it. And so no one in my circle, I mean, certainly no 20 year olds, 19, 20 year olds had taken MDMA or probably had even heard of it. It was at this point had just, I think it was schedule one in ’85. So it had been legal up until, for therapeutic use up until just the year before.

And this was just kind of an export from the psychotherapeutic community that had adopted it with great interest for obvious reasons. But now at this point it was illegal. And I was given it actually by my mother who’s, you know, among her many talents and virtues, she was someone who had had—I mean, she was not a druggie at all. She had completely missed the 60s. She never smoked pot. But in a therapeutic context, someone had given her MDMA. And she found it just incredibly useful.

SHANE SMITH: For anxiety, depression, just kind of a—

SAM HARRIS: Breakthrough into a feeling of well-being that you didn’t know was possible. And I think when I was around 16, she gave me one of Ram Dass’s books, “The Only Dance There Is,” which is I think just a transcript of some recorded talk. And I think she told me I was 16 or 17. She told me about this MDMA experience.

And I was smoking pot as a teenager and I was a committed student, but I was recreationally getting stoned. And she knew about all that. And she said, “If you’re ever interested in any of this stuff, I would just love to talk to you about it and sort of open that door for you.” And I was not interested at all at that point.

And I think it took another two years before I even remembered that conversation. And then I came back to her and I said, “Yeah, this is something I would want to look into.” And so, yeah, she gave me and my best friend—she just, she didn’t stay. She wasn’t with us. She just, she was our dealer.

SHANE SMITH: And I can imagine the parents are the best friends.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah, sure, yeah.

SHANE SMITH: Excuse me.

SAM HARRIS: I don’t think they know about this, Mrs. Harris. So it’s important to say we went into this experience having no expectation beyond this is going to reveal something about the mind that is kind of profoundly interesting from a psychological and ethical point of view.

I mean, we knew what kind of the target state was, which was you’re going to feel more loving and connected and less self-conscious than you’ve ever felt. And this is worth doing because you don’t even know this state is possible. Zero party culture, rave culture, this is, you know, you’re going to get laid. I mean, none of that stuff was associated with this drug. And it was just the two of us sitting alone in a house having a conversation.

The Moment of Clarity

And at a certain point in the conversation, I realized two things. One was for some period of time I had, without even noticing it, I had been stripped of my neurosis. There was no part of me that was concerned about or even monitoring his view of me. I was just talking to my best friend and all of a sudden 100% of my attention was free to just appreciate him, to recognize how much I wanted him to be happy. And my thoughts about myself had completely evaporated.

And I wasn’t—and it was in that vacancy that I realized for the first time how oppressive they had been every moment of my life that I certainly remembered up until that point. And so it was on some level, it was like the first moment of sanity I experienced as a quasi adult. I mean, I don’t recall what it was like to be a four year old child, but once this carapace of egocentricity and self-concern had been built for me, it wasn’t until that moment on MDMA that I realized what it was like to be free of it.

And so that was the first insight. So I’m just talking to my best friend and suddenly we’re talking about how uniquely free of inwardness and neuroticism we felt. And then I realized that although all the love I was feeling for him and just kind of the freedom, the very strong sense that love was not a transactional emotion. It wasn’t like, “I love you because of our history.” There was no kind of expectation of reciprocity.

It was really just like falling into a state of being that had as its ethical and psychological valence in the presence of another person, love and compassion, and just wanting that person to be well. But I realized at a certain point in the conversation that if the mailman had walked into the room, I would have felt the same way to the mailman. This state of being was not at all contingent upon a personal history with somebody.

And that just completely blew my mind. I mean, that was the moment where I realized all of these otherwise deranged utterances that you read about in scripture, the world’s spiritual and contemplative traditions and religious traditions, Jesus sermonizing on the mount, all of that made some significant sense. Regardless of what I might have thought about organized religion or the way in which all of that can get corrupted, et cetera, et cetera.

I suddenly understood that for millennia people have been having this kind of experience where they recognize, okay, it’s possible to have as your default a feeling of loving kindness and compassion and well-wishing toward all conscious creatures and to just abide as that so much that it transforms your life.

Religion and the Spiritual Experience

SHANE SMITH: But not through religion. What you’re describing is the opiate of the masses. You’re describing religion teaching you that you’re going to be crazy and life is going to be awful. But if you pray and are good and do these things, then you can love all human beings.

SAM HARRIS: I mean, I have many things to say in criticism of organized religion, as you probably know, but the thing that I don’t share with most atheists is a sense that there’s no baby in the bathwater worth saving. I mean, the baby in the bathwater is clearly this kind of experience that is only really attested to in our spiritual literature and which science has very belatedly taken an interest in.

SHANE SMITH: Well, you understand the reason for laws and religion and police and a lot of things codifying things. When you have anarchy, when you see full blown anarchy, you’re like, “Oh, yeah, I get why we have all these things,” because it’s really bad and we’re really bad to each other. And when you strip everything away and you can go, for example, to parts of the world like the DRC where you go, “Oh my Lord, we need lots of laws and lots of religion, philosophy, all these things that we’ve been doing is to sort of keep us away from ourselves.”

Now I go back to—I was talking to Barry Diller about this yesterday and he basically had a very psychologically fraught childhood. And I said, “Was normal then?”

SAM HARRIS: Right.

SHANE SMITH: Which is from Quadrophenia. And it’s a very famous thing in punk and mod circles. What’s normal? There’s no normal. And so that plus “physician, heal thyself.” I think everyone’s crazy to a certain degree if we let our brains go and we come up with different ways of keeping our brain.

So you had this MDMA, which—the telling thing that you said to me there is, “It was the first time I didn’t have neuroses. It was the first time I was free from that.” That’s because you’ve got a big brain. It’s been thinking a lot and it becomes a problem. And so you did MDMA. Now springboard to how we got to India.

The Path to Meditation

SAM HARRIS: So that book that my mother had put on my shelf.

SHANE SMITH: So she’s into meditation?

SAM HARRIS: No, no, no, she wasn’t at the time. No, she had just had this one experience. I think she just had it once, maybe twice. Again, not a druggie at all. I mean, never liked pot, tried LSD once in the 60s or early 70s. Not a drinker. I mean, just like zero. And not a meditator.

But she had read the book. She’d had the experience and read the book and just saw, “Okay, this is just a reference point that is just worth knowing about.” And so she kind of—so once I had this MDMA experience, I read the book and it gave—I mean, I don’t know how much you know about Ram Dass, but I mean, he was Timothy Leary’s colleague at Harvard, Richard Alpert, and they were doing their acid research and psilocybin research and both got fired for having given too many drugs to too many undergraduates in a way that was not strictly legal at the time.

And ironically, it was Andrew Weil who got them fired. Andrew Weil wrote the article in the—I don’t know if you know Andrew Weil, but he’s a naturopathic doctor who I think feels guilty for having gotten them fired. But he wrote the article in the Harvard Crimson that shined a light of scrutiny on them.

SHANE SMITH: So hold on, he was doing it maliciously or—

SAM HARRIS: Well, no, I mean he—I think he at the time thought—correct me, sorry, Andrew, if I’m getting this wrong, but I think he thought that what they were doing was wrong and reckless. And I think so, and it probably was, honestly.

So they both got fired and then Ram Dass went to India, Richard Alpert went to India and became Ram Dass and was, you know, came back teaching meditation and really kind of teaching this buffet of various practices, some Buddhist meditation practices, then kind of Hindu chanting and yoga and just a bunch of stuff.

And I went on a retreat with him in I think it was summer of ’87. So this is after I had taken an interest in meditation based on this first MDMA experience. And this is the first time I actually was taught to meditate. And it also happens to be the first time I took acid because my roommate on this retreat had some LSD. So I went from one MDMA experience to one LSD experience.

SHANE SMITH: Which did you like better?

The Perfect LSD Experience

SAM HARRIS: Well, I mean, they’re very different and they served fundamentally different purposes. I mean, I think the MDMA was absolutely the correct first experience for me. I mean, I also, I just got incredibly lucky with knowing what unlucky looks like. I mean, I had, you know, later on I had lots of terrifying and counterproductive experiences with LSD.

But this first experience, I mean, it was really just the perfect LSD experience. I was on a retreat. I had been meditating for days up in Breitenbush Hot Springs and ran into Ram Dass in the middle of my trip.

SHANE SMITH: Had you met him before as part of the crowd?

SAM HARRIS: I mean, there’s like a hundred people on this retreat. But this was a day of silence where everyone’s doing their own thing. I decided to drop acid and sit on a bench. And Ram Dass came around the corner and kind of recognized the condition I was in and sat on the bench with me for like five hours and just hung out with Ram Dass for five hours.

SHANE SMITH: Did you talk to him?

SAM HARRIS: Yeah, but, I mean, it was supposed to be a day of silence. It was, yeah. I mean, there was not a lot of talk. That was mostly, I mean, honestly, there was at least an hour with the knuckles of our index fingers touching, the least possible touch that still constitutes touch. And that became the universe.

I just realized that, I mean, the real resource is attention. And when you have the sort of the 20 kiloton version of it and can direct it into your knuckle, touching the knuckle of another human being, you can have the beatific vision right there. I mean, there’s nothing.

You know, this actually goes to the point you were making about the boundary between wisdom and madness or the boundary between normative psychological states and madness. Because on some level, obviously it’s crazy to be spending half the day with 100% of your attention in the few skin cells that are on the surface of your knuckle and feeling nothing but kind of oceanic bliss as a result.

There’s a point of view from which that can be seen as pathological. Right. And we’ll get there talking about bad trips. But anyway, this was the quintessential good trip. This was a quintessential good trip. Such that when people talked about bad trips, I just had no idea what they could possibly mean. I mean, it’s like, I mean, I just, what direction could you point from the experience I just had that would be anything other than blissful and transformational?

The Reality of Bad Trips

SHANE SMITH: I used to tell that to people when I was a kid. I took a lot of acid and mushrooms and everything else but acid. And when you’re young, it’s fun and you’re in the forest and you’re having adventures and “oh my God, we tried to get ice cream and we were out there in the creek for three hours” and, you know, it’s fun. And as you get older and there’s more stuff in your brain, yeah, that stuff comes out and it’s like, “I don’t know about my taxation situation.” It becomes this.

SAM HARRIS: This didn’t even require my getting older. This is, so at this point I left this retreat convinced that all right, this is the purpose of my life, to get deeper into this mystery. I mean, just how is it that I can transform my mind such that more and more of the time, that experience of just intense absorption in the well of being is just my day to day, hourly, you know, moment by moment experience.

So I started doing a lot more practice. I mean I was meditating a lot and started doing other silent, properly silent meditation retreats. But I also took acid probably once a month for a year at that point. So maybe 12 trips.

SHANE SMITH: You’re in Stanford at this point?

SAM HARRIS: But I didn’t re-enroll. So now I’m just writing and meditating and dropping acid once a month.

SHANE SMITH: Full on hippie.

SAM HARRIS: Full on.

SHANE SMITH: When you dropped out of school, you’re…

SAM HARRIS: Taking, I’ve got long hair and the whole thing.

SHANE SMITH: Wow.

SAM HARRIS: And I hadn’t gone to India yet. I think I, I think that was in a year away. But I was studying, I was sitting meditation retreats in the States. But then maybe, I don’t know, three, four, five, six acid trips in, I had my first bad one. And it was every bit as bad as the good one was good. I mean it was just a harrowing encounter with psychosis. I mean, just full on psychosis.

SHANE SMITH: Am I ever going to come down? Am I ever going to be normal again?

SAM HARRIS: And, but, and also, but, but I mean, so far gone that there’s, there’s no memory of having taken a drug. Right. So like this is, this was my permanent state. I’d always been this way, a beginningless…

SHANE SMITH: Hell that’s making me…

SAM HARRIS: Yeah, that trip right now. Yeah. And so I had a few trips like that and actually one with Ram Dass. I mean Ram Dass later became a friend and I had one of the worst trips I ever had with him just hanging out in his living room. And for whatever reason, that spin of the roulette wheel sent me just into an ocean of shame and weirdness.

Hanging Up the Phone

So then I was convinced, all right, I don’t need to do this anymore. This is like the door to hell is always ajar. And however I prepare, set and setting and it didn’t seem necessary because, you know, as Alan Watts once said, “when you get the message, hang up the phone.”

What psychedelics can convince you of is that there really is a there there. And yet they’re not, they’re kind of misleading and also risky method in the sense that it’s not totally predictable what experience you’re going to have. And also the durable transformation of your mind can’t be a matter of just getting high and coming down and getting high and coming down.

I mean, because all these states are transitory, right? They last six hours, 10 hours, and then you’re back being who you’re tending to be. And it’s that place that needs to be transformed by your discipline of attention or basis for insight.

So I got much more into meditation and did no psychedelics for like 25 years. But just before COVID I recognized that there was a, you know, the research with psychedelics had become, you know, back into vogue and was, you know, bearing a fair amount of fruit. And I was wanting to talk about it both on my podcast and write about it.

And I realized there was a kind of experience I had never had, which I just felt I needed to have in order to be able to talk about this, this part of the mind. With ketamine? No, with, I haven’t had that experience either. But having been a fan of Terence McKenna over the years and hearing him talk about high dose mushroom trips, it just, you know, blindfolded and, and just kind of going, going inward with a very visual psychedelic which, you know, LSD isn’t really compared to high dose psilocybin. It’s, I mean it’s just, it’s, it’s visual, but it’s not as visual.

SHANE SMITH: Right.

SAM HARRIS: So I just decided to have that experience which was also very interesting and useful, but I don’t really feel the need to keep having it. But, but so I had had a 25 year hiatus and then I, in 2019, I think I, I had another.

The Modern Psychedelic Renaissance

SHANE SMITH: Yeah, I was the same. I did a lot of drugs when I was younger, stopped for a long time and then sort of when I got older I guess because I sort of come back in vogue a little bit. Started, you know, just checking them out. Just out of interest, did you do…

SAM HARRIS: The 5 grams of dried mushrooms in the dark?

SHANE SMITH: Well, that’s one thing I haven’t done, which is I was talking to Hamilton Morris about this, but you know, what became fashionable is the sort of ayahuasca deal or DMT or ibogaine or whatever. I live in fear of barfing because I generally don’t barf and when I do it like breaks my ribs and I can barely breathe. Ibogaine and ayahuasca are just barfing. I mean, for days you’re barfing and I’m like, yeah, no, no, no, no, no.

SAM HARRIS: Although DMT apparently isn’t. I haven’t done DMT either.

SHANE SMITH: And it’s quicker, but you’re as high as you’ve ever been. So, I mean, to go back to our very fragile brains, I live in fear that I’ve gotten to a place where I’m sort of dumbly happy and my brain sort of functions as I like it.

And I think a lot of the things with ayahuasca and things and ketamine and Molly and the things that people are doing now are, again, it’s physician. Like a lot of sad people and people with anxiety and depression or unease in their own skin or neuroses or what have you, and they’re looking for a drug to solve it.

So I’m, I, I did the same thing basically, and then I said, okay. And by the way, also pharmaceutical drug, Xanax, whatever. And you’re like this, like that doesn’t work. And so you have to sort of fix the brain and, you know, meditation. So I meditate as well. And I’m going to ask you a favor if we can maybe meditate before we get into the meaning of life.

SAM HARRIS: Well, just to close the loop on the way…

SHANE SMITH: I don’t want to stop the story narrative. I like…

The Role of Psychedelics in Meditation

SAM HARRIS: Yeah. To close the loop on how psychedelics fit into meditation. I do think it’s… First of all, we should realize that these drugs are different. I mean, so some of these drugs are physiologically very well tolerated and altogether safe, really. Which is to say there’s virtually no lethal dose of LSD, for instance. I mean, certainly not a dose that has any relationship to the kind of dose a person would take.

That’s not at all true of MDMA. Yeah, I mean, the effective dose of MDMA is much closer to the LD50 or the dose that would kill half of the people who took it. I mean, maybe it’s 10 to 1 or something, or 1 to 10, whereas with psilocybin and LSD, it’s orders of hundreds or thousands. But that’s not to say you can’t have an experience that is so destabilizing that it damages you. So I think people are right to be cautious with all these drugs.

I think there are people who shouldn’t take any of these drugs, but for those of us who can, they serve a crucial function for some percent, for some percentage of the people who can safely take these drugs. There are people who I consider myself one who almost certainly would not have become interested enough in meditation to have experienced any depth there.

Like, if you had taught me to meditate at 18 or at 28 or even now, but for the fact that I had this reference experience of a radical transformation in my sense of my self and what it is to be a self in the world, as virtually everyone does when they first try to meditate, I would have experienced the frustration and restlessness of just not being concentrated, just having a wandering mind, and would have not seen. I just would have bounced off the project. I just would have not seen what was of interest there.

It wouldn’t have been sufficiently interesting to me that I couldn’t pay attention. I mean, this is the one doorway in for the skeptical mind here, is that if I told you, just pay attention to anything. Pay attention to the breath or the sounds you hear in the room around you or the feeling of your body sitting in space. Just pay attention to anything for the next 60 seconds without getting lost in thought. Virtually nobody can do this. I mean, you’d have to be a savant of concentration to be able to do this.

And what’s far more common is that most people are so distracted by thought, there’s so much white noise in their minds that they’ll think they did it because all their only experience of being awake and functional is to be thinking every moment of the day without even knowing they’re thinking.

And so a much more likely experience would be you could take one of these people and put them in a room or put them on a retreat for 48 hours or 72 hours or a week, and have them do nothing but pay attention to the present moment, the breath, or the feeling of walking. And they would soon discover that their attention can’t rest with anything for more than a few seconds at a time.

And that is… It’s totally normal, but it’s totally pathological. This is the mechanics of our psychological unease. I mean, this is the wheelhouse of suffering that we’re always trying to mitigate by having good experiences and controlling our environment and controlling what happens to us.

But there’s a spell that really has to be broken here. This confinement to thought every minute of the day. And for most of us, unless you’re very lucky and you have a talent for meditation or you’re just in so much psychological pain and for whatever reason, you’re convinced that this is really going to be a remedy and you should just tough it out. In my experience, most people can’t be convinced that there’s a there there.

But for having had the psychedelic experience, which, again, is not a perfect window onto what you get from meditating. It’s just enough of a change to convince you that change is possible.

Concentration and the Overactive Mind

SHANE SMITH: Yeah. I have many things to say about that. One is, it’s the reason for a mantra is you can concentrate on one thing.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah.

SHANE SMITH: So that the rest can relax. I find things very strange. Like, for example, I play cards and I watch football. And both of which are spas for the brain because you’re just concentrating on the cards or you’re just watching because football. There’s 27 million things happening. It’s literally made for an overactive brain. And you just go, grrr. And it’s like a spa. And the same thing for a mantra.

A, B. I think in a psychedelic experience, the classic hippie psychedelic experience is you open your brain and you say, “Oh, I can see other universes, other times, other…” This, by the way, DMT, other timelines, Ayahuasca and ibogaine. You see your relatives both in the future and in the past. It sounds hippie-ish and crazy. And we all discounted the hippiness of it.

The whole 10% of the human brain, we open up the brain and it’s like we can see, “Oh, my Lord, there’s a lot of stuff out there.” And then you sort of come back to reality. Meditation is a way of keeping that going without doing the drugs. But maybe it’s a way of opening our brains because our brains need to be open because there’s a whole lot of stuff that we don’t register.

The Illusion of the Ego

SAM HARRIS: Yeah, but the crucial difference from my point of view between psychedelics and what is all implied there by all those changes in state and meditation is that what meditation reveals is that even in ordinary, perfectly ordinary states of consciousness, I mean, just the kind of consciousness you need to have a conversation like this or to drive a car or answer email.

That state of just knowing clarity, just the fact that they’re seeing and hearing and smelling and tasting and touching happening that is already centerless without any. There’s no ego in the middle of it. I mean, the ego already doesn’t exist. It’s not like you have an ego which you meditate out of existence or that you lose because you bombard yourself with psychedelics.

The ego is an illusion that can be seen through and seen through. It again need not mean that your experience is psychedelically transformed. It can be as simple as just looking at this can. You can look at this can feeling like you’re over here, behind your face, the subject of experience looking across space at an object that is this can.

Or you can lose that subject-object dichotomy. And there’s just this totality of experience. And the can is in the middle of it. And that transition from a kind of a spiritual, ethical, psychological point of view is everything. And it doesn’t entail any of the pyrotechnics of the psychedelic experience.

And this is why there’s something very misleading about psychedelics. In the end, again, they were totally indispensable for me. But they give you the sense that freedom is elsewhere. Freedom is up at the top of the mountain. And you’ve got to schlep up there with all the drugs or all the effort or something. Either you’ve got to fast. You’ve got to spend a decade in silence. You’ve got to go into the dark. You’ve got to do something to so thoroughly perturb your nervous system so that you are transfigured.

And everything is like me and Ram Dass sitting for five hours with our knuckles touching. And it’s everything. No, that’s… All of those experiences are possible and interesting. But the real wisdom of emptiness from, to use Buddhist terminology, is to recognize that there’s no center to any experience.

There’s just consciousness and its contents. And you’re not on the edge of it. You’re not in the middle of it. You’re not a man in the boat rowing on the stream of consciousness. There’s just the fact that everything is appearing, and that is what it’s like to be you in each moment.

Your body is appearing in space, in an apparent world. From a neurological point of view, this is very much like a dream. I mean, all of this is being run on the wetware of your three pounds of oatmeal that are in your head. And so the “out there,” the place you see outside again, the place where this can is, is the same place where we are thinking. It’s not like we’re thinking in here and the can’s out there.

No, all of this is in the same… Neurologically speaking, all of this is mind. I’m not even prejudging any of the metaphysics here. Let’s say materialism is true and the mind is just what the brain is doing. And when you’re dead, you’re dead. I mean, let’s say all that’s true, this can is in the simulation that’s being run on your brain right now.

And so this is where… And you could visualize, you could try to imagine a second can next to it. And if you’re… Some people can visualize imagery better than others, but if you can do it at all, you can get a little something, a glimmer of something, double the size of this can, or put a can next to it, or put a red apple on top of it.

You sort of see something that’s the same real estate in your brain that’s seeing the can is seeing a little bit of something when you visualize on top of it. And so your mind is all you have.

SHANE SMITH: Right.

SAM HARRIS: And the representation of an ego in the middle of all this or on the edge of all this is optional. It’s something you can cease to do. You can cease to… And this is what I first experienced on MDMA. For whatever reason, the drug relaxed the neurophysiology that was constantly representing self in the world.

I mean, there is the world that’s being represented through sensory cortex. And you’re constantly building this world with various circuits in your brain. But in addition, most people are constantly building a self representation in the world, and it’s not the same thing as representing your body, because most people don’t feel their self to be the same as their body.

They just don’t feel like the self doesn’t go down to your toes. In some sense, the self is a passenger in the body. There’s a feeling that there’s a subject in the head that is riding around in the body, and the body, in some sense, is part of the world. You have a relationship to your body, and your body can malfunction.

You were talking about getting sick and having your body betraying you with, you used to never get sick, and now you’re sick. So you have a relationship to all of this pain and chaos, but you’re up here. You’re the subject, the embattled subject who’s like, “Get me less of this and more of that.” And, “How do I stop this?” And now I have a pain in my hand, and I’m waiting for that to go away.

And… But I’m waiting from the point of view of being the subject in the head that can pay attention or not to that or get diverted into watching football or not. And it’s the subject that is the problem and is the central illusion that meditation can deconstruct.

Psychedelics can be very useful as a kind of reference point, but it can also be very misleading because there’s this sense that the deconstruction of that subject must entail this just explosive change in the contents of consciousness, and it really need not.

Studying with Meditation Masters

SHANE SMITH: And did you find that when you went to India and Nepal?

SAM HARRIS: Well, so I just studied with some great meditation teachers in both places, mostly in Nepal and mostly Buddhist, but not exclusively. And I sat with a bunch of Western meditation teachers in the States first, but then many of them became friends, and then we went and studied with their teachers in India, Nepal.

And so I have a lot of… Virtually all of these people have since died. I mean, I got very lucky in meeting kind of the final batch of great meditation masters, especially in this one tradition of Dzogchen masters in Tibetan Buddhism. I mean, like the Dalai Lama’s meditation teachers, Kensu Rinpoche and Yoshoken Rinpoche.

SHANE SMITH: You got a brief slice of time with these…

SAM HARRIS: I mean, these guys had come out of Tibet and set up places where they, they’ve been discovered by Westerners in the 60s and 70s and had been teaching for some decades. And then I sort of came around in the late 80s and early 90s, and so there were seasoned translators who had studied with them for years and had taken the time to learn Tibetan.

And I just got incredibly lucky with access and kind of the generosity of these teachers, and then I could go back. I didn’t spend a ton of time in Asia and living with the chaos of just trying to maintain your health on retreat in that kind of context. So I would go for two weeks or two months, and then I would come back and do retreats in the West. And so it was really an optimal experience.

Returning to Academia

SHANE SMITH: And so how do you go back to school after that? You’re like, “You know what? I want to change. I want to get into neuroscience. I want to get into figuring out why my brain acts this way.”

SAM HARRIS: Yeah. So I started writing. I stopped writing fiction. I just, every time I finished something, I just couldn’t really stand behind it. I never really tried to get any of it published.

SHANE SMITH: But it’s a great process because when I was younger, you learn about wordplay and things that help you later in life.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah. And you read a lot of books. So it wasn’t a waste of time. But at a certain point I started writing nonfiction and then gradually realized, okay, now everything changes. The moment you’re writing nonfiction and purporting to know something, the first question is, so where did you go to school and what did you study? And why should I listen to you?

And so, at a minimum, I had to go finish my undergraduate degree. So I went back to Stanford again, which again, was incredibly lucky because had I been going to Harvard or some other good school, I would have been gone, I would have had to have reapplied, and then I would have had to have explained myself. And I think they probably wouldn’t have been so interested in the fact that I had just done a lot of drugs and spent a lot of time in India.

SHANE SMITH: Stanford’s more West Coasty hippie-ish.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah. But I mean, crucially, I just wasn’t, I was still enrolled, and Tiger Woods could go back tomorrow, presumably, and he’d still be an undergraduate.

SHANE SMITH: That’s a good recommendation for Stanford, I gotta say.

Returning to Academia

SAM HARRIS: So I went back and I finished in philosophy because I had really spent the intervening decade reading a ton of philosophy and effectively writing Philosophy of Mind. So it just allowed me to finish as quickly. I just took a very heavy load and allowed me to finish as quickly as I could.

And then I thought I was going to do a PhD in philosophy, but got a little sick of hearing the philosophers of mind sort of wait around to hear what the neuroscientists were going to say about X, Y or Z. So I decided that I wanted to do a PhD in neuroscience. Not so much because I thought I was ever going to run a lab or be a professor of neuroscience, but just that I wanted to know. I wanted to be conversant in neuroscience, to be able to think about the mind and how the brain works.

So then I did a PhD and I actually studied belief and disbelief and uncertainty for my PhD work. And a kind of popularized version of my PhD dissertation became my third book, the Moral Landscape.

SHANE SMITH: Were you an atheist before you studied that?

Understanding Religious Experience

SAM HARRIS: Yeah, so I was always an atheist, not somebody who was interested in atheism, but I just was raised without any kind of religious indoctrination, so I didn’t have a belief in God when I went to college the first time around. I remember being in the Great Books Seminar and part of what we read was parts of the Bible and being surprised that some of my classmates were religious and then just kind of having some debates around religion as a freshman in college. And I was very skeptical of all of the theology, and I mean, it was preposterous to me.

But then I had this MDMA experience, and then I had a very clear sense of, okay, now I understand what people are going on about. I understand that somebody like Jesus probably just didn’t have temporal lobe epilepsy or he wasn’t just a fraud. It’s possible to have this transformative experience and then to be talking about it and to be doing it so charismatically that people just want to hang out with you and hear you talk about it and have that experience with you, and then this cult forms and then literature forms around that, and then people talk about it generations hence.

And so certainly when you have that happen in a context that’s free of science, because science really hasn’t been invented yet, and everyone believes in magic and miracles, and there’s really the sky’s the limit in terms of the kinds of claims you’re going to make about the way reality is. And everyone can essentially be L. Ron Hubbard, right, who can just point up at various constellations and say, yeah, the galactic overlord Xenu’s got his base star base there. And then he’s fighting a battle with that.

SHANE SMITH: Yeah, but that’s true, though, right?

September 11th and The End of Faith

SAM HARRIS: Exactly. So, I mean, it’s easy to see how all of that started. And so my skepticism with respect to doctrine and religious sectarianism continued, but again, I sort of backed into atheism just writing my first book in response to September 11th.

So when September 11th happened, I was just getting into my neuroscience research, and people started flying planes into our buildings for clearly theological reasons. And we on our own side had no way to think about this apart from, on the one hand, endorsing our own religious, quasi-theocratic passions, and then in a secular context, being basically confused about why anyone was doing anything.

I mean, I was meeting secular liberals who just couldn’t understand jihadism. They just thought these people must have been motivated by economics or ordinary politics. And I just had a very clear view of that because I had spent the previous decade studying religion effectively and knowing that many people really believe what they say they believe. I know that the suicide bomber in most cases believes in paradise, right, and is motivated by that belief.

And so when I see someone like John Walker Lindh, the guy who was raised in Marin County, who winds up fighting with the Taliban and they pull him out of the cave or the hole in the ground, and he’s completely unrepentant and still believes that the Quran is the perfect word of the creator of the universe, and he’s on that side, I understand him. Because I had done a similar thing with a very different belief system. I had dropped out of college. I’d spent functionally something like two years on silent meditation retreats in my twenties studying meditation.

It’s not at all, it’s not like John Walker Lindh’s project, but it was similarly extreme given the opportunities available to me, what you’d think is somebody with my opportunities would have wanted to do in his early to mid-20s. So I knew that we’re in the presence of true believers who are motivated by sincere religious convictions.

And so my first book, the End of Faith, was my effort to disentangle all of these variables. What is legitimately there, spiritually and ethically that we should care about and seek and seek to understand and seek to actualize for ourselves? And why is it that ceding that conversation to religion is so dysfunctional and divisive and ultimately the source of the very political chaos we were then witnessing in our society? And why is it, why do we want to get religion out of politics once and for all?

And so the End of Faith became that book, and then that sort of, then I kind of spent four years out of the lab dealing with the reaction to the End of Faith. I wrote the second book, Letter to a Christian Nation, which was my response to the Christian pushback to the End of Faith.

SHANE SMITH: What was the Christian pushback?

SAM HARRIS: Well, just, they were very happy that I had attacked Islam in the book, but they were very unhappy that I had attacked evangelical Christianity or any kind of Christian fundamentalism. And I attacked religious moderation too, which religious moderates didn’t like, because I viewed and continue to view religious moderation as a kind of fig leaf for religious fundamentalism.

I mean, the religious moderates, because they’re still attached to their sectarianism and their watered down religious beliefs, they don’t want anything too critical said about religious fundamentalists, and therefore they’re part of the problem. I mean, especially at that point, especially with respect to Islam and jihadism, they want to keep any criticism of religion taboo, and they want to call you a bigot if you say anything too strident against religious orthodoxy. And it’s just becoming increasingly unhelpful in a world where theocracy is really consequential.

Spirituality Without Religion

SHANE SMITH: You talk about spirituality without religion. People like to be told what to do and what to think, and they like structure and it gives them community. If you take it away, if you have spirituality that seems to be more individualistic than a sort of created religion for the masses, spirituality without religion, what are your thoughts on that?

SAM HARRIS: Because it’s just a fact that it’s possible to have a very different kind of experience of life than people tend to have just based on the happenstance of how they were raised. You had the family you had, you’ve got the genes you have, you’re in the society you happen to be born into. You get educated up until the age of 18, say or 25 or whenever you stop. And then our culture more or less decides, well, you’re done, you’re cooked. Now you’re the person you are, good luck being happy. And it’s a more difficult project than that.

It turns out you have many, for all intents and purposes, psychological experiments being run independently where many of these variables are controlled for and we see the outcome. And so we see that it’s possible to have everything, literally everything. You can be gorgeous and rich and famous and actually very talented. So we just pick your unhappy rock star or movie star or model or whoever it is. We all know these people who have everything and yet they either in fact commit suicide or they’re so unhappy that they may as well have committed suicide.

I mean, it’s just having everything for whatever reason isn’t enough to be happy. And conversely, you can be wandering the streets of New Delhi and find someone who has nothing, who’s apparently radiantly happy. Everything in between is possible. And so there’s more to learn.

And spirituality is the, it’s a word I’m not totally comfortable with because of all of its associations, but I really don’t know of a better one. It is that part of the project which deals with the furthest range of human well being. Where it’s, what is it possible to realize about the nature of mind in every present moment that is liberating? How is it that you can cease to suffer? And how fully can you cease to suffer unnecessarily, given the fact that your body’s going to age, you’re going to get sick, you’re going to feel pain, and ultimately you’re going to die, and ultimately you’re going to lose everyone you love.

I mean, we’re in this circumstance of radical precariousness and impermanence, where really change and loss is the only thing that’s guaranteed, right? No matter what you have and no matter how energetically you try to hold onto it, your grasping at what you love and want to maintain is going to ultimately be frustrated because of change and because of impermanence. And is it possible to be free and at ease in the midst of that? The answer to that question is spirituality, for lack of a better word.

And what religion tells you is that all you need to do is believe something about this circumstance and you’re going to get everything you want after you die. And in the meantime, you just have to be this person who either pretends to believe what is in fact incredible, or you have just managed to beat your intellect into some conformity with dogma such that you do believe this stuff and you live this life of cognitive dissonance.

And there are certain kinds of conversations you just don’t want to have or you can’t have or will refuse to have because they are effectively a kind of violence. I mean, if someone starts saying something too cogent and critical about your foundational beliefs in the virgin birth of Jesus, say, or the resurrection, or that the Quran is the perfect word of the creator of the universe, whatever the founding dogma is, if one shines the light of scrutiny on that too closely, there’s too much at stake, right?

You’ve built your life around it. Your marriage is framed by it. You’ve drummed this into your kids. You think that there’s something that’s going to be lost if that gets reexamined such that you no longer believe it. Whereas the real opportunity and possibility is if you’re Christian, it’s actually possible to be more and more like Jesus, the archetype of Jesus, somebody who’s radically free. That’s possible.

The Nature of Free Will

SHANE SMITH: Man’s interpretation. It all comes down to interpretation. The suicide bombers are told by the mullahs. They’re generally illiterate. But I want to go to the implications of free will denial. So when you’re talking about this, it’s very individualistic, actually. Your mom was a certain way and gave you a book and gave you some MDMA and you went off on a path.

A lot of parents say, here’s Christ, here’s religion. And so they go off on a certain way. Interesting free will. And you talk a lot about this, that our brains are making decisions before we’re conscious of them and who is writing the script and the sort of black box behind there. And the reason why I love it is because I love things that make me think and who is writing the script and where do these thoughts come from? And what is free will?

So let’s talk about free will, which is maybe as esoteric as we can get. And then we’ll come back with the hard facts of modernity and the crushing pain of human existence.

SAM HARRIS: Okay, let’s go. Well, so free will, both as an experience and as a concept, is really just the other side of the coin of self that we’ve been talking about. In my saying that the self is an illusion or the ego is an illusion, that’s the same thing really at bottom as saying that free will is an illusion.

What most people mean by free will is this sense that consciousness is organized around their authorship and agency as a subject, right? So they feel like they are thinking their thoughts and they are authoring their intentions. So it’s like I can decide to pick up this can and my conscious experience of intending to pick it up is the kind of the first mover in that chain of events.

Whereas in reality we know this from the third person side of just studying the brain. But this could be obvious from the first person side of just paying attention to experience. The reality is something must precede my conscious intention to pick the can up. And I’m not conscious of that prior cause, right? The buck has to stop somewhere.

SHANE SMITH: But I’m thirsty or yeah, but there’s—

SAM HARRIS: A first conscious correlate of this experience of me reaching for the can. But we know, for instance, that if we were scanning my brain and just scanning motor cortex and premotor cortex, we would see the kindled conscious plan some seconds even before I could report that I’ve just had the thought that I would like a sip of water, right?

I think, okay, now, now’s the moment. If my brain had been scanned continuously, someone could have in real time said, okay, he’s, yeah, I give it about 500 milliseconds and he’s going to be reaching for the can.

SHANE SMITH: They can predict it.

The Illusion of Conscious Control

SAM HARRIS: Yeah. But even if that were not the case, even if it was just truly coincident with the arising of the intention consciously, there’s still just this first arising. The intention just comes out of nowhere, right?

Just now, speaking from the first person experiential side, I’m just sitting here and what’s true of intention is true of anything that I can experience. I could hear the sound of a bird. I didn’t bring that into being, right? I’m just hearing the sound. But so it is with my own thoughts.

If you just wait around, what are you going to think next? You don’t know. If I asked you to remember a person or think of somebody famous, right? And then don’t pick that one, pick a new one. Right? But of all of the thousands of people that could have come to mind, Sylvester Stallone comes to mind right now. For whatever reason, my Sylvester Stallone neurons were kindled, ready to join the conversation. The Mel Gibson neurons weren’t, right?

I know of Mel Gibson’s existence just as much as I know of Sylvester Stallone’s existence. They’re presumably given a similarity in their careers, they share some important real estate in my brain. But for whatever reason, I thought of one rather than the other. And of course, there are hundreds or even at least a thousand people who I’m not thinking of right now, who I could potentially think of.

None of this demonstrates free will, right? Because free will, people’s sense of free will is they could have done otherwise. I mean, the sense of free will is given another given. If we roll back the movie of my life to 30 seconds ago, I was free to not think of Sylvester Stallone. I could have thought of somebody else. Yeah, right.

And that counterfactual never gets experienced. We know it makes no physical sense if we just array all the same physical causes to the way they were a moment before, this conversation is going to play out the same way a trillion times in a row. And if it plays out differently because you’re adding some component of randomness, randomness is not what we mean by free will.

If I told you that someone’s rolling the dice every time you open your mouth, your thoughts and utterances are being slightly buffeted by these quantum or otherwise random contributions of chance, that’s not what anyone means by free will. I mean, that’s just chance. That’s just randomness, right?

SHANE SMITH: So it’s sort of what some people mean. They’ll be like, look, I can turn right instead of turning left. I can do that.

SAM HARRIS: But if you dialed up the signal on that chance, if you experience that chance as in fact chance as randomness, you would in fact say, well, I don’t know what came over me. I don’t know why I did that.

If your hand suddenly starts moving and it’s not in conformity with any conscious reference, any plan you had, well, then that’s what it is to have a tremor. Or that’s what it is. I mean, this is not okay. That’s not me. I wish I could stop that. But that’s not, I’ve got this resting tremor. That’s not the free will people think they have.

In philosophical terms, people think they have what’s called libertarian free will, which is the “I could have done otherwise” sense. And that’s the thing they want to hold other people responsible for too. And this is how it affects our ethics.

Free Will and Moral Responsibility

So somebody does something harmful and they’re not insane, they’re compos mentis. They knew what they, they have control of their actions. They’re not children, they’re adults. They’re the very kind of person who we can hold responsible for their actions. We want to be able to say, okay, you could have done otherwise, you should have done otherwise. And we’re going to punish you for having made a different choice because now you’re this malicious bastard who is consciously causing harm.

And that’s totally appropriate up to a point. It’s totally appropriate in the sense that holding one another responsible for our actions is a great way to modify actions that can be modified. If I’m going to fine you every time you park in the wrong place, or I’m going to punish you with jail every time you break a law that we care about sufficiently, you’re going to take that into account through no free will of your own. But just, that’s going to modify, that’s going to be a stimulus that’s going to modify your behavior. And we’re going to want that modification. So it’s important that we do that.

But in reality, when you look at the micro events that determine everyone’s behavior, everyone’s behavior really is mysterious. I can’t know. When I go into a restaurant and I’m offered a dozen things to eat and I pick something from the menu, I am confronted with a fundamental mystery as to why I do what I do when I do it.

So first of all, there’s all the things on the menu that I don’t like for whatever reason. I’m not going to, I’m not, I hate scallops. I’m never going to order scallops. But I didn’t create this hatred of scallops in me. I didn’t decide to hate scallops. I just hate scallops. Right. So that’s not free will or—

SHANE SMITH: You had a bad scallop.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah, but whatever. Whatever was done to me by my genes or my environment, I’m just never going to want the scallops. Right. And so that’s already, my degrees of freedom are trimmed down. But then there are all the things I want and really want to eat, and I repeat these pleasures day after day, year after year. That’s not freedom. I didn’t pick those wants. Right. I’m constrained by those wants on some level.

And then of all the things that I want that are available, my decision to order a hamburger versus the chicken, that is, I might be able to tell some story about why I did one versus the other, but it is, in fact, mysterious. It’s subjectively mysterious. And you can be more so.

SHANE SMITH: We don’t know who’s writing the script.

The Mystery of Consciousness

SAM HARRIS: Everything is just appearing. So subjectively speaking, everything is just springing into view, into consciousness. I mean, there’s a moment before you have a preference, and then all of a sudden you have a preference. And then maybe you might think, oh, now would be an interesting time to go against my preferences. But why didn’t you think that the last time you were having a meal?

You didn’t think that, but now that you’re thinking that this time, why is it behaviorally effective? Well, it’s because I just had, I just did this podcast with Shane, and I was talking about this for the one time out of a thousand, I’m going to eat something I actually don’t want to eat. I’m going to have scallops. First time, right?

SHANE SMITH: That would make me impossibly happy if that happened.

SAM HARRIS: But that whole process of self-talk and the fact that it becomes behaviorally actionable, the fact that I just don’t think the thoughts and then think, who the f* are you kidding? You don’t like scallops, having a hamburger. The fact that it doesn’t go there, but it goes to me actually ordering the scallops, all of this is mysterious.

There’s no place to stand in your experience where you can be the final decider of any of it. Even if you at the last second pivot and say, no, I’m changing. You can’t know why that happened, right? That’s just springing out of the darkness that’s at your back.

And neurophysiologically we know that all of this is just happening. It’s just a million dominoes falling that are genetically and environmentally determined. And throw in any contribution of randomness you want to that picture, it still doesn’t get you freedom, it just gets you randomness plus clockwork.

Democratic Institutions Under Threat

SHANE SMITH: The initial thesis of this show was I was fascinated by social media and more fascinated by people’s reaction to it, especially young people who take whatever side you’re on as a given, even though it’s mostly bull. But no, this is for sure. It’s the Rothschilds and it’s Baphomet and this thing and Bill Gates has done this and it’s all putting in our brains and you’re like, what are you even talking about?

So but what I wanted to do initially was to go into these COVID, for example, and say, okay, let’s talk to both sides and let’s figure out some commonality effects. I was too right for the left, too left for the right. And by the way, you shouldn’t be talking to anybody now. That’s social media.

I want to also say that one of the scariest things was I did a documentary with President Obama where we brought him to a prison. And because of that he sort of gave me a present where he said, you can have access to the last six months of my presidency. And it was during the Tea Party and dysfunction.

And so I said, what scares you? And he said, what I’m really terrified of, what keeps me up at night, is the loss of belief in our democratic institutions and the move away from those institutions which have weathered us through a lot of storms.

And I want to talk about Elon, social media. And again, I cannot find it in my notes because I have too many of them. But I know you talk about this sort of the loss, how we’ve become ungovernable because of social media, because the lack of commonality effects, and because our liberal institutions, or not liberal, I want to say institutions, our democratic institutions have come under attack and or are not believed or supported anymore.

The Crisis of Modern Media and Information

SAM HARRIS: So I would say that the alternative media space and social media have a lot to answer for here. And I think we have done immense harm to ourselves because of what’s happened to media and the loss of gatekeepers and the loss of trust in institutions, real journalism, real academic products, the scientific establishment, the government’s representation of science.

Ironically, things have unwound so fully that now it’s even true to say that you can’t trust the CDC because you’ve got bozos in charge of the CDC. So things have flipped, right? So there are institutions that really have degraded. And I’m not discounting the fact that during COVID and before, many of our institutions were captured by what Elon calls the “woke mind virus.” I mean, the New York Times and Harvard and scientific journals, there was a real problem of ideological capture.

But still, there has always been a difference, and there remains a difference between real science and real scientific integrity and real intellectual honesty and the norms in institutions that safeguard all that, and real journalism, and all of the impostures and counterfeits that we see out in the wasteland of social media and independent media. Podcasts in particular have a lot to answer for. Newsletters. I mean, I’m a podcaster and I have a Substack newsletter, and I’m an outdoor cat, too.

But what Joe Rogan’s style of conversation in podcasts and what Elon has done in social media, all of this has amplified misinformation and conspiracy thinking to a degree that is just totally dysfunctional. And it’s doing tangible harm to our politics and to our society. And it’s frankly getting people killed.

I mean, there’s no question. There’s no question it got people killed during COVID. There’s no question it’s causing political combustibility that shouldn’t exist. I mean, the real problem is that we are now combustible as a society in ways that would have been unthinkable.

The Assassination of Charlie Kirk and Social Media’s Role

Just look at the assassination of Charlie Kirk. There’s a moment there where this one guy gets killed, and we all see it in real time on social media, and then you see the reaction to it. And on the far left, you have 100 or 1,000 or however many proper lunatics with nose rings who’ll get on camera and celebrate this guy’s murder, right? And they’re taken as emblematic of what the left really wants and what the Democrats really want.

And now we have an increasingly authoritarian government that’s going to respond to all of that in increasingly authoritarian ways and justify their response with yet another guy with a nose ring saying, “Look how happy he is that Charlie Kirk got murdered.” And you’ve got Elon messaging into all of this, saying that the left wants to kill you. The left is the party of murder, or whatever the exact quote was.

I mean, these are just arsonists who are showing up to the fire pretending to be firefighters, right? I mean, this is a fire that they have, in fact, created for us with these tools. And then you’ve got 1,001 podcasts just sticking a mic in front of every crazy person’s face.

And from Tucker Carlson on down, talking about, “Oh, maybe the Mossad did it and maybe the Jews did it.” Maybe there’s a… You got Candace Owens saying, “Maybe there’s a trap door and somebody sprung up and he wasn’t even shot by the person who seemed to have shot him.” Even the person who seemed to have confessed that he shot him isn’t the person who did it.

And you’ve got the most… Now we have the paradox of some of the most witnessed events in human history, witnessed in real time, about which there’s now manifold controversy, because people, crazy people jumping on microphones, talking about what they think is real.

And we have an information ecosystem that is just grifting on top of all of this, right? The business model for somebody like Tucker Carlson is just to amplify all this noise all the time, and nothing is as it seems. And let’s just keep asking questions. And this is how you get Holocaust denial as the main meal on some of these podcasts.

The Political Migration of Elon and Joe Rogan

SHANE SMITH: Now, first of all, I know Elon a little bit and Joe a little bit. I think there was a time when the left was doing their utmost to push people away and attack and attack and attack.

SAM HARRIS: And I was attacked along with them.

SHANE SMITH: Joe. Yeah, Joe started… as was I, as was life. And Joe started very left, and as did Elon. And then people… It reminds me of when you’re a punk. You come to school and you get a Mohawk, and then all the Rockers and the normal people go, “Yeah.” And then all of a sudden you have facial tattoos near your squeegee part. You move… people are attacking you, you move to the people who are saying, “Hey, come over here.”

People, those are saying… the Democratic Party needs a Joe Rogan. He used to have him.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah.

SHANE SMITH: But for me to go back, I don’t want to say that’s all social media. Social media is a huge thing. Young people are addicted, my daughters included, and trying to get them off of it.

Social Media Addiction and Regulation

But I want to talk to you about you personally. You said that X or Twitter was a drug and you had to get off the drug. They’ve actually proven… There’s studies, I remember like Facebook initially, that it’s addictive for young people. And now Instagram and X and things we all use, I use them all and I know how bad they are and I know how bad they are for my kids and we’re trying to do stuff with them.

I wasn’t allowed a TV when I was a kid, so I became obsessed with media and got into media. My ex-wife wasn’t allowed candy, so she became obsessed with sweets and candy. I mean, you take the thing away and it does the exact opposite of what you want it to do.

And then there’s regulation, which I’m very anti-censorship. But if you don’t regulate some… I mean, I think we’re going to look back from our golden bliss of AI future 50 years from now and say, “Can you imagine that we did that?” Now again, I’m not talking about censorship, I’m just talking about completely unregulated. McDonald’s for kids at all times, just have it on, go. And even though we know it’s…

The First Amendment and Censorship

SAM HARRIS: Well, let me take the censorship piece because I think there’s a lot of confusion here. So I’m very glad we have the First Amendment. I think what’s happening in the UK now is insane. I mean, you got comedians being arrested at the airport for things they tweeted. Literally. There are people in prison for things they post on social media. Completely insane. I don’t know how that’s happening. I don’t know how it’s being tolerated. It’s just madness. Okay?

So I’m very happy we have the First Amendment and any infringement… But to infringe on the First Amendment is a very specific thing. It’s the government coming and saying you can’t say that thing or we’re going to put you in jail. If you say that thing again, we’re going to destroy your livelihood. We’re going to debank you, whatever we’re going to… And there’s certainly some concern that the Trump administration is showing that kind of inclination.

SHANE SMITH: And the Biden administration, too.

SAM HARRIS: Right. But I mean, all the people who complained about it with Biden are now sort of capitulating to it with Trump. And Trump is a hundred times… What Trump has already done is 100 times worse than anything Biden did.

I mean, Biden never had his AG stand up and say, “We’re going to destroy you.” It’s illegal to criticize the president is effectively what Pam Bondi said in the Jimmy Kimmel moment, and “We’re going to come after you.” Right? We’re in a different universe from where we were with Biden just saying, “Will you please take the naked photos of my son off of Twitter?”

SHANE SMITH: And, well, they also went to Google and said, “We don’t want you to say this.”

SAM HARRIS: But they never said, “We’re going to destroy you. This is illegal.” We have a president who, when Bruce Springsteen is overseas and says something critical of him, he literally in public will say, “Well, let’s see what happens to Bruce when he comes back to America.” I mean, we’re in a different world here with what Trump is doing.

So I totally support the First Amendment. I’m glad we have it. And censorship is the government bringing its force to bear on your speech, which I think we should have a very high tolerance for divisive, scary speech and not want the government to get involved, unless in those specific cases where we do want the government to get involved, which is like suborning people’s murder.

Editorial Judgment vs. Censorship

But that doesn’t give us any guidance. The First Amendment doesn’t give us any guidance as podcasters and as platforms, the social media platforms or those who own them for what we should… the kinds of information we should spread. And everyone is in the business of making these editorial judgments.

Even the worst places on the… even 4chan has a moderation policy. I mean, 4chan doesn’t just let it rip. It’s not just like, “Give us your child porn.” No. 4chan has things that it will take off its network, even though it is tolerant of just the most vile and obscene and misleading content.

So everyone’s in the business. There’s no so-called free speech absolutist. And Elon is certainly not a free speech absolutist. Elon in the presence, in the very moment where he’s amplifying neo-Nazis and bringing Alex Jones back on his platform so he can pretend to be a free speech absolutist, he is actually deplatforming or deboosting journalists he doesn’t like and actually kicking and silencing political dissidents the world over whenever he gets a strike against them from authoritarian regimes who he’s decided to play ball with.

Right. So in Turkey or India… He’s playing by completely different rules. He’s not even a free speech advocate in those contexts. Right. So it’s completely hypocritical.

But the point is, everyone is in the business of saying, “Okay, I don’t want to be associated with that on my platform.” And so for me to decide not to talk to RFK Jr. on my podcast because I think he’s a crackpot and a liar, that is not an infringement of the First Amendment. That’s actually my deciding how I’m going to use my First Amendment protected speech.

Right. I’ve decided there’s a kind of speech I don’t want to be associated with. I don’t want to give a platform to somebody who I can’t fact check in real time, who I know is just going to lie into an open mic in front of a million people. Right. And rather I’m just going to criticize him on my podcast and on your podcast. And I’ve got my constitutionally protected right to do that.

Right. So every editorial judgment is our use of our own First Amendment protected speech. Anyone who owns a social media platform should, in my view, be able to decide, “We have a no Nazis policy.” We’ve got a… “We’ve got a no redheads policy.” If you want to have that platform. If you want to have a platform without redheads, I think you should be free to do it.

It will be… You’ll then be criticized by all the people who think that’s an indecent thing to do. And you’ll… It’ll probably be a failing business. But the point is, I think the freedom of speech is on the side of the platforms and on the side of the publishers, on the side of the editors who make these curatorial judgments.

The Alex Jones Case

And so it’s a judgment you can make either way. Do you want to be associated with Alex Jones after he has immiserated the parents whose kids got murdered at Sandy Hook and grifted off of that lunatic project of just lying about their suffering and about them being crisis actors? Many of them had to switch houses 10 times in the aftermath of having their kids murdered.

He monetized that whole cult. That’s why all these platforms said, “We want nothing to do with them.” That was their First Amendment right and the rights of their employees to say, “We don’t want to work for a company that’s going to make Alex Jones rich.”

If you’re working at YouTube, you should be able to go up to the C-Suites and say, “Listen, I’m an engineer who you’re paying $400,000 a year to. I don’t want… Why are you making this guy rich? Well, look what he’s doing to the parents of kids who got murdered.” Right?

That’s not censorship. That’s a platform deciding, “We don’t want to be associated with this evil anymore. Let him build his own platform.” Right?

SHANE SMITH: Which he did.

The Problem with Platforming Misinformation

SAM HARRIS: And Elon, granted, Elon should be free to bring Alex Jones back onto X, as he did with great fanfare in this absurd Twitter spaces where he had Jack Posobiec, the Pizzagate genius midwifing this sane washing of Alex Jones’s reputation along with David Sachs riding shotgun with him. Great. This is the Trumpist MAGA project that is a race to the bottom for our democracy. But they’re free to do it under the First Amendment, which I absolutely think they should be.

SHANE SMITH: Okay. I remember when I was in college and I was, full disclosure, I was a Marxist in college, and we had a lot of Marxist professors, right? And there was going to be some right wing dude who was going to come debate somebody at the college. There was a lot of hullabaloo about it. And they eventually said, well, you can’t come.

And I remember thinking, well, why wouldn’t we? If these guys are teaching me that they’re the best and the smartest, why don’t we just debate them? Now, debate’s another thing. Because debate is if you’re a good debater, you just debate people. Which I am not a good debater, but I know lots of good debaters and it’s like a lot of tricks and stuff, whatever. I talked to a guy named Destiny and he basically just debates people for a living.

But like, for example, with RFK, you’re one of the smartest guys I know. Why wouldn’t you just say okay? Because the problem with RFK for me is everything is second or third or fourth or fifth hand.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah.

SHANE SMITH: Like, you need to have somebody say, okay, vaccines, what is the real thing? And what the hell happened in Samoa? And like, blah, blah, blah, right? There is a commonality of facts. There is such a thing as the truth. And like, you’re a very smart guy who gets this stuff. Why wouldn’t you just say, like, vaccine, et cetera? Like, because you’re platforming him. But to me, it would be like—

The Asymmetry of Information Warfare

SAM HARRIS: Okay, well, it’s just a—I mean, I consider it a waste of everybody’s time. And one is, no one should be talking to RFK Jr. about it. He wasn’t yet running the HHS status.

SHANE SMITH: Right.

SAM HARRIS: He was running for president, but he wasn’t going to win. He’s not a scientist, he’s an activist and he’s a lawyer. He’s a liar, he’s a confabulator. I mean, I think there’s some, there has to be some psychological explanation for why he is the way he is, but he just says things that are untrue.

But the reality is that every one of these encounters is an asymmetric information piece of information warfare where it’s just much easier to light a bunch of small fires than it is to put them out. Right? So, and there are people who are talented confabulators where they can just keep talking and keep referencing the paper. “You didn’t read the paper that came out of Johns Hopkins that said that the MMR vaccine…” And he’s just making it up. Right.

But there’s no way for you to know he’s making it up. And in real time in that format, you’re going to seem like the guy who didn’t hear about that paper that he just referenced. And like, he knows his stuff and you don’t know your stuff, but it’s all bull. Right?

And when you’re dealing with people who are actually unethical or just crazy, you’re just getting a fire hose of bull aimed at you and there’s no dignified way to feel that incoming. Right. It’s just like, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Sorry, I haven’t heard of that. Okay, but can we get over here? Oh, no, I’m not avoiding that. I just haven’t heard of that. I can’t deal with that. It’s just a mess and you can’t—there’s no way to bail water fast enough.

And now that he’s running HHS, I think it would be a worthy media project to stick him in front of microphone with a sufficiently prepared group of people to basically perform an exorcism on him so that everyone could see that, one, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Two, he’s a very weird person who’s willing to pretend that he knows what he’s talking about when he obviously doesn’t. He’s incapable of being shamed. He’s a very Trumpian character. And he’s also demonstrably lies. And you can catch him in those lies. Right?

But that takes a tremendous amount of work and it’s a very weird exercise and it’s something that I wouldn’t have wanted to do when he’s just a guy who thinks he’s running for president and is never going to be president and should have never gotten anywhere near the HHS.

And the reason why he was there, frankly, is because people like Joe Rogan stuck him in front of a mic for four hours and with very little critical pushback and very little preparation, if any preparation, just let him roll. And when you let someone like that roll in front of an audience of 50 million people, you’re effectively letting them wash their, what should be a thoroughly disreputable reputation because in real circles, real scientific circles who understand the history here, he’s a crazy person and he’s totally irresponsible.

I mean, he’s someone who will say that if we lived in a—this is a quote—”If we lived in a just society, we would be building statues to Andrew Wakefield.” Andrew Wakefield is the con artist and fraud who gave us this initial fake paper that has been unpublished, probably the most consequential scientific fraud to happen in our lifetime, seeming to link the MMR vaccine to autism.

All of his co-authors have disavowed the paper. It’s been officially unpublished. He lost his medical license. There’s been endless apology for this, what was in fact a scientific fraud. We know a lot about his backstory. We know that he was working for lawyers who were—I mean, he had obvious conflicts of interest that he didn’t disclose. He even had like a stake in a rival vaccine that was like a single M vaccine as opposed to an MMR vaccine, so as to seek windfall profits should the MMR vaccine actually be discontinued.

I mean, it was—he was playing a very shady game and in RFK Junior’s telling, he is the most unfairly maligned scientific genius of our lifetime.

Social Media and the Death of Shared Facts

SHANE SMITH: But to the point where that’s become a given. Now this isn’t to go back to social media and I want to get back to social media because what I found amazing was that people will see it on social media and then they believe it’s fact.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah.

SHANE SMITH: And I think we should have real time AI fact checking or some kind of fact checking because super group factor, whatever it is, I mean, we do have that.

SAM HARRIS: I mean people can people fact check Elon with Grok and they show Elon to be lying on X. But it’s obviously the AI is not perfect and the AI hallucinates. But, and occasionally it declares itself a Nazi if it’s Grok. But—

SHANE SMITH: But just because like again, you hear all this, oh, he’s a crank and he’s—and then it’ll be like, well, this type of red dye is like a carcinogen or whatever. And I guarantee you there’s 500 carcinogens out there that are in our food system. And whatever else you’re like, okay, well, that doesn’t sound so bad.

SAM HARRIS: So there’s, well, also a lot of these crazy people or these dishonest people or these unethical people are right about many things.

SHANE SMITH: Yeah.

SAM HARRIS: Right. So I mean, that’s the thing. There’s lots of half truths there that are to which all lies are anchored. I mean, Elon is right about many, many things. And I mean, the irony is I view what happened on the far left, the whole social justice, moral panic around George Floyd and trans activism and all of it, I view that more, I mean, perhaps with a few rounding errors aside, exactly as Elon and Joe Rogan and all these right of center characters view it. Right.

I think it was just almost without remainder, just an expression of moral panic and delusion and dishonesty and grifting and just—it’s an irredeemable mess. Right. And a lot of the people who have been celebrated left of center in polite society, the Aspen Ideas Festival or in the New York Times or in the Atlantic, people like Ibram X. Kendi and Ta-Nehisi Coates, I view them as pornographers of racial grievance and just—

Again, it’s not that we don’t have a history of racism that we need to be aware of and talk about and teach in school. And it’s not that there aren’t current racists we need to worry about. And it’s not that racism has never been a problem. It’s not that it isn’t still a problem. And it’s not that there isn’t consequential inequalities in our world that are correlated with race. All of that’s true.

And yet these guys are shameless grifters and liars and pornographers and they should be just ignored. And I’m much more aligned with the Elons of the world in casting a critical glance at all of that. And yet Elon is a shameless liar.

And it’s just the first cut is we have to lose our patience for liars. Lying needs to be really damaging to your reputation. Right. If you’re going to get up in public and say up is down or you never did that thing when now we have you on video doing that thing, that’s got to matter.

And the reason why we’re in this freefall condition politically is that it no longer matters. I mean like lying—it’s the opposite. Lying, everyone—I mean there is a different physics right of center. I mean the stuff that Trump does, if you do one one-hundredth of that left of center in our politics it still destroys your reputation but so there is a different reputational physics right of center.

SHANE SMITH: But that’s true. Liberals are eating themselves and conservatives are circling the wagons.

SAM HARRIS: But lying is just, I mean lying is the royal road to everything that is wrong in our society.

The Collapse of Institutional Trust

SHANE SMITH: So one of the necessities for liberal democracy in my mind and many, I study politics but most political thinkers is a sort of free journalist society class media. If we’re going to no commonality of facts. If we’re going to everything being op-ed bias. If we’re going to—in fact for young people the majority of where they get their news is social media.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah.

SHANE SMITH: And Obama’s biggest fear fully realized might even predate our subjugation to the AI overlords that our democratic institutions and media institutions are being so battered.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah.

SHANE SMITH: That we don’t have commonality of facts. We don’t have journalists who keep politicians in check. We have journalists who root for their team. We have sports color commentators.

SAM HARRIS: And it’s a very big difference because when you look at—I mean, so we had, and to bring it back to like political violence and the Charlie Kirk assassination, which is horrible, unambiguously horrible, yet we had a period of much worse political violence in living memory.

I mean, the late 60s and early 70s, we had bombings and we had, obviously with the famous assassinations of JFK and RFK and MLK and the attempts on presidents’ lives, Reagan and Ford and so there was more of it.

But when JFK got assassinated, something like 75% of people had great trust in our institutions. I mean, like when you would ask people, do you think government does the right thing most of the time, or do you think the media is getting it right most of the time? That was like 75% of people thought, yes, that was the case. Now we’re down to like 22% for those kinds of questions.

We’re combustible for the reason that we have lost trust in institutions fundamentally and across the board. And so, and it’s the institutions that you need to be able to listen to in an emergency. It’s like when JFK got assassinated and the newscast—it was Walter Cronkite at the time. I forget who the other ones were. You had like three newscasters who would come on the mic and say, tell you what happened and why it happened and here’s what’s going to happen next. The country believed that was real information.

We’re living in a country now where if we have another 9/11 within four minutes, you’re going to have Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens saying that they talked to a guy who can tell you that the Jews did it. Right. And, or whatever the conspiracy theory today. Yeah. And millions of people are going to run with that.

The Problem with Modern Journalism

SHANE SMITH: Yeah. Well, the problem with that is because Kennedy, since he was assassinated, has been the object of many conspiracy theories. And then it’s only sort of lately that, you know, this could have been this and that could have been that. And you know, and they’re declassifying.

It’s a problem because also the Walter Cronkite. And I say this all the time because I learned it firsthand, which is you go to many of these countries and you have an international bureau where the guy stays at the hotel and he is a stringer many times don’t go into the field and the stringer calls in the story. They call in, the story goes on a teleprompter.

Walter Cronkite was a—and I love Walter Cronkite, but he was a teleprompter reader, right. And he had people writing it for him, and they were calling in from Karachi or whatever. And it was. But you had to believe every thing down the line was kosher.

SAM HARRIS: But I mean, that obviously began to unravel with Vietnam and Watergate.

SHANE SMITH: It was the Tet Offensive and the Tet Offensive, and it was a surprise. And everyone said, “We’re winning this war.” And Morty Safer. That was Morty Safer and the Canadian whatever. But they went and they said, “We’re here and we’re not winning this war.” And Westmoreland said, “You better play ball.” And they said, “You.”

And that’s when, you know, there was that sort of golden era of journalism. Yeah, but they played ball. Those guys played ball. And now the problem is we’ve gone the other way and we don’t believe anything. At least everyone. The reason why 75% of the people believed it was because there were three of them, and they all said the same thing.

And Walter Cronkite was more believable than everybody else, and he cried because JFK got killed. And this is the time. I get it, but I’m just saying, like, now I think we’re heading towards this. Remember when I said laws, philosophy, religion are all there for a reason to stem anarchy? To put the thumb in the dike, we’re heading towards media anarchy.

SAM HARRIS: Oh, yeah, I think we’re there. Yeah.

SHANE SMITH: Tell us. Tell us about that.

Social Media’s Impact on Journalism

SAM HARRIS: Well, again, I mean, social media is a major piece of it. I mean, it’s the Internet itself, but it’s—but social media is the most culpable part of it. And it’s—and the behavior of, I don’t know, man, CNN, Fox. Well, yeah, but much of the dysfunction in journalism is because of what social media has done to journalism.

I mean, like, even for more prestige products, like the New York Times, I mean, there was a period there. I think the New York Times has sort of—the pendulum has swung back considerably. But there’s a period there, and certainly during COVID or just before COVID where Twitter had effectively had become the editorial board for the New York Times, like, being completely constrained by the backlash on Twitter. And, you know, people were—

SHANE SMITH: It’s just like, what, for example, basically.

SAM HARRIS: Everything that falls into the bin of, you know, wokeness and social justice, you know, activism. I mean, the most—for the New York Times specifically, I think the real tipping point was when the Tom Cotton op-ed was published and there was a kind of mutiny in Slack among New York Times staff. And the head editor wound up getting fired as a result.

Publishing a congressperson’s opinion piece that was—it might have been an opinion piece that most liberals didn’t like, but it was—it was a completely valid thing to publish. This is a sitting member of Congress or a senator. It got distilled down to this perfect piece of crystalline moral confusion, which is “all black people at the Times are now made unsafe by our publication of this op-ed.”

All of that got potentiated because of how consequential making noise on Twitter became and remains to some significant degree less so. I mean, X is not as powerful as Twitter was at that moment. Certainly journalists. Yeah, because X is becoming a little bit like—I mean, it’s not that it’s not consequential, but it’s a little bit like Truth Social or—I mean, the liberal version is Blue Sky. Right.

Like, it doesn’t matter what happens on Blue Sky. You can be vilified on Blue Sky and it’s not going to ruin your life. That’s more true on X. I’m occasionally trending on X because Elon attacks me. There’s—and it matters not one whit to my life. I mean, it’s just like it’s a completely non-factor.

SHANE SMITH: And you again, I’m paraphrasing, so correct me, but you said “I quit it because it was sort of like a drug.”

Breaking Free from Twitter

SAM HARRIS: I quit it because I noticed—you know, it took me a while to notice this, but I noticed that almost every bad thing that had happened in my life in recent years was certainly professionally. But even just like the toxicity of like, you know, just leeching in from my work life into my family life and just kind of the bad mood I would bring to the table at dinner or the kind of the vacation that goes sideways because of some controversy that has erupted in my life professionally.

Virtually all of it. I mean, I think it is actually accurate to say all of it was a result of something that I did or responded to or felt I had to respond to on Twitter. And it was just like I got—I, you know, I say that I—

SHANE SMITH: I noticed Twitter or other social media as well.

SAM HARRIS: It was—Twitter was the only one I used. Yeah, personally, you know, my team would send—my team still sends stuff out on social media accounts, but I never look at anything. Twitter was the only thing that I personally used. It was me. All the tweets under my name were, in fact, you know, me.

And so, yeah, I get into a fight with Ezra Klein on Twitter because he effectively calls me a racist for having Charles Murray on my podcast. And so I see this blowing up on Twitter, and, you know, it’s getting lots of traction. Like, now I’m the racist on Twitter, and I have to respond to this. Right?

But does it matter that I’m in the middle of a vacation with my family on Hawaii, and it’s like the one vacation we’re going to take as a family that year. I’m in the middle of it, literally sitting by the pool, and my Twitter is blowing up. It’s like I’m now, you know, a Nazi on Twitter. And it’s because Ezra Klein has said so and published a piece in Vox, and it’s a totally dishonest piece.

And can I wait to respond to this? No, I can’t wait to respond to this because I’m on Twitter. And so I start responding and it gets uglier and uglier. And now I got to—now I have to record a podcast to really, you know, and then now I got to bring—now I got to bring Ezra onto my podcast to debate him. Cause I have to respond to this thing that couldn’t be adequately responded to on Twitter.

And all of a sudden, this is a month of my life and maybe more because of something that is just—it’s a—it’s a pure hallucination that’s modern. I never had to respond to that thing on Twitter. None of it matters. Like, I—like, you know, I’m not saying that Twitter isn’t real life for some people. Yeah. I mean, some people are going to get fired because of what somebody said about them on Twitter. I mean, that—that happens.

But it wasn’t me. I built my life so that I—I don’t have to worry about that. I mean, there’s no one who can fire me because of what somebody said on Twitter. And yet it was a kind of hallucination machine where I just felt like, okay, it’s here. It’s so big. There’s thousands. I mean, this tweet has—you know, I mean, honestly, those—Elon had—somebody sent me a video.

I mean, I’ve been off Twitter for almost three years now. But occasionally, again, occasionally, I’m trending. And people send me the thing that, I mean, occasionally get a text or an email, and it’ll be like, “Are you okay? Like, is everything—” It’s like—

SHANE SMITH: I mean, sorry, from a friend.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah, “Sorry you’re dealing with this,” right? I’m not dealing with anything, but “Sorry you’re dealing with this.” And it’s like, you know, they send me a link to something on Twitter and it’s like a—it’s a video of somebody lying about what I said on my podcast or like clipping something out that is perfectly misleading from my—it’s going to happen probably in this conversation here.

Someone’s going to clip something that’s going to make it seem like I, you know, you know, whatever, you know, I mean, it’s often crafted so that it literally seems in context that I’m saying the opposite of what I was saying, in fact, in context. And, you know, Elon is signal boosting something. And now the video has, you know, according to X, 50 million views. Right. Lying about my position on immigration or Islam or whatever it is.

And it matters not at all to my life. Right. So, but, and—and that’s—and yet if I were still playing that game, that would then be the thing I would have to respond to.

Media’s Political Weaponization

SHANE SMITH: Yes. And it’s the game that media plays with itself. And, you know, I can go on for hours and hours about this, but it’s actually when all the PR gurus from politics came to media, including the New York Times, they use the same atomic weapons that they use in politics in media.

And it’s when media started taking scalps from each other and all this stuff. And now it’s just become a whole thing of scalping the opposite side, which is, again, politics. You’re either with us or you’re against us. Anyway, not to get on that forever.

Do you ever think—because in a way, you’re kind of like a politician as a media person because you’re going out and you’re saying, “Look, here’s my point of view on this thing. Here’s my point of view on that.” You don’t vote on it, but, you know, you’re talking about Gaza, you’re talking about the Ukraine, you’re talking about China, you’re talking about AI.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah.

SHANE SMITH: So there’s obviously there’s people who are for you and people who are against you. And then therefore, you are going to have to fight and you are going to have to fight on social media or somewhere else. Do you ever think “I should just go back to Stanford and study the brain and come up with a new idea”?

The Temptation to Retreat

SAM HARRIS: For brief moments I do, but I mean, it wouldn’t necessarily take that form, but it would take the form of just me writing books, writing and talking about purely intellectually interesting things. Right. And I don’t—because I just—our world’s on fire. Right?

Like, I mean, it’s like there are real problems and there are not that many people making sense at scale. You know, if I—if I saw someone doing my job, my—my precise job, as I think about it, better than me, and there were, you know, five of those people or ten of those people, and I could just kind of outsource my conscience and my concerns to somebody else. It would be very tempting to just, you know, just talk about meditation or just, you know, you know, it’d be very, very tempting.

SHANE SMITH: So that was giving my point. My point is when you talk about meditation, you’re like calm and happy.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s a different gear.

SHANE SMITH: And then when you start to go into politics and social media stuff, you obviously get more amped because, you know—

The Responsibility of Public Intellectuals

SAM HARRIS: But the thing is, I think that other register is important. And this is kind of a debate I have with friends who are just in the meditation game, right? For whom right speech, in the Buddhist conception of right speech, conveys, at least in their understanding of it, this imperative to actually not offend people, to never express outrage.

I feel like you need to still have the gear of moral outrage because, if for no other reason, it’s the only thing that’s going to give you sufficient energy to respond to these consequential harms in the world. I mean, the truth is I can decide, and for most of my life I do, for most of my day I do decide just to be happy, right?

I mean, the paradox for me personally is that I live my life. I am so lucky, right? I’m so lucky with everything now. I’ve just got, I’m surrounded by, for the most part, healthy—I’m, knock wood, for the moment, I’m healthy. The people I love, with a couple of important exceptions, everyone I love is healthy. And I’m just surrounded by loving people and I’m free to spend my, use my attention however I want to use it.

And most of the time I’m just free to just pay attention to cool and interesting things and it’s beautiful, right? So I live my life at a kind of very high level of personal well-being and it would be indecent to do otherwise because I basically won the lottery. It’s all good. If I can’t be happy here, nobody can be happy anywhere.

And yet, for whatever reason, I’m really in touch with how precarious our circumstance is collectively and just how much of the building is on fire and how rational it is to be worried about these ten things that I can spend my time professionally worrying about.

Certainly on my podcast over here at Waking Up, I can just talk about meditation and the nature of consciousness, and that’s fine. But over here on the podcast, or when I give public talks or when I decide to write, I am really worried about a lot of things that are really worth worrying about.

The Urgency of Our Moment

And we have a, in my view, a brief opportunity not to f* things up. Things are moving very, very fast. They’re not going to stop moving. We talk about AI and we’ve talked about social media and we’ve briefly talked about how the hyperpolarization in our politics. All of these are just like massive objects hurtling along. And there’s a lot that can break. There’s a lot that is breaking.

And nobody’s in control. Nobody’s really in charge. I mean, a lot of people who are kind of pretending to be in charge and a lot of people have a lot of influence, but nobody’s really in control of this machinery. And there’s just a lot of guys like us having conversations and getting bright ideas at three in the morning and deciding what to say on Twitter.

And there’s a lot of people in roles of serious responsibility who have no business in those roles. Honestly, there’s like 5,000 people who are deciding the fate of humanity at this point. And you and I both know a lot of these people and have their phone numbers in our phones.

So I feel like I feel a massive responsibility to not just live my comfortable, meditative, carefree life that I can figure out how to immunize against too much chaos for myself, hopefully for my lifetime and the lifetime of my children, because there’s just too much at stake.

SHANE SMITH: I agree 100%, and that’s why I got back in the game. Personally, I’m happy, but these are huge questions that we at least have to ask. We need more people like you to ask, by the way, to call bull on both sides and to say what’s good on both sides, but also to put up their hand and say, “Hey, over here. This might be a problem that everybody should,” we’re not saying we’re going to solve these problems, but we do what we can to say, “Hey, we should be thinking about this.”

And look, you’re a complex, beautiful baby boy. You have a lot of stuff because you have five, ten, fifteen things that you are interested in and are interesting. So I could have asked you 5,000 questions and I asked you five.

But I just want to say, people like you who are bringing attention to important stuff—important. People like you who are calling both sides—important. And people like you who actually have ideas of how we can do things going forward—important. So thanks very much for taking the time.

SAM HARRIS: It was fun. We thought we were coming from what.

SHANE SMITH: And hopefully we can do this once every season where you come back and we can do much more of a—I’m local, so. Okay, well, perfect.

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