555. How the Internet Is Breaking Our Brains | Sam Harris

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I'm increasingly worried that we have effectively rendered ourselves ungovernable based on the way we have shattered the information landscape.

This is a consequence of hyperconnectivity and stunning ease of communication.

You can just go down a rabbit hole and find endless confirmation that's fairly anonymized.

We have to ground our perceptions in an axiomatic framework.

The old norms that the gatekeepers, I I mean, for all their faults, they had standards.

I don't trust anything the New York Times prints at all.

The gatekeeping institutions have also revealed themselves as catastrophically flawed.

The antidote to that, to the failures of institutions, is not new standards, it's really to apply the old standards.

I've spent a lot of time over the years speaking with Sam Harris.

We've spoken publicly half a dozen times and privately far more than that.

We're coming at the same problems, I would say, from quite different perspectives and establishing some concordance over time.

Today we went down the

rabbit hole of rabbit holes, I suppose, discussing the fragmentation of the narrative narrative landscape on the social media front and what that means for cultural incoherence, weakness, demoralization, deceit, self-deception, and inability to understand one another.

And so join us as we attempt to clarify the catastrophe of infinite plurality.

Well, Mr.

Harris, it looks like it's time for our approximately annual conversation.

Yeah, nice.

You're the clock clock that ticks once a year.

Yeah, well, I suspect that's more than enough.

So

tell me what you're thinking about lately, Sam, on the intellectual side and what you're doing.

Well, it is actually relevant to the chaos in our politics at the moment.

I'm increasingly worried that

we have effectively rendered ourselves ungovernable based on the way we have shattered the information landscape.

And I think independent media of the sort that we're indulging now

is part of that problem.

I mean, I don't know if you're aware of it or not, but I've been fairly vociferous in criticizing some of our mutual friends.

And in my case,

some may be former friends, but fellow podcasters and people in independent media.

I just think they've been part of this shattering, and it's been

fairly obvious, and

the cases are different, but many people have been quite irresponsible in the way that they have platformed people uncritically and let them spread

truly divisive and dangerous misinformation.

I mean, I'm thinking especially of in the aftermath of October 7th and the global explosion of anti-Semitism, we've had some very big podcasts like Tucker's and Joe's platform Holocaust deniers and revisionists.

it's been quite insane out there.

And it's just, I mean, that's just one piece of it.

I mean, you can talk about COVID or Trump or Ukraine or

pick

your ugly object out there.

There's just a radical divergence of opinion into these echo chambers we build for ourselves.

And it seems to be very difficult to cross

political lines.

It's It's somehow deeper than politics, actually.

So, anyway, I'm increasingly worried about that.

And

I'm trying to hold up my side of the conversation in ways so as to cross those lines.

But I'm just noticing that

it's

in many cases it's proving impossible.

Yeah, okay.

Well, that's I am aware of that.

It's actually part of the reason I thought it would be useful for us to talk today.

So, I want to think about how to respond to that to begin with.

Well, I think the first thing that we should probably note is that

this is a consequence of hyper-connectivity and

stunning ease of communication.

Right?

So, I mean,

it's obviously the case that the

landscapes of communication that once held us together for better or worse are now so multiplicitous that

they're numberless.

And so that, so what does that mean?

I think what it means in part,

and this is where I think our conversation might get particularly interesting, is that

we don't have a shared story anymore.

And

I think a culture is literally a shared story.

And a story is a structure.

This has been part of our ongoing discussion for a very long period of time, right?

The relationship between

the

perceptual framing that is constituted by a story and, let's say, the domain of objective facts, right?

This is a very thorny problem.

But it seems to me that you have a culture when people share the same story or the same stories.

They have the same shared reference points.

And with an infinite landscape of communication, that fragments indefinitely.

And then no one, see, Sam, let me tell you, I might as well, just to annoy you,

just to get the ball rolling,

I spent a lot of time thinking about the story of the Tower of Babel.

There's two stories in Genesis that describe how things go wrong.

And one story is the flood, and that's the consequence of absolute chaos bursting for...

forth, essentially.

But the Tower of Babel is a story about both totalitarianism totalitarianism and fragmentation.

So what happens is the engineers get together, because that's who it is.

It's the city builders, the toolmakers,

those who create weapons of war, the city builders, the engineers.

They get together and they build these towers

for the aggrandizement of the local potentates.

So there was competition in the Middle East of that time to build the highest tower for the glory of the local ruler.

And

that presumption, so you can think about that as misaligned aim on the sociological front.

The consequence of this misaligned aim is a kind of

what?

Because the aim of the culture is wrong.

Words themselves lose their meaning.

That's what happens in the story, right?

Everybody ends up speaking a different language, and then the towers fall apart.

So it's because the stories are the story that's being told is one of human self-aggrandizement.

That's part of it.

And

the culture pathologizes and then disintegrates.

And so

I see that happening in our culture.

There's a technological element of it, obviously, that technological utopians are driving this.

The transhumanists are driving this.

And we're aiming at the wrong goal.

And the consequence of that is that our language is falling apart and we don't share the same reference points.

That's part of what's happening.

So I'm curious about what you think about that, you know,

how that fits in with your concern, your emergent concern.

Like, when you say fragmentation, Sam,

what is it?

that you think is fragmenting because it's it's not the objective view of the world precisely although the scientific scientific enterprise even

seems to be shaky

and corrupt and falling apart in many ways.

Well, so I agree with that.

I think the analogy to Babel is quite apt.

I don't think bringing Doge into Babel would have helped much.

I think it is technological.

Yes, there's just the fact that there's because of the, I think largely this is a story of social media, but it's really the internet generally, because of the information

technology we have built, people can find endless confirmation of whatever their cherished opinion is.

And

it's no longer,

there's some cultural immune system that has been lost, right?

If you had to go to the physical conference out in the real world to meet the other people who were sure they had been who were sure they've been abducted by UFOs, well, then you would be meeting these people, you would see the obvious signs of dysfunction in their lives,

and there'd be more friction to the maintenance of

this new conviction just based on

the collision with other ancillary facts that have social relevance to you.

But online,

again, this even precedes social media.

This is true of the internet back in the late 90s.

You can just go down a rabbit hole and find endless confirmation that's fairly anonymized, right?

The

20-minute documentary that blew your mind and convinced you that the World Trade Center towers were brought down by the Bush administration.

You didn't know that it was made by some 18-year-old in in his mother's basement, and you didn't have to know that.

You were just looking at the product online.

But if you had had to meet this person, all of a sudden you'd realize that this is the

maintenance of this fiction becomes quite a bit harder.

So we're living now, I think, in the second generation of that moment where

it really is bottomless.

I mean,

the ocean of misinformation and half-truth and misunderstanding is bottomless.

And the tools we have built to rectify misunderstandings and to spot lies and to

be better truth seekers are there, but they have been

in some sense,

this is asymmetric warfare.

They're no match for

the information

waste product that

can be produced more quickly, right?

I mean, this is just the older.

Well, it's easier to produce noise than signal, obviously.

Yeah, or pseudo-signal.

Yeah.

I mean, there's so much that purports to be signal, right?

I mean, you, I mean, and again,

this is probably

socially more inconvenient for you than it is for me.

But, I mean, many of your bedfellows or former bedfellows

are

the principal parts of this problem.

I mean, they're the gods and goddesses on this landscape.

I'm thinking of someone like Candace Owens, who's quite literally trafficking in blood libels now on her incredibly popular podcasts.

I mean, she's just gone berserk, as far as I can tell.

And

yet,

what is the style of conversation that would disconfirm all of that for her audience?

At this point, I don't know because I think what's happened is

we've trained up a culture of people or cultures of people

that simply don't care about facts, really.

They want a story that aligns with their,

in some sense, their confirmation bias.

I mean, they have certain things they want to believe.

There's certain ideas they like the taste of, and then they just want people catering to that appetite.

And there's a good business in that.

I know as a clinical psychologist that any given teenager is going to fall prey to peer pressure from time to time.

If you listen hard enough, people are likely to tell you everything.

Our son, who's in seventh grade, he's starting to fall in with a bad friend group.

Teenagers are desperate to fit in and obviously desperate to have friends and not to be the isolated target of exclusion and bullying.

How do we as parents get involved and engaged?

The reason people don't have these sorts of conversations is because they don't want the emotion.

And the longer you let it go on, the more mess you're going to have to clean up.

Our daughter was bullied at her school.

How do we protect our kids when this is happening?

Don't let your kids drift away when they're teenagers.

They don't want to, but they will if you don't pay attention.

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Well, part of that, I think, is

the consequence of the fact that we have to ground our perceptions

in an axiomatic framework.

And I mean, this has been my concern with the primacy of the story right from the beginning.

And I think the deeper question is, a deeper question is,

you know, is there some

is there some necessary structure to that fundamental axiomatic framework.

You know, the postmodernist claim was that the postmodernist claim, the fundamental postmodernist claim is that there is no uniting metanarrative, right?

We live in the postmodern world now.

The postmodern world is a place of local truths.

And the French intellectuals,

they decided that that was

necessary and an improvement.

And now we see the consequences of that.

We're in a landscape of infinite narratives.

And the question is,

how do you define a rank order of narratives such that some are valid and some are invalid?

You know, the idea of misinformation is obviously predicated on the notion that certain narratives are invalid.

And that seems self-evident to me.

I wouldn't exactly call myself a fan of the direction that Candace Owens has decided to walk down, but I'm not going to say anything more about her.

And

so, you know, what I've been trying to struggle with is,

and this has been the basis of many of our discussions in the final analysis, is what is the proper grounding for a narrative framework?

And I mean,

my understanding of your position is that

that's why you've turned right from the beginning to the world of objective fact, so to speak.

But the problem is, is that

There's a lot of facts and which ones to prioritize and which ones to ignore is a very thorny question.

And, you know, one of the things you referred to obliquely was that,

well, when you and I were young, because we're about the same age, I think you're four years younger than me,

we had narratives that united us as a culture.

There was a certain,

well, there were fewer people.

There was more

ethnic homogeneity,

at least in the local environments in the world.

there were information brokers that were extraordinarily powerful.

The universities, the newspapers, the

TV stations, the radio stations, and they weren't very easy to get access to, and they had gatekeepers, and at least some of the time, those gatekeepers seemed meritorious.

as well as arbitrary.

And, you know, it could easily be that the fragmentation of the landscape is a consequence of technological revolution and also perhaps of the

well,

you had pointed to the irresponsibility of the participants in that landscape.

I mean, I think it's also, or even more primarily, that

they're flooded with information and very finding it very difficult to keep up.

Well, they're also just not disposed to function by the old norms that the gatekeepers, I I mean, for all their faults,

they had standards, right?

I mean,

but Sam,

those, I agree with you.

But I also would say that those institutions, the gatekeeping institutions, have also

revealed themselves as catastrophically flawed in the last five to ten years.

I mean, I'm interested in your take on this.

Like, you brought up October 7th and the rise of anti-Semitism.

And I've been tracking that with a couple of friends of mine.

And we've been spending a lot of time fighting it off in all sorts of ways, some of which are public and some of which aren't.

And I'm appalled by it.

What's happened in Canada on the anti-Semitic front since October 7th is something I never thought I'd see in my lifetime.

It embarrasses me to the core.

My goddamn government came out the other day, those bloody liberals, and they talked in the aftermath of October 7th about combating Islamophobia, as if that's Canada's problem, which it isn't.

And so, but, and then, you know, you saw what happened across

the United States and Canada with regard to the universities, Columbia University in particular, and their absolute

silence and complicitness while these terrible demonstrations were going on.

Not that I think that the demonstrations themselves should have been, well, we can talk about that.

Letting terrorist radicals take over the universities doesn't strike me as a very good solution.

So

I'm curious about what you think about that because,

well, so like I think the gatekeepers have abandoned the gates.

Like I don't trust the new, I don't trust anything the New York Times prints at all.

I think they're reprehensible.

The universities, I I think, are beyond salvaging.

I can't see how they can be fixed.

Anyways, man, lay it out.

Tell me what you think.

I think all the way up until those last two statements, I can sign on the dotted line.

I think

all of these institutions have embarrassed themselves in recent years for the reasons that I think you and I would fully agree about.

This became most obvious.

during COVID,

but it's, you know, the October 7th is

more of the same.

But I would just point out that the antidote to that,

to the failures of institutions,

is not new standards.

It's really to apply the old standards.

I mean, we need the institutions.

Spoken like a true conservative.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, fine.

Well, I mean, so it's.

Yeah, but the antidote to

failures of science, say, you know, or scientific fraud,

is not something other than science.

It's just more science, real science, good science, scientific integrity.

And so it is with journalism or any academic discipline or anything that purports to be truth-seeking.

We have standards,

and there's nothing wrong with our standards.

What's dangerous about the current information landscape where we have just this contrarian universe where anything that is outside the institutions is considered to have some kind of primacy, right?

Where everyone is kind of a citizen journalist, a citizen citizen scientist, where you're just going to flip the mics on and talk for four hours, and that's good enough.

What that's selecting for are the people who have no standards to even violate, right?

I mean, these people are incapable of hypocrisy.

I mean,

the one thing that's good about the New York Times and Harvard and any other institution you would point to that has

an obvious egg on its face at the moment is that at a minimum, they're capable

of being shamed by their own hypocrisy.

And the people who aren't in the,

I would agree with you that there's been some institutional capture where we have people in those institutions who just shouldn't be there, right?

But we would make that judgment, again, by reference to these old standards of academic or journalistic integrity.

But Candace Owens just doesn't have that, right?

And

sorry to beat up on her exclusively.

I can move to other names if you want.

But I mean, she's not a good person.

No, it's not

principles.

The reason that I'm not inclined to discuss her isn't because I agree with what she's doing.

It's because I think the best way to deal with what she's doing is not to discuss her.

Notice her.

Okay.

But

I could say the same thing about Tucker Carlson, right?

And you might, whether you agree with me or not, this is my view of him, that he's not in the truth-seeking journalistic integrity business.

He's got some other political project that entails spreading a fair amount of misinformation quite cynically and consciously and smearing lots of people.

And in the case of, you know, I don't know how deep his anti-Semitism runs, but in the case of that particular topic, midwifing a very misleading conversation with an amateur historian who he considers the greatest historian working in America today, Daryl Cooper, the podcaster.

And,

you know, the opinion expressed, again, this is like, this is at the highest possible level in our information ecosystem to the largest audience.

You know, few historians in human history have ever had a bigger audience than Darrell Cooper had on Tucker's podcast and then quickly followed by his appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast, right?

And on that podcast, he spread the lie,

the recycled, you know, David Irving

point that

the Holocaust is not at all what it seemed and

you wouldn't believe it, but the Nazis really never intended to kill the Jews.

They just rounded up so many prisoners in their concentration camps and found that they just didn't have enough food during winter to feed them.

And they just were put in this impossible situation.

And

might it not seem more compassionate to euthanize these starving prisoners in the end, right?

I mean, that's how

they accidentally stumbled into the final solution, right?

That's what he spread, again, to the largest possible audience.

And in Tucker's case, you had a very,

I would say, you know, sinister midwifing of that conversation.

In Joe's case, he just doesn't know when he's in the presence of recycled David Irving

and is just happy to have a conversation with a podcaster of whom he's a great fan.

But yet he's still culpable for not having done enough homework to adequately push back about what's being said to his, again, to his audience, which is the largest podcast audience on earth.

So

it's journalistically, and I know Joe doesn't consider consider himself a journalist.

He considers himself a comedian, who's just having fun conversations.

Great.

But what that is tantamount to at this moment, especially in the context of the worst eruption of anti-Semitism we've ever seen in our lifetimes globally, that's tantamount to taking absolutely no responsibility for the kind of information that is flowing unrebutted into the ears of your audience, right?

That's why I got angry at Joe, right?

I love Joe.

Joe is a great person.

He's completely in over his head on topics of that sort, and it has a consequence.

It has an effect.

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Well, you know,

one one of the problems, I suppose, in some ways,

Sam, is that in this new information landscape,

we're all in over our heads.

Yeah, but some of us are alert to that possibility and worried about it and taking steps to course correct and notice our errors and apologize for those errors.

Okay, okay.

Well,

let's also try to make a distinction here.

You know, I mean,

there is a distinction that's important to make between

accidentally wandering into pathological territory, you know, and causing disruption

because of the magnification of your voice.

And there's a big difference between that and exploiting the fringe for your own self-aggrandizement.

And there's plenty of the latter online.

And I've been concerned for some substantial amount of time that online anonymity also drives that.

I mean, you talked about the utility of embodied interaction in separating the wheat from the chaff, right?

So one of the things you see online is, as you pointed out, if you have a crazy idea, you can find 300 other people who have even a crazier idea of the same sort, and you can get together with them, which you couldn't have done 20 years ago because there's only one of them per 100,000 scattered all around the world, but they can aggregate together quite quickly online.

The places that females gather online, for example, are rife with that kind of pathology, and all sorts of psychogenic epidemics spread

without any barrier whatsoever in consequence, because young women in particular

are susceptible to psychogenic epidemics.

And so that's a huge problem.

It's also the case that in real-world conversation,

if I'm talking to you, you know it's me.

And I have to live with the consequences of what I've said to you,

assuming we ever meet again.

And I have to live with the fact that other people hear about it as well.

But if I'm anonymous,

then I can say whatever the hell I want.

I can gather the

the fruits of that and I can dispense with any of the responsibility.

And so my sense is that

online connectivity magnifies our voice to a degree that it's virtually impossible to be responsible enough to conduct ourselves appropriately because the reach is just so great.

And anonymity, anonymity literally

gives the edge to the psychopaths, predators, and the parasites.

And this is a huge problem.

You know, as a biological, we could think about it as biologists for a moment, Sam.

I mean, I would say two things.

When the cost of communication is zero, the parasites swarm the system,

right?

Because communication is a resource and

abandoned resources attract parasites.

And what is it now?

50% of internet communication is bought.

And a huge part of the reason for that is that communication is free.

But it's not free, right?

Because you have to attend to it.

It actually has a cost.

So the price of free is the wrong price.

You know, let me give you an example of this.

Just you can tell me what you think about this.

You know,

one of the things I've done recently with my daughter and

her husband mostly

and a bunch of professors is start this Peterson Academy.

And we have an online social media element to that, which

tracks about 15,000 regular users.

And we keep a pretty close eye on it.

And

we

refunded the money of 10 of our students because they were causing trouble on the social media platform.

10 out of 15,000.

That's all.

And it markedly improved in their absence.

And so, you know,

there's an interesting dynamic there.

You know, we don't know what online anonymity does.

We don't know what.

free communication does when the actual price isn't zero.

It certainly serves the parasites extraordinarily well.

And

we are learning that bad information is easier to generate and spread than good information, right?

None of this is personal, right?

None of this really,

I know we've already talked about the fact that

all of this

what would you say, edgy conversation can be monetized and used to attract attention towards bad actors.

Let's leave that aside.

I agree with that completely.

I think it's appalling.

But there are structural problems here that are even deeper.

And I think, well, anonymity is a huge problem.

But then also, I think, well, what the hell are we going to

world would we define and live in rapidly if every bloody thing that you had to say online was verified with a digital identity?

I mean, they've taken a lot of steps in that direction in China.

That doesn't look very good to me.

Well, I think the structural problems run even deeper because

I agree with everything you said about the effect of free and the effect of anonymity.

And I draw two lessons from your experience with your online forum.

One is that

having it behind a paywall

made it much cleaner than it otherwise would have been.

You only found 10 people you had to kick out to clean the whole thing up.

But the other point is that those 10 people can really have an outsized, toxic influence on

a larger culture.

So

I think

we want social media platforms that draw that kind of lesson.

But it's not just anonymity and it's not just

people who are grifting or otherwise incentivized to be liars or

spreaders of misinformation.

There are people who with reputations you would think they would want to protect.

I mean, people with real, real,

like

the biggest possible reputations and the biggest possible careers who, in the presence of social media, have gone properly nuts.

And I would, you know, put as patient zero for this

contagion, Elon Musk.

I mean, Elon has, you know, I've witnessed a complete unraveling of the person I knew, and I believe I knew him fairly well,

under pressure of extraordinary fame and wealth, but really

kind of weaponized by his addictive entanglement with Twitter.

I mean, he was so addicted to Twitter that he needed to buy it so that he could just live there, right?

I mean, that was Twitter was his whole life before

anyone heard about his impulse to buy it or anyone heard about his concern about

the woke mind virus.

I mean, before COVID, he had gone off the deep end into Twitter being everything.

How do you know this?

I know this because I was his friend at the time, and

I was there

in his

very close social circle when

Twitter was causing obvious problems for his life and his businesses.

When he would tweet,

420, you know, funding funding secured,

right?

You know, and the SEC, you know, raids his, raids the offices of Tesla and seizes everyone's computer.

Right.

I mean, that, that was, he was get, he was, he was screwing up his life through Twitter, and yet it was unthinkable that he would get off of it.

So, so potent a drug was it for him.

Let me ask you about that.

Let's think about this biologically again.

One of the ways you could define addiction is as the pursuit of positive emotion that's bound to a very short time frame.

So you get addicted when you optimize positive emotion over a very short time frame.

So for example,

the addictive propensity of cocaine is dependent on the dose, but also the rate of administration.

So the reason that snorted cocaine or injected cocaine is more potent than the same dose of

like swallowed cocaine is because it crosses the blood-brain barrier faster and raises the dopaminergic pitch quicker.

So there's rate and

also

the reward component appears to correlate subjectively

not with the peak in actual pleasure of the resulting stimulus, but in the peak of the expectation that the pleasure is about to arrive.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, the dopaminergic system is an expectation system.

Yeah.

And cocaine, okay, so now, so here's what we have with social media, with the bots, with the

AI algorithm optimizers, right?

So this is what's happening.

You can see it happening to YouTube, too, is that

the systems are optimized to grip attention.

But the battle is for the, for shorter and shorter,

what would you say?

For shorter and shorter durations of attentional focus.

So the battle is not only for attention, but for the shortest possible amount of information that will grip the maximum amount of attention.

Now, the AI systems are using reinforcement learning to determine how to optimize that.

And that's driving that fragmentation.

Like you can see it on YouTube because YouTube is tilted more and more towards shorts like TikTok, right?

These fragmentary bursts of maximally attractive information.

And they could capitalize on rage because rage has a positive emotion element.

Now, I want to put this in into the context of what you said about Twitter and you and I could have a conversation about X and Twitter that's personal as well.

So

you said, you know, Elon got hooked on X and

enough to buy it.

And so

let's assess that situationally and biologically.

Now,

I've spent quite a bit of time on X.

In fact, it's the social media platform that I've used personally the most.

It's the one I'm most familiar with.

And I would say it's been a very, it's very complex platform for me.

Yeah, hasn't it at various points convinced you that you should no longer use it?

Haven't you gotten on and on?

Multiple times,

multiple times, multiple times.

I learned that lesson exactly once, but it really did stick.

I have not looked at it.

Yeah, well,

that's partly

what I want to talk to you about.

I mean, so part of it is, you know,

I get a lot of my podcast guests and my ideas for podcast guests from X,

because I follow about 2,000 people.

But

I'm very extroverted, and there's an element of impulsivity that goes along with extroversion.

I'm very verbally fluent, and so I can think up new ideas in no time flat, and I'm likely to say them.

And so it's very easy for me, if I'm on X, to react to a lot of things.

And so

foot meet mouth.

Well, that, but it's weird.

It's a weird thing because some of the things that

some of my impulsive moves, so to speak, which have gotten me in quite a lot of trouble, I'm not the least bit unhappy about.

You know,

I got, you cannot believe how much flack I got for

tweeting out something arguably careless on October 8th.

What was that?

Not being on Twitter, I never saw that.

What was the defending of the Texas said, give him hell, Netanyahu.

Yeah, yeah, right.

So that took like eight months of cleanup work to deal with.

Seriously, it was no, it was, and, and, but, but, but, but, and, well, and I got kicked off, X.

Yeah, you're not going to get any dispute from me about that.

I mean, Netanyahu, just to, just to close the loop on that, Netanyahu is obviously a very polarizing figure and probably a fairly corrupt figure, and he's got lots of problems that have implications for Israeli politics.

But I'm not convinced that even the perfect prime minister who has no optical problems, you judge from our side, would have waged this war any differently.

I mean, I don't know what they should have done differently at every stage along the way, and I don't know that any other prime minister would have taken a different path.

Well, the situation to me looks like, and you tell me what you think about this, and then we'll go back to the to the to the problem of

ai optimization of grip of short-term attention and the manner in which x in particular falls into that category so my sense with with the situation israel it was has been right from the beginning that

iran in particular

would

and has set up the situation so if every single palestinian was sacrificed in the most torturous possible manner to irritate, annoy, and destroy Israel and agitate the Americans.

That would be 100% all right with Iran.

I think someone once said that the molos in Iran will fight Israel to the last Arab.

I think that's the line that I

captures.

Yeah, well, that's exactly that.

Well,

that's exactly how it looks to me.

And so I look at that situation and I say, well, I think, well, like,

what do you do in a situation like that?

That's moral if you're Israel?

Anyways, I don't want to go down that rabbit too deeply.

But that's,

yeah, yeah.

Well, but that, but, okay, but so I've had this like

complex relationship with X, and some of it's been real useful because I follow a lot of people there, and I keep an eye on the mainstreams of the culture, and I extract out my podcast guests, and I can see where the real pathology is emerging, and I can keep an eye on it.

And the price of that is that, you know, now and then I stick my foot in it in a major way, and sometimes that's good and sometimes it's not.

And

now I've sort of built a variety of fences around me that are part of my organization that,

you know,

they're kind of these intermediary structures that we've been talking about that

put a lag in between what I read and how I read.

And,

you know,

well, that's one, you know, and this is part of, it's the destruction of those things that we're starting to, you and I are starting to talk about here.

Because, you know, there's never been a time in human history where you could publish your first pass opinion about anything to 20 million people in one second.

Right?

No one could ever do that.

And

we're not neurologically

constructed to live in a world where you can yell at 10 million people whenever you want about anything.

Yeah, the problem for me is that so what's happened now, going back to this core topic of

what in particular is wrong with X and the time course

at which people are reacting to information and producing information in turn,

there's a lot wrong with that.

And what it's done to our culture and what it's done to specific people, I mean, again, Elon for me is the enormous, the 800-pound canary in the coal mine, is that

it's effectively made them behave like psychopaths.

I'm not saying that, I mean,

if you just look at X, and this is what convinced me to get off of it,

you would think there were many more psychopaths in the world than there are, in fact.

I was seeing people who I knew in every other context would be psychologically normal, or at least normal enough, behave like psychopaths to me, toward me, in front of me.

And in some cases, these are people I actually knew.

In some cases, these people I had dinner with.

And I knew what I was seeing on X

was what was would have been impossible across the table from me at dinner.

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um right right right and well that's that's an interesting interesting definition of of a pathological sub-environment, isn't it?

Like, you can tell a family is pathological when the rules that apply in the family don't generalize to the outside world.

And

you're pointing out that the game dynamics of Twitter have that

aspect, is that the game that's being played in Twitter doesn't suit the world well.

It's not an iterable game in the world.

And it could easily be the fact that it maximizes for short-term emotional reactivity is exactly what gives it that psychopathic edge, because the definition of a psychopath in many ways is the person who will sacrifice the future and you for immediate gratification, right?

That's the pathology of

psychopathy is a form of extended immaturity.

Yeah, well,

there's a lot of aggressive immaturity on display on X.

And again,

Elon is one of the primary offenders.

The one instance for me that made this especially clear and the role played by X especially clear was when

he jumped up on stage during one of these campaign events, or I forget if it was campaign or

I guess

the election had already been won, but some event with Trump.

And Elon, you know, quite famously, quite infamously, did what appeared to be a Nazi salute twice to the crowd

and got a reaction from much of the world of horror and

insult.

And now, honestly, as his former friend and as somebody who just imagines

his worldview has not

fully

disintegrated into

a tissue of

weird internet memes,

it was impossible for me to to believe that he was sincerely announcing his solidarity with the project of Nazism by making those salutes.

So I didn't view those as Nazi salutes, even though just ergonomically they were in fact Nazi salutes.

I just thought, okay, I don't know what he's doing, but the idea that he's picking this moment to say I'm a Nazi seems frankly impossible.

So

I was interested to see what he was going to do in response to the controversy.

What he did in response,

and again, this controversy is coming

in a context that doesn't look at all good for my very

charitable interpretation of his behavior, because it's in a context where he's funding the far-right party in Germany,

assuring us that there's absolutely nothing wrong with that party, whereas the party does, in fact, contain whatever Nazis there are to be contained in Germany.

Not that it's only a Nazi party, but it is in addition to everything else, it's got the Nazis.

He's

playing FTSE with lots of fairly aggressive anti-Semites on his own platform.

He's with great fanfare.

He had brought back Nick Fuentes and Kanye, and these people are

anti-Semites, if not actual Nazis.

So

he is facilitating a very unhappy

recrudescence of anti-Semitism on the platform he owns.

And now he's doing Nazi salutes in public.

So

what is a genuinely not anti-Semitic, well-intentioned person who cares about his reputation and is still capable of embarrassment do in the aftermath of this?

Well, it would have been

just trivially easy for him to have said something totally sensible uh and and apologetic that would would have been honest and would have taken this the sting out of the moment perfectly he could have said listen i know how that looked i don't know what i was doing up there i was just you know captured by the energy of the moment obviously i was not doing a hitler salute i'm not a nazi i've got no no interest in in amplifying their message on x or anywhere else if you're a nazi please don't follow me i hate your whole project project.

You're completely wrong about everything, right?

End of tweet, right?

He did nothing like that.

All he did was troll his audience making Nazi jokes and puns on X.

So you can fault his character for that,

but what I also think we should fault is the medium itself, right?

This is the way his brain is conforming to the technology.

Yes.

Well, look,

you know the fundamental attribution error.

It's like the one thing social psychologists have discovered that's actually valid.

That's a bit of an exaggeration, but

the fundamental attribution, yes, a dozen things.

The fundamental attribution error is the proclivity to attribute to character what's actually a consequence of situation.

You know, and these we should be very careful, and I think we are at the moment be very careful to assure that our first presumption is that it's the pathology of the technology that's the fundamental driver

and that people are just went along in it.

That's my account of what has happened to Elon almost in his entirety.

I think Twitter has, you know, he is the greatest living casualty of what Twitter does to someone who becomes properly engorged by it.

And that's,

yeah, yeah.

So, but

and one of the reasons why I got off, frankly, was apart from my own misadventures on the platform, which were nothing like Elon's,

I looked in the kind of the funhouse mirror of what was happening to him in his life, and I thought, you know,

here's a very smart guy who's got much better things to do than fuck up his life in this way, and yet he can't seem to stop.

How much am I like him?

How much is there this component of addiction and dysregulation and failures of impulse control and a need to just

get my thoughts out on a time course of seconds rather than more carefully over the course of days?

I mean,

and so then I yanked it for that reason.

And the one thing I found is that when you don't have it as an outlet, right, when you literally can't publish that quickly,

then things have to survive a much larger informational So then there's this thing online that happened that I'm tempted to react to.

It has to survive until I do my next podcast, which might not be for three or four days, right?

And so,

and obviously 90% of the things I thought I had to react to don't survive that time course.

Yeah, you know, I made a deal with my wife that was like that because

You know, I can see things going sideways,

I think, with a fair degree of accuracy, and that disrupts me emotionally now and then.

And I made a deal with my wife several years ago that

I can't complain about anything I won't write about.

Right, well, that's

well, it's the same thing, and it bears on the same issue that you're describing: is that if it's not important enough to

write about,

then you should ignore it, right?

You're not actually, it's not significant enough.

It's not significant enough to sacrifice some genuine time and thought.

You shouldn't be commenting on it.

And

that's kind of a maturity, but it's also,

it's a weird thing because it's not exactly like

it isn't something that people had to contend with previously because you couldn't publish immediately.

There were barriers of cost and difficulty and gatekeepers and distribution.

And so that wasn't something you had to think up for yourself.

Like, how do I put a lag in my life before I communicate with a million people or five million people?

And so you're basically building these inhibitory structures out of whole cloth.

And

now,

you pulled out of Twitter

quite a while ago now.

It's a couple years ago.

Yeah.

Right.

Okay, so two and a half years, something like that.

Yeah.

Well, it was, it was actually right when Elon took it over, but it wasn't because he took it over.

I mean, that, the timing there was, was fairly accidental.

I was, I was getting ready to pull the plug, and then I just saw how much chaos was being introduced into his life around it.

And I just thought, all right, this is, this is a sign.

And so I

yanked it.

And

I mean, one of the benefits, apart from just introducing this different time course into my life by which I interact with information,

I just don't like, you know,

there's this phrase, you know, that Twitter isn't real life.

And then at a certain point, many of us realize, okay, that's, that's too sanguine a thought because we're noticing people losing their reputation so fully that, you know, they get on an airplane, like the, I think it was the Justine Sacco incident where she got on an airplane and then half the world was tweeting about her and she arrived at her destination only to find that she had been properly canceled and lost her job, et cetera, et cetera.

So, obviously, Twitter can, you know, whether you're on it or not, it can, under the right circumstances or the wrong ones, become real life.

But the truth is, given the platform I've built, given the,

I mean, just frankly, how lucky I've been to find an audience and to build a readership and a podcast listenership,

Twitter really isn't real life for me, right?

Like I like I'm still, Elon still attacks me on Twitter by name, and I find out I'm trending on Twitter, you know, years after I've left, and it matters not at all for my life.

It matters not at all for my business.

Nothing happens, right?

And yet if I were on Twitter, there would be this illusion of emergency, right?

If I was on there looking at it and looking at the, you know, looking at the biggest, literally the biggest bully on Twitter has just punched me in the face.

And I'm seeing the aftermath of it, the temptation to respond to that and to to make it

and to feel that not only do I have to respond there, but I have to respond on my podcast.

And then now this is how I'm spending my week because this thing just happened on Twitter.

It would be almost impossible not to be taken in by that and not to be just convinced of the necessity of it because all of this is really important.

I mean, we're talking about millions of people.

Like, I mean, like, literally,

there are videos

denigrating me for things I've never said or believed that Elon has amplified, and these videos have 50 million views, right?

And I just happen to be lucky enough to have built a life and a career where that matters not at all, right?

But for somebody else finding themselves in that situation,

I can well imagine, all right, this is just the destruction of my reputation in a way that matters.

Well, that's what it looks like, sure.

And like you said, it's virtually impossible to

resist that temptation.

I mean, who are you to deny the

impact of the opinion of 50 million people?

You know what I mean?

I mean,

that looks like an insane pride in a way to ignore that.

But the point that you're making is that it's very difficult to

Well, it's very easy to ignore it when it actually isn't making contact with my views.

It's like if I had said that.

Right, but it's hard to see that it isn't like because it's so it's it appears so powerful.

You know, we've found as a social media platform that Twitter is the worst of all social media platforms for sales conversion.

Yeah, I can imagine.

In our experience,

it's interesting.

You're next to some, you know, somebody getting

beaten to death in a liquor store.

I mean, like the, like when I go on Twitter, since I don't have an account, I'm not, you know, so I have a naive account.

It's not following anyone, and I, and I almost never click anything.

So I really see this the pure algorithm when you just kind of just look at the home page scroll and or as pure as it gets.

I mean, maybe it's got some information on me based on my IP address or something.

But

if I ask myself, what is this

algorithm trying to get me to be or to believe?

Honestly, I can tell you that it is trying to get me to be a racist asshole, right?

And a fan of Elon's, right?

So it's given me a lot of Elon, and then it's giving me a lot of

black teenagers beating up white, you know, a single white teenager or

people of color robbing stores and getting shot in the face.

I mean, it's just awful, like 4chan-level awfulness,

and then the occasion, and then the occasional unlucky brand advertising to me in that context.

I mean, it's just, it's a, it's a monstrosity of a platform from which to actually try to sell things.

So

it's, it's,

but

yes, if I were on Twitter following 2,000 smart people as you are and

feeling that they are curating for me,

you know, their best, the best of their information diet, I would have a, I know what that experience is like because that's what I was doing.

That's why I was on it for, whatever, 12 years and couldn't convince myself to get off it.

It seemed like a professional necessity.

It seemed so good in the sense

the incoming stuff was so good because, again, I had chosen who to follow, and all these people were reading great articles and forwarding them and having great short takes on them.

And

all that stuff was great, but I have managed to

get a surrogate of that in the way I find information otherwise.

And what I don't have is the emergency.

Like, I mean, the ruined vacation where somebody, you know, like somebody, some genius over at the New York Times has called me a racist and now I have to, you know, spend the rest of my vacation with my family trying to figure out how to respond to this.

I've tweeted back at them and blah, blah, blah, blah.

It's escalated and now we've just nuked each other.

And

it looks real.

Yeah, it looks real.

But it feels real.

And

it is real if you spend your time that way.

I mean, that's the thing.

If you spend your time that way, which I did for years, it is real.

It is the substance of your life.

It is

the manner in which you, it's the thing you bring back to the conversation with your wife, you know, five minutes later or five hours later, more likely, and it's in your head.

And just, it was, it was a ghastly use of attention.

That's what I finally realized.

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Well, you made an allusion when you were talking about what you regard as the unfortunate effect of X on Elon and maybe on other users.

So let's assume that, that

you were afraid that the sort of things that you were seeing happening to others,

more than merely Elon, let's say, in your estimation, were also happening to you.

And so what do you think, in retrospect,

what do you think it was doing to you?

You just talked about the effects on your family on vacations.

I've experienced a fair bit of that.

I understand exactly what you're saying.

And it does seem like the world's burning and you better do something about it right now.

And it's no wonder it seems that way because it's lots of people.

And generally in our...

normative ecosystems, if lots of people appear to be upset with you or around you, you should pay attention.

But Twitter isn't the real world.

We don't know what the hell it is.

It looks more and more like a world of demonic bots, and God only knows what that world is.

But what did you see, especially now that you've been away for a while,

what elements of your character do you think were pathologized and that were brought to the forefront?

That's because of this.

Yeah,

I considered myself a fairly careful user of it.

I mean, I was not at all like Elon.

I was not addicted to it in that way.

I was not tweeting hundreds of times a day.

I think I averaged something like three tweets a day over the course of my use of it.

And that would come in spurts.

I mean, so there would be, I would not tweet for three days and then send out a dozen tweets because it was some hot topic.

I was always fairly careful so that I I honestly don't think I ever said anything on the platform that I regretted, right?

I mean, if I ever made a mistake, I apologize for it.

But

I never, you know, I treated it like writing.

I was aware I was publishing in that channel, however, quickly and impulsively, I was, you know, I'm a much, I'm enough of a writer and an academic to feel like, okay, this is yet another occasion where embarrassment is possible and you don't want that.

So

I never, I'm not, I don't remember ever really screwing up on the platform.

And yet, what happened there was,

I mean, I can honestly say that for a decade,

the worst things in my life, and in some sense, the only bad things in my life came from Twitter, came from my interaction with Twitter.

I mean, apart from like a family, you know, family illnesses, you know, like that's leaving something, leaving that aside.

My life was so good, and yet I had this, you know, digital serpent in my pocket that I would consult a dozen times a day, 20 times a day, maybe 100 times a day.

So again, I might have only posted once or twice, but if something was really, if the news cycle was really churning, I might be looking at this my consulting of this

news feed effectively

was interrupting my day, you know, not just every hour, but maybe every five minutes of many hours, right?

Or for 10 minutes of that hour.

And

so it was segmenting my day, however good that day or productive that day was or should have been, I was constantly chopping it up by how I was engaging with this scroll.

Again, mostly consuming, but often in response to the one or two things I had put out.

Yes, there was a dopaminergic

component to that, obviously.

I said something that I thought was clever, that was perceived as clever by my fans, and perhaps to the detriment of my enemies.

And, you know, all that seemed, you know, exactly

what I wanted in the moment.

But even when it was at its best, right, even when

there was just good information coming to me and I was responding

happily with good information back,

even the non-toxic version of it was a

style of

was intrinsically fragmenting of my life.

I don't read a book that way.

I don't have a book that I pick up for two and a half minutes and then I put down and then try to have a conversation with my kid and then say, okay, hold on one second and pick up the book again.

It's like, that's not how you, that's not how anyone reads a book, right?

And yet Twitter

far too often became that sort of thing in my life.

Right, right.

And it's like a parasite.

It's like it parasitizes the exploratory instinct.

It's something like that, right?

Because, and maybe,

look, you know, for a long time,

I didn't have a

cell phone.

I was a late adopter of cell phones.

And I didn't watch the news, probably, really, from like 1985 till about 2005.

I had cut myself off from news sources.

I didn't read newspapers.

And the reason that I didn't do that was...

A few things happened in there.

Did you catch 9-11?

Who was you missed that?

Well,

I used to read, for example, I would read some credible magazines like The Economist when it still was credible because I don't really think it is anymore.

Isn't it amazing to consider that magazines like Time and Newsweek

could expect that their audience would wait a week to be informed about the news of that week?

That just seems extraordinary to me now.

Well,

my conclusion about that was that if it isn't important in a week,

it's not important.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Right.

And so and so I substituted these longer lag time

news aggregators for TV in particular or radio.

It's like, if it's today's news, it's not news.

Maybe if it's not important in a month, it's not news, right?

And that's part of that, that, that intelligent filtering.

And I guess part of the reason that X is dangerous and social media is dangerous, X in particular, is that

that proclivity to forage for information is

in general an extremely useful instinct, right?

It's the instinct to learn.

But

what we're learning, you might say that the shorter the period of time over which the information is relevant, the more like pseudo-information it is.

And so then any system that optimizes for the grip of short-term attention is going to parasitize your learning instinct with pseudo-information.

Yeah, it's also.

And the algorithms are going to maximize that.

The half-life is one thing, but also the culture that is informing these algorithms,

the actual human behavior that the algorithms are skimming

and boosting

is increasingly

a bad faith style of conversation.

I mean, it's just people are,

so many people, especially the anonymous people, are in the misinformation business.

I mean, they will just cut together a clip that is designed to mislead, and that is the clip that will get spread to the ends of the earth.

Well,

maybe is it designed to mislead, or is it designed to optimize their particular grip on short-term attention for their own gratify for their own aggrandizement.

Like that, like the psychopathic move, and let's say that it's facilitated by these short-term attention aggregators

that are driven by bots that are learning how to do this,

like the psychopathic proclivity, the narcissistic proclivity, is going to say whatever puts you at the center of attention, whatever it is.

Now, if you're governed by some kind of ethos

that is outside of attention seeking, then that's a different story.

But

if the game is that the machine optimizes for short-term attention, then it's going to reward all the players that are doing whatever it takes.

to grip short-term attention.

Yeah, but the thing is, people,

whatever it takes, though, is to get somebody seeming to say something totally outrageous.

And

in context, it might have made perfect sense,

or at least it be a very different point than the one that's being advertised by the clip.

But the clip, shorn of context, is just calculated to mislead in that

the person who has edited that clip knows that

the naive viewer can only draw one conclusion from

the utterance as presented.

Even if they're well-intentioned and fairly alert to this problem, almost no one is going to go back to the original podcast and look at the comment in context.

I mean, this just happened to Rogan, I believe.

I think he had Bono, the singer for

YouTube on his podcast.

Bono said something critical of Elon, I believe.

And this got chopped up in a clip that was just, it made it look like Joe really disagreed with Bono

and was critical of him.

And

the clip just got exported as like,

look at Bono getting owned by Joe Rogan or whatever.

But that's not what the conversation was at all, right?

Like Joe conceded, you know,

most of the point that Bono was making.

It was just, it was false.

It was

a false picture of what happened there.

And the person who makes that clip just knows that

if they frame it as a SmackDown,

people are going to love to see that.

And it doesn't matter that they're lying about what happened and damaging people's reputations in the process.

Yeah.

Well, and that's especially true if they're anonymous and their reputation bears no consequence of their lies.

You know, well, the other thing that's happening, I don't know how much this is happening to you, but and this is another example of the parasite problem.

so increasingly

um my voice and my image are being used not exactly in the way that you're describing although that's happening a lot yeah i'm selling cognitive enhancers somewhere as an ai version of myself okay Okay, well,

that's happening a fair bit too, and sometimes worse than cognitive enhancers.

But the worst thing that's happening now

is that

these

sites that are operating under my name using my image and my voice are providing pseudo-philosophical content and pseudo-psychological insight

as if it's me.

And so

it's like what I've said has been put through a filter of stupidity and reorganized in my voice.

And this is happening constantly.

Like

YouTube has already taken 65 channels down that are doing this.

And so this is another example of that parasite problem, right?

You store up a reputation and then the parasites swoop in and pull off the attention that the reputation has garnered and monetize it.

And they can escape into the ether because they do it anonymously.

And so

this is going to become a stunning problem.

I mean, it's a big problem.

I can see that

the perfect version of it is

at most a year away.

I mean, it might only be a couple of months away.

We've experimented with this on our side, too.

Just like, for instance, in my meditation app, waking up, we're now experimenting with translation to other languages.

And, you know,

they've got AI has got me speaking 22 languages perfectly in my voice.

And it really sounds like me speaking those languages and the translation from what we can tell so far is is fairly impeccable so we're going to roll out a you know a Spanish version of the app in the not too distant future just to see what happens but it's like it's it's it's getting it's getting too good so I think what

the the lesson that that that consumers of information who care to have real information are going to have to learn is that

you can't trust if you're if you're looking at Jordan peterson

on youtube you simply cannot trust that it really is jordan peterson unless it's coming through

one of one channel that you know you can trust which is so no we're back to the age of gate ironically we're back to the age of gatekeepers right it's if it's not on your channel or joe rogan's channel or you know chris williamson's channel uh if it just purports to be them but on somebody else's youtube account you can't trust it.

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Yeah, well, it might also be, Sam, that the real solution to that is payment.

Like if it's the rule is going to be, maybe this is the rule, the rule is going to be

free.

Right.

If it's free, it's a lie.

Right.

Yeah.

That's the world we're rapidly moving into.

And or if

except someone's going to be able to create, I mean, until you find them and stop them, someone will create the fake Jordan Peterson Academy that has a paywall, right?

That looks like you, sounds like you, and

it's only $5 a month.

And so they'll monetize that way, and that'll still be the problem.

Has that been happening with

your meditation app, with your enterprise yet?

Not that I'm aware of.

No.

I mean, I just think

I'm just aware of seeing short clips of me

seeming to hawk

you know, psychotropics that

I've never heard of.

And that's just an AI version of my voice.

It's real footage of me stolen from somebody's podcast and then an AI

workover of that, you know, that turns into like an Instagram ad.

Yeah, well, I talked to some lawmakers in D.C.

about a year and a half ago about the fact that this was going to happen, hoping that they would,

well, it takes a long time to take notice and

take action, but you know, it's essentially the digital for it's the digital equivalent of kidnapping.

like i think people should people should be put in prison for a long time for stealing your digital identity and monetizing it like it is very much akin to kidnapping because what they're doing is

they're draining the value out of your reputation that's essentially the game you know and so so what what's happened to your life you you you you you There's a couple of there's a couple of things I'd like to investigate here first.

The first, I'd like to return to something something that you and I talked about that we beat, that we wandered around a fair bit in our previous conversations.

You know, you had

partly because you were concerned about the distinction between good and evil, and let me put words into your mouth, you were hoping to find a

objective basis for morality, a way of grounding morality in the objective world.

And I have a thought about that that's relevant to our current conversation.

You know, so

tell me if you accept this proposition.

Part of the pathology of Twitter is that it operates by game rules that not only don't apply in the real world, but that when exported to the real world, pathologize it.

Is that fair?

Yeah.

Okay.

I like that.

Okay.

Okay.

Right.

Okay.

So here's a way of, I think, bridging the a gap between the way you've been thinking about the world

from the moral perspective and the way I've been thinking about it.

So,

you know, I've always been,

I've understood that you had a very deep concern about moral judgment and that your attempt to provide a scaffolding of objectivity for morality was grounded in that even deeper concern.

And I thought that I could understand why you did that.

And I didn't agree with the conclusions that you'd drawn, but

I agreed with the overall enterprise.

And it struck me

recently, and I think we've already obliquely made reference to it in our conversation, that

there's another way of conceptualizing this

relationship between morality and objective fact,

and that it that might be it might be more fruitful to

look

into the realm of something like, well, it's like theory of iterability

and generalizability.

It's maybe a variant of something like game theory.

Like imagine that, so let me give you an example, Sam.

And it's a pretty famous example.

You know, those trading games where

behavioral economists sit people down and say, two people, they say, I'll give you $100.

You have to make an offer to the okay yeah so the finding across culturally is that people generally approximate a 50% 50-50 split right yeah

and they're highly they're they they're not game theoretic with respect to unfair trades like they don't they don't want to accept unfair trades even when it would just narrowly be to their advantage to accept them exactly exactly okay okay and that's true even if they're poor so if if you put a a poor person in a situation where they have to accept an unfair trade, that would be to their immediate economic benefit, they seem even less likely to accept it.

Now, I think the right way to construe that is that if you and I engage in an economic trade, we're doing two things at the same time.

The first is what the classical economists would say is we're trying to maximize our

short our gain, let's say.

But the problem with that notion is that we aren't playing one game.

Or

while we're playing one game, we're also setting ourselves up to play a very large and unpredictable sequence of games.

Those are happening at the same time.

And so we don't want to just optimize for gain in the single game.

We want to optimize our status as players in a large series of unpredictable

games.

And so we want to put ourselves forward as fair players so that people line up to play other games with us.

Okay, so then imagine that the hallmark of morality

is

something like

generalizable iterability across contexts.

Right?

Because

this would allow for,

and so you can think about a more truly moral system is the most playable game.

And an immoral system augers in.

And like when we've seen, we're talking about this to some degree with regard to X, because our proposition is that fundamentally, because it's optimizing for short-term attention grip, and it benefits the psychopaths and the short-term gain accruers, the parasites, and perhaps the predators, that it's fundamentally a non-playable game, and that if its

consequences generalize outside the world of X, that it pathologizes the environment.

And the reason for that is it's not optimally iterable.

And so the pattern of object, the pattern of morality that would be grounded in the objective world isn't in the world of objective fact.

It's in the world of optimized iterability across people and contexts.

Well, I would just say that there are

some set of objective facts that subsumes that picture, right?

I mean, the world is the way it is.

The social world of social primates such as ourselves is the way it is.

It admits of certain possibilities and certain other things are impossible given the kinds of minds we have.

Our minds could change in all kinds of ways.

They could change by being integrated with technology.

They could change by, you know, genetically being manipulated at some point in the future.

There's this landscape of possible experience that

the right sort of minds could navigate.

And we're someplace on that landscape, and we're trying to find our way.

And so I view morality as a, at bottom, bottom, a navigation problem, right?

And it's got this iterative quality that you describe.

It's, it's, the question is,

it's always, you know, where

can we go from here?

Where should we go from here?

Okay, where should we go from here, given all the possible places we might go from here, both individually and collectively?

Okay, well, you know, the reason that I got obsessed with stories to begin with, Sam, was because I realized 30 years ago that a story

was a description of a navigation strategy.

That's what a story is.

And so

then the question is: okay, let's see if we can formalize this a bit more.

The story has to, let's say, an optimized story has to iterate and improve.

So, for example, if you

construe your marriage properly, it exists stably but that's not as good as it could get it could exist stably and improve as it iterates and then you can imagine that there's a small world of games that are playable in the actual natural and social world that improve as they iterate and those are

Those games, pointers to

those games are moral pointers.

And I think that that's what the core of the religious enterprise

dives into and elaborates upon.

I think that's what makes it the religious enterprise, is that it deeply assesses.

So

if imagine this, imagine that your proposition, the proposition you laid out is accurate, is that

the fundamental concern is navigation.

How do we get from point A to point B?

Well, a story,

you can think about this and tell me what you think, but I believe that a story is a description of a navigation strategy.

If you go see a movie, you infer the aim of the protagonist and you adopt his perceptual frame and his emotional perspective.

That's how perception works.

And then you could imagine that there are depths of games.

Some are shallow.

And

short-term games that maximize for short-term gain and to hell with everything else are shallow.

And games that are sophisticated can be played in many situations with many players.

They take the future into account and they improve as you play them.

And there's a hierarchy of value in consequence of that,

that is obliquely associated with the world of fact because it has to operate in the world of fact, but that isn't fundamentally derived from like data

that's directly associated with the facts.

Well, not operationally,

but potentially so, just not in fact.

It's just that's just not.

I'm never claiming when I say that there are objective truths to all of these questions, that those objective truths will be delivered by some guy holding a clipboard, wearing a white lab coat.

But there are things we just know to be true, and it would take a lot of explaining to get to the bottom of how we know them to be true.

But I mean, just very, they're very simple claims.

We know that

life

in

the best and most refined and most ethically positive some

developed world context, right?

You know, you and me and our most conscientious friends at the nicest resort after having done a great day's work, we're enjoying a great meal

and talking creatively and positively about how to improve the world, we know that's a better game than

trying to find some child soldiers to torture the neighbors in some malarial hellhole

in

sub-Saharan Africa

so that we can extract

some heavy metals

the extraction of which is polluting the environment and causing the the

the the life expectation to be 30 years lower than it is in where we live right I mean so like there's they're different they're fundamentally discordant human projects that are available to some very lucky people and unavailable to others

and and luck is by no means

evenly distributed in this world.

So there are better and worse games, right?

By any measure of better,

you want to, you know, ethically better, artistically better,

entrepreneurially better, economically better.

It's just, you know, better

with respect to the health outcomes, et cetera, et cetera.

So we're all trying to play the best game we can be a part of.

We're all trying, I mean, some people,

I take that back.

Many of us are,

we're all trying to play the best game

we can think of as best but but one of the the um the consequences of my argument is that it's possible to be wrong it's possible to actually have false beliefs about what is in fact better or worse yeah like you can be well i also you can be future i also think you're insufficient you're insufficiently pessimistic too sam i think because i don't think everyone is trying to play the best possible game i think that there are

truly negative games where

i think

people are being rewarded in some way.

You know, like the sadist whose favorite game is to just see, to cause suffering in others and enjoy that suffering, the fact that he enjoys their suffering, right, that's that's a problem with him, right?

He's a, you know, he's a neurological monster of a sort.

And he's confined to being the sort of mind that finds that very

uh low-level game more rewarding than the than the game i just advertised at the resort with us being creative and productive and and and you know positive some

yeah well that's the man who wants to rule over hell sam right right yeah so i'm not because he thinks yeah i'm not okay fine fine fine fine fine fine but my point is that there are there's we're obviously living in a a a realm where there are better and worse outcomes by any definition of better and worse that makes sense.

Even from within the confines of the games that you're describing.

Yeah.

Right.

Because one of the ways of deciding that a game is counterproductive is that if you play it, it doesn't produce the result that it intends.

Right.

Right.

So that's another kind of universal hallmark of moral judgment.

Like if you're aiming at something and your strategy doesn't get you there, either your strategy is wrong or your aim is off by your own definition.

Right.

There's no relativizing your way out of that.

And then we can say, well, there's a hierarchy of games that

expand and improve as you play them.

And there's a hierarchy of games that degenerate as you play them, even by your own standards of degeneration.

Yeah.

And

the games...

the more refined games actually refine you as a player.

You get changed by the game you play,

to your advantage or to your disadvantage.

And it makes you more or less capable of playing any specific game.

So

this is what learning, this is what education is.

This is what skill learning is.

This is what interpersonal skill learning amounts to.

This is

the difference between having good relationships versus bad relationships, being in a good culture where its institutions

incentivize you to be your effortlessly be the best possible version of yourself as opposed to you know you having to be some kind of moral hero just to be just not a psychopath.

I mean, this is what's so

important about incentives and about contexts like Twitter that incentivize the wrong things.

What we want, I mean, we don't want to have to take on the burden of

rebooting civilization ourselves based on our own native moral intuitions every single hour of every single day.

That's for sure, Sam.

That's for sure.

We need

systems that make it easy for strangers to collaborate effortlessly in high trust environments, right?

I mean, this is like the, we need to offload all of our moral wisdom into institutions and to systems of incentives such that you would have to be a very bad person indeed not to see the wisdom of being a peaceful, honest collaborator with the next person you meet, right,

given the nature of the system.

Whereas, I mean, if you look, I mean, just to sharpen this up, because that can sound very abstract, if you take

an actually normal, decent person who just wants to be good and have positive sum relationships with everyone he meets, you put that person in a maximum security prison in the United States.

That person will be highly incentivized to join a gang that

has the requisite color of his skin

and be essentially a monster because that's the only way to survive in that context.

To not join a gang, to not join a racist gang is to be the victim of everyone.

So, what you have in a maximum security prison is a system of terrible incentives where you have to be some kind of

self-sacrificing saint to opt out of ramifying this awful system of incentives further.

We want the opposite of that

in situations that we control and in institutions that we build.

And

the thing that's so

disturbing to me about this contrarian moment is that so many people have gotten the message, and this is

really

most explicit since COVID.

They've gotten the message that

we don't need institutions.

We don't want institutions.

We just need to burn it all down

and we're just going to navigate by substack newsletter and podcast.

And

that's just not going to work, right?

We can't be all contrarian all the time.

We need institutional knowledge.

Intermediary institutions.

Yeah, that work.

Yeah.

So whether we have to build new ones or perform exorcisms on our old ones,

that might be a different answer depending on the case.

But there's there's no question we need institutions that are better than most individuals and that make most individuals

live up to norms that they themselves didn't invent and would

under another system of incentives would struggle to emulate.

All right.

I'm going to bring it in to land, Sam.

I think what we're going to do on the Daily Wire side, I want to talk to you, I think, for half an hour about

the anti-Semitic landscape on the left and the right.

And I want to go down those rabbit holes and explore them with you.

So that's, for everybody watching and listening, I think that's what we're going to do on the Daily Wire side.

And because you made some comments earlier about your concerns about the right-wing parties in Europe, for example, and the Nazis that are hiding there.

And

I've seen no shortage of right-wing anti-Semitism rear its ugly head, let's say,

on X, for example.

But I also want to talk to you about the same pathology emerging on the left, because there's no shortage of unbelievable anti-Semitism on the left, and we should sort that out a little bit.

And so that's what we'll do on the Daily Wire side.

Sam, every time we talk, I think we get a little bit,

well, we understand each other a little bit better.

I think there's something very fruitful for us to continue discussing in relationship, well, to a number of the things things you discussed today about the necessity for intermediary institutions.

That's the principle of subsidiarity.

It's an ancient principle of Catholic social,

what would you say, social philosophy.

You have to have intermediary institutions.

They're the alternative to tyranny and slavery.

The idea that there's a harmony between individual development and proper institutions that has to be established.

You know, you can't be a good, it's very difficult to be a good person in an entirely pathological social situation.

And

then this idea that there's a hierarchy of games, because part of what got me interested to begin with in the religious world, let's say, was because I started to understand what constituted the religious as the

structure of the depth of games.

This by definition.

And I'm not talking about what people think about as superstitious belief.

That's not the issue.

The issue is that there's a hierarchy of game

from shallow to deep, from counterproductive to productive,

from unplayable to iterative, and that that's a real world.

And there's a reason for that that I think is allied with your desire,

lifelong desire, to investigate

the objective grounds of the moral world.

Yeah.

I mean,

the one thing I would add to that is that also by definition, on my account,

whatever is true there,

whatever's truly sacred, you know, the true spiritual possibility has to be deeper than

culture.

And it certainly has to be deeper than the accidents of

ancient cultures being

separated from one another based on linguistic and geographical barriers, right?

So it can't be.

No dispute about that.

Yeah, it can't be that Eastern Orthodox Christianity is the real answer versus Hinduism being

the real answer.

Because I mean, one, they're incompatible answers at the surface level.

Whatever deep truth they may be in touch with, that is something we have to understand in a 21st century context that is that is deeper than provincialism.

That's my argument against religious sectarianism of any kind.

We definitely have much to discuss the next time we talk.

All right.

So for everybody watching and listening, join us on the Daily Wire side because we'll go down the anti-Semitic rabbit hole.

And that'll give Sam and I a little bit of time as well to discuss the political, which we haven't,

you know, which we've conveniently circumvented in a sense, but we had other things to talk about.

So join us there.

Thank you to the film crew here today in Scottsdale.

Thanks, Sam.

It's always a pleasure to talk to you.

I'm glad you're doing well.

It's real good to see you, man.

Yep.

These are questions that take cultures thousands of years to answer.

During Answer the Call, I take questions from people just like you about their problems, opportunities, challenges, or when they simply need advice.

How do I balance all of this grief, responsibility?

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My daughter, Michaela, guides the conversations as we hopefully help people navigate their lives.

Everyone has their own destiny.

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