What social media and just the democratization of everything has given us is some insight into how rotten our institutions were in the first place. There's a kind of wokification of the right that is happening. It's like professional wrestling. Nobody cares that it's fake.
If I was caught doing that, I would lose my 100% of my audience. You have to hear what they have to say. No, but that's a self-reinforcing... Sorry, let me just finish the point.
The smell of bullshit is detectable far enough off that you just don't have to spend time with it. You're not going to put new media back in the tube, right? That's toothpaste is out. It's how people are going to have those conversations, whether you like that or not.
And we have, you know, Islamist stealth groups in every western society, and certainly in America and the UK. We are living in an age now of conspiracy. People believe that the people empower the experts. The institutions are lying to them.
And I want to know, does this create problems that we should be worried about? And if it does, why should people listen to the two of you? Why are you guys trustworthy? Well, you want to start?
No, you go first, okay. Well, I mean, something I'm quite worried about. I think we're getting profoundly misinformed by the tools we've built. And I mean, I think it's a multi-level problem.
Now, on the one hand, many of us feel that what social media and just the democratization of everything has given us is some insight into how rotten our institutions were in the first place, right? So like, it was just a much more transparency. You know, the emperor has no clothes in many cases. But I think it's in part, that's true.
But I think what has also happened is that the institutions have become corrupted by the tools we have built. So, you know, as my friend Barry Weiss pointed out, when she left the New York Times, that Twitter had effectively become the editorial board of the Times when she left. And that's not simply a matter of shining sunlight onto the distortion of the priorities of the Times. The tools effectively just distort the priorities of the Times.
And, you know, for some period, they're almost ruined it. So, I just think we have to acknowledge that we have built a machine for propagating hallucinations and distortions of reality that we don't know how to use. And so, yeah, I'm just going to come to your question about why either of us are better brokers of information. I mean, I think you have to look at what we're specifically doing and the incentives we have built in our various platforms to motivate us to work.
And I mean, I've been very careful about this phenomenon of audience capture, which is what happens to even people with real integrity and the best intentions. They notice a signal in their audience. They notice an appetite for a certain message. And because they're incentivized to feed that signal, they do it.
And they want to become radicalized by their audience. And because this may be less true of you, given the kinds of topics you touch. But maybe not. I'm really not political by tendency.
I might just hate politics. I just feel all of it is a massive opportunity cost. And so, whenever I touch politics, I'm really not aligned right or left in any kind of predictable way. And so, I want to pissing off people on both sides.
I certainly piss off the far left and the far right, I would think equally at this point. And so, whenever I'm touching a very topical polarizing issue, I'm pissing off some considerable portion of the audience. And so, I've just learned to simply not care what the audience wants. And so, I can honestly say that I'm never even feeling the impulse to be blown around by the wind of sentiment in my audience.
It's just not what's happening. I find what I think is interesting and consequential. And I talk about it. And since I deleted my Twitter account, I almost never even see what's coming back at me.
So, for better or worse, I don't see what's coming back at me. And so, I'm really not. I'm just calling it as I see it. And I'm very happy to build a system that allows me to do that.
Okay, so, you don't have the deranging incentives that a lot of people have. Konstantin, talk to me about it is what we're going through problematic and if so, in what specific way. So, I think Sam laid out, yes, it's a problem. But why exactly?
What does this derangement do to us as a culture so much that we should do podcasts about it? May I also pick up on some of the things that Sam mentioned as well? One of the things I would say first and foremost is I've never made the claim that other people should listen to me. And I'm not intent on making that claim in the future.
The only area where I might invite people to listen to me is the invitation for critical thinking. I think that's an area where I hope that me saying that is helpful. But apart from that, people should make up their own minds. I think a lot of the critiques that Sam has been making for some time are exactly right about the nature of institutions first and then the response from the media to them.
Because I don't know if this is true, but I suspect we have the least corrupt institutions we've ever had. That's very possible. I'm not saying that is true. I'm saying that's a possibility.
And what has happened over time is our insight into how corrupt they are has improved our ability to understand how corrupt they are. So of course they are corrupt, but they may be a lot less corrupt. And we can sort of logically think about that from the perspective of if power corrupts, when the New York Times literally had a monopoly on all information, I imagine they use that power even more than they have been in recent decades, right? So what has happened is our faith in institutions has declined because we no longer willing to tolerate the level of corruption that we now know is there.
The problem is that at the end of the day, we still have to at some point be able to agree on what reality is. And we are now in a space where I think that the fragmentation of our reality has reached levels that are actually unprecedented to the point where if you think about words or names or anything, they no longer mean the same thing to most people, even more so than in the past. So the way I think about it now is if you take a name, Sam Harris, Donald Trump, Konstantin Kitomba, whoever, the person who's hearing that phrase has an experience of who that person is, that will be quite often almost entirely different to what another person who looks just like them sitting next to them has of that same person. So what Sam Harris is to people depends on what Sam Harris content they've encountered, and we can go down the path.
So how do you then have a conversation about ideas, about people, about anything? I think the fragmentation of our reality is a really scary thing. And then you layer on top of that, the other point that Sam made, which I think we're seeing play out. And I've always been very hesitant to believe in the idea that audience captures ubiquitous and affecting everybody.
And I have realized over time is because I'm a very highly disagreeable person. So from day one, I've been like, I really enjoy people, I don't enjoy. I am willing to be unpopular with different people because I care about the truth. I care about.
And I'm not saying that I have a better access to the truth than other people. I just care about pursuing it in my own way. So on trigonometry over time, we have pissed off left and right, you know, like Sam, you know, during the summer of BLM, we were very clear that what was happening was a problem. January the 6th, we were also clear that was a problem, but there were a lot of people for whom it was either, either BLM was a problem or January the 6th were a problem.
You couldn't say that both were a problem, right? And we lost, I call it pruning, we prune our audience all the time. It's like, well, if you want to be extreme, this may not be the right place for you. And I'm much more interested in having a million subscribers on YouTube, which is where approximately we are now, but pursuing the truth as best Francis and I can versus having 10 million subscribers and pandering to an audience that makes me resent myself and them.
But the other thing we all know is human beings do respond to incentives. So in the world in which, you know, it's very clear to me that the modern information ecosystem is not optimizing for truth. It's optimizing for outrage, it's optimizing for extremism, it's optimizing for engagement, which those two things produce. And I noticed this, I mean, there's a kind of, I'm trying to introduce this concept into the culture, and I don't know if you'll agree with me on this, but there's a kind of wokification of the right that is happening to find that.
Well, if you think about what defines wokeness in terms of tactics and behavior, it's a glorification of victimhood, hypersensitivity, and attempts to restrict the speech of others where conflicts with their previous ideas. That is all happening on the right. And I really experienced this, I wrote an article in my sub-stack that I then made into a video called Tucker Carlson and the Woke Right, which was a response to his trip to Russia, magically discovered that they have shopping carts and basically misled the American people about the idea that food is cheaper and Russia, which is complete BS in relative terms. Russian people spend way more of their household than come on food, and it's not because they eat more, it's because it's way more expensive.
And every single major influencer that I've discussed this, not every single, sorry, I take that back, most people who you would see on your x-feed or on your YouTube that I've spoken to, but they don't give a shit. They do not care. They just think Tucker Carlson is this big name, and that's what they care about. Now that worries me tremendously because if we are talking about making sense of things, making sense requires the ability to say this has gone too far.
We have now reached a stage where we're not talking about the truth. We are now pandering, playing to our audience, compensating for our own psychological traumas. I mean, in Tucker's case, I think it's his support for the war in Iraq means that he's anti every American intervention anywhere now. And that means if we're not, if the incentive structures are not there to optimize for truth, then we are going to get whatever it is that we're optimizing for, which seems to be outrage and the hottest take.
And the mechanism for challenging that just doesn't seem to be in place at all. So I think last time I was here, we spoke about the positive impact I thought New Media was making. And I think in terms of the democratization of information, I think that was necessary. But I think I was a little blind, truthfully, to the long-term impact.
And you actually made the point at the time, as I recall, that I was a little blind to what the flip side of that coin was going to be. So I think we're in a very tumultuous time and how our information system adjusts to that will I think determine where the world goes. All right. One thing I find when people are debating a point is that they're not getting to the underlying assumptions that drive their worldview.
And therefore, my wife and I have a rule in our marriage, never argue about the tea. The biggest argument we ever got into was over a cup of tea. Of course, it's not actually about the cup of tea, it was about the underlying assumptions and the tea just became the lightning rock. Well, she's British.
So we talked about it very seriously. No doubt. So I hear you guys both saying, this is a problem. I hear we've been circling around the truth and the truth.
If I were just listening to this, and this was all I knew of the two of you, I'd say the truth matters, but I don't yet understand why. And I feel like the culture war is really a war where two people think they have the truth, but they have not agreed upon how you determine what is true. I'm hypersensitive and I mentioned this to you before. I know you and Jordan really derailed on how we define truth.
So instead of necessarily right now getting into how we define what is true, I want to understand why the truth matters. And I'll say just for simplicity, that the truth is the bedrock upon which you can build the rest of your life and you won't have a hard time making predictions. So this stupid example, but it will orient people is nobody walks out of their second floor window because we all agree foundationally the gravity is real and you can just sort of take it for granted. So my thing has always been just to give truth to proximity.
It's that which has predictive power. So I can predict it if I step out my window, I will fall and get hurt. It's predictive. So if we can all agree on that definition, is that why you guys think truth matters in that it just gives you a foundation and you can build upon or is there some other reason?
Well, the truth matters because there is a reality and if we're not tracking it to some pragmatic approximation in our lives, we're just going to bump into hard objects. I mean, this is just on every level from our health to our figuring out what the weather is going to be tomorrow. I mean, we're in relationship to a system that's much bigger than ourselves. And if we're delusional about the cause and effect and any picture of how things happen, we're just going to be perpetually victimized by our ignorance, right?
So representing having a map that fits the territory to a first approximation has been useful long before we could even form the concepts that would allow us to have a conversation about it. I mean, epistemology has came online before we had the concept of epistemology, which is how we know things. So I don't think anyone has to defend the value of tracking the truth. I think we're always just approximating it and we're never arriving at some final truth that no longer admits of any other argument or possible counter-evidence.
It's not that everything's always up for grabs equally, but it's usually a matter of a probabilistic sense of what's true and the probabilities tend to get so high that we no longer are disposed to reconsider things, right? So if you're going to ask, well, do we know anything about the biological basis of inheritance and just DNA have something to do with it? Well, 99.999% of biologists will say, yes, DNA is the answer to that question. And it's not that we understand everything about it, but we understand enough that that's not where the new theory making is happening in biology.
And the problem, and this is especially a problem in the current context of social media and alternative media, you can always find a crazy PhD or a PhD who's semi-crazy and has just a hobby horse that he can't get off of who will attest to anything no matter how crazy, right? So there are enough people with graduate degrees on any topic that the cigarette industry could find a bunch of PhDs to swear from Congress that cigarette smoke is not addictive, right? So even when they knew it was, so you can always find those people. It's not enough to have found one guy who will tell you that vaccines cause autism and will swear and swear and swear again, even when he loses his medical license.
And it were wise, again, given all the caveats about bad incentives and the possibility of any, even the most esteemed institutions becoming corrupt were wise to trust, by default, the consensus of experts most of the time. And it's not to say that there can't be a lone genius who proves the experts wrong and overturns our paradigm. That happens, but this is the extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence he risk, right? I mean, just if you're going to say that you have a new version of physics and it allows for time travel, okay, we all need to triage our attention and our time and decide whether or not this is worth the podcast or certainly worth being invited to a conference.
I mean, usually the answer is no, under what rubric? Well, again, it's there's no algorithm for deciding what's real because that would be computationally impossible. I mean, it's just functionally impossible. We can't in advance know what we will later know.
I mean, we just can't produce knowledge that way, right? So it's always iterative. It's always a matter of error correction in terms of what you approach and respond to. Just in terms of how you model, just how knowledge grows.
It can't be a matter. If we had an algorithm for flawlessly producing each new increment of knowledge, we would essentially be able to model the total future of our knowledge. It would just be that system would bite its own tail. It's not computationally possible to do that.
So we just need error correction mechanisms and so at the grossest possible level, you mentioned someone like Tucker Carlson. The reason why I find Tucker's career at this point, so grotesque, is that he's managed to build an audience that simply doesn't care when he lies, right? When he's shown to be lying. I mean, there are different ways to be uncancelable.
One way to be uncancelable is to actually have pander to an audience. It's found an audience that wanted to be pander to in such a way that they don't care that you're what you say is no longer truth-tracking, no longer even attempting to be truth-tracking. This is a very Trumpian phenomenon in Trump is the quintessence of this. He's found people who don't care if he contradicts himself over the span of three minutes, right?
It's like because he's just creating a mood of grievance and pandering to the grievances of his audience and demonizing the outgroup and it's all theater. It's like professional wrestling. Nobody cares that it's fake. It's like the fact that it's fake is priced in and they just want the spectacle.
And so we have even so-called news-gathering creatures like Tucker, who are just creating a spectacle and some kind of political theater. And it's got this very weird gloss of super high integrity. I'm just telling you, I've been wrong before and I'm just telling you the way I see it. But in the clearest instance, we know from his private texts that were leaked in the Dominion lawsuit that he hated Trump all the while, couldn't wait for him to get out of our politics, thought he was a demonic force and yet for years had been chilling for him for his audience, right?
So you can call that all his capture, you can call that hypocrisy and all those things. But the crucial thing is if I was caught doing that, I would lose my 100% of my audience, right? And anyone with a real reputation for integrity for their audience would suffer a similar consequence. But what we have are people who can be caught lying or can be demonstrated to be nuts.
In many cases, I'm like Alex Jones fits that description. And yet there's still this massive audience that wants to hear the next thing they have to say. And that's, I don't know what you call it, but it's not a conversation about reality. And yet people are using it in the same vein as we use any other product of journalism as though it's providing some kind of guidance for what's happening and what's likely to happen.
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So the thing I want to hear, and I guess my base assumption to bring the two of you on is that ideas matter. They will influence the individual life and one's ability to get to human flourishing. And every individual when brought into a collective means that a society either can or can't get to human flourishing. So that's my confession about what my North Star is.
And when I hear people arguing about, hey, there's this crazy Trumpian phenomenon or there's this crazy Tucker Carlson phenomenon is arguing at the level of the tee. To me, this is a conversation about what you said previously, which is the reason that the truth should matter to you, dear listener, is that you will constantly injure yourself by, and now I'm using my own words, by not being able to predict the outcome of your actions. And so if you are in taking all of your information from somebody who is, I've heard you define a bullshit or previously, somebody who just does not care whether what they're saying has any internal consistency whatsoever. It's just about getting the right response out of their audience.
And if you do that, you if you take on that entertainment, because it is very entertaining, if you agree with them, you will fail to achieve the things in your life you want to achieve, because you will have built upon a foundation that just is not predictive at all. And if that really is true, re anchoring the conversation back to that seems to me, and you guys tell me if I'm being naive, but seems to me the only way out of the death loop that is us birthing an age of pure conspiracy. Did you guys watch the Joe Rogan Terrence Howard interview? I saw a clip of it that that people were hurling at me for it's yes, I hesitate to say it's entertainment value, but it was entertaining.
It is entertaining. And so if you guys are right, and there is a problematic breakdown, when people have lost sight of the fact that perhaps they're because there's two paths, they're listening to an interview like that, because the establishment has lied so many times that when somebody says, hey, listen to me, I've been shut down erroneously, you need to hear these things and they're going to help us. Maybe that really is true. Or maybe it's we've not just given up pursuing quote unquote truth, because we have no idea how to find it, nor do we know why we care about it.
Well, may I add a couple of pieces at first? I don't know that that's true. I don't think we've lost that. I think there's a few things going on.
First of all, anything that involves a camera and a microphone will naturally over prioritise charisma. So one of the things that happens with any kind of mass communication is we human, this is why truth matters, because actually being interested in what's true is the only way I think that we are able to overcome very faulty heuristics that human beings have evolved with. And I'm not saying they're faulty for the ancestral environment 50,000 years ago, but they are faulty in the modern world, right? And our cognitive biases will naturally lead us away, I think, from truth, because that is a much harder path.
In the same way, the reason it takes discipline to go to the gym and work out and lose weight is that it's much easier when you're surrounded by abundance to just shove food in your mouth and not do anything, right? It's much more comforting. It's much easier to do. So I think that being interested in what's ultimately true is the way that we can overcome our inclination to believe things that charismatic people tell us, to believe things that match what we already believe, to believe.
I mean, that is essentially, to some extent, the nature of the scientific method, right? It's testing as reality as opposed to going, well, this seems right, or I believe this or whatever. So I think that ultimately, the reason I'm really interested in it is I think that it's the only way to overcome my own predisposition to believe things about the world that make me feel good, that are not, that are not, as you say, predictive and therefore useful. And unless you operate in the world from that perspective, unless that's what you're optimizing for, your brain is going to take you off on a loop.
And now we live in a world where every whim of yours is cater to. And if your whim is to be entertained, if your whim is to hear conspiracy, and I have to say, I don't know why, and I'm actually really interested in investigating and finding out, I do have, I have found that I think in the US, those kinds of ideas about how the world is and who runs it and all of that seem to have a way broader appeal than they do in the UK where I live. I don't know why that is, it could be the flip side of the beautiful American idea that, you know, America is a nation of believers, and I don't mean necessarily religiously, I just mean, if you know the idea that you can tame a continent in a couple of centuries and create this incredible country, which is the most powerful, in my opinion, the greatest society in the history of the world, that takes, that's an act of faith in and of itself. And maybe the trade off is that, you know, Americans are very good at believing lots of different things.
And this is one of them. So that's maybe why really being interested in is what I'm tempted to believe our accurate reflection of reality is the antidote to going off the rails on that front. And I think that's why I am so interested in it. It's really took God against my own cognitive biases that I think we all have.
Let me give an example of just how distorted I think our current moment is because it's, I find it surprising. So you take the, the Warren Gaza, right? And we're now on the, on the tail of all of these college protests, we've had, we've witnessed in our finest institutions, apparently an endless number of people expressing sympathy for the Palestinians, even simply for Hamas, and which is, you know, just officially a genocidal death cult. I mean, describe itself as a genocidal death cult.
And, you know, they, they, they seem, everything, to my eye morally seems upside down. I mean, they can't, they can't distinguish the difference between people who use human shields versus people who are deterred by the use of human shields, they can't distinguish people who intentionally burn families alive from people who inadvertently, you know, kill innocent people, trying to kill the people who burn families alive intentionally. And so there's, there's just so many asymmetries here. But what's amazing is you have these protests on college campuses, effectively silencing even some of the most powerful people in our society, even just celebrities who think, you know, it would be totally unconcerned to express their opinion.
They're being silenced, you know, they understand there's a difference between Hamas and the, and the IDF. They won't say anything in support of Israel because it's just too toxic in Hollywood in, in, you know, in, in, in, in, among Fortune 500 corporations. There's, there's so worried about being boycotted and, and, you know, and public backlash, especially on social media. And yet, on the other side, there are people signing, you know, that celebrities are signing letters in support of the Palestinians.
And they're not at all concerned to be mistaken for people to support Hamas or even, or even outright anti-Semitic. So there's that asymmetry of public opinion. And yet there was just yesterday at Harvard Harris poll that revealed that 75% of Americans are all in for Israel. They think Israel should do a, just route out Hamas tomorrow in Rafa, right?
Like everyone's been debating whether the IDF should go into Rafa and this is the absolute torture debate. 75% of Americans, they go into Rafa and kill Hamas, right? That's where public sentiment actually is. And yet we have built a machine, right, where even the most powerful people in our society are terrified of, of, of, of the 25%.
You know, they're, they're, they're busily offending either by their silencer, by their, their support for Hamas, effectively 75% of America. And they don't even know it because everything is so distorted, the whole informational landscape is so distorted based on the capture of certain elite institutions by some very confused people on the left. And what we've done on social media, I mean, everyone's just looking at X, thinking, Oh my God, everyone supports, you know, everyone thinks Israel is guilty of genocide. I should keep my head down here.
I know, I know Israel is not guilty of genocide, if the word means anything, but it's just too dangerous. And yet in terms of the actual public sentiment of the people who could buy the tickets to your next film, it's completely reversed in reality. And I think one of the reasons that is that there are obviously lots of reasons. But one of the reasons is in the social media age, the cognitive bias of, Oh my God, I am seeing horror on my screen.
Therefore, this is wrong, automatically is very hard to overcome. And it's very difficult to argue against that when you're seeing, no, I'm a father, when you see babies being pulled dead babies being pulled out of rubble by their parents, like there is no, there's no human being alive unless they're psychopath that doesn't go, Oh my God, this is awful. And this should stop immediately. Right.
But does that really reflect the nature of reality? No, but we also have a significant portion of the population that cannot think past their emotions. But that now was standing 75% of Americans think that you're going, I think your point is, I wasn't just speaking that at all. I think your point about the fact that there are different conversations happening in different places.
I think it's absolutely right. My point is, I think one of the reasons for that is 75% of Americans are not sitting and looking at their phone every day for eight hours watching children being blown apart and whatever. So, but those people who are interested in what's going on and are looking into it, they are not able to think past, I have seen one image and babies are bad. I think we can all say that, right?
I mean, so it's uncontroversial, but being confronted with the nature of war and thinking that it's horrible, I think is a useful thing in terms of really being reluctant to get into wars unless it's absolutely necessary. On the other hand, you have to be able to see past your emotional visceral reaction in some situations and say, why is this war happening? What is the objective of this war? Who is responsible for this baby being pulled out of rubble?
Who is it? Is it the people who are going into kill terrorists? Or is it the terrorists who are using the baby as a human child? How do you run that moral math?
How do you get everyone to run the same moral math? I don't think you can. I don't think ever look, this sounds elitist and it's not the I don't think everyone's capable of it. And we see evidence all day, every day.
A lot of people like to operate solely by emoting. And we now have tools that encourage them to do so. Well, people can get better at consuming video. I mean, we know we're bad at this and we should spell out why people are bad at this.
So, you see a video of some guy being beaten senseless by a crowd, right? And it just starts in the middle of the emergency. He's getting, you know, he's already down and he's getting punched by and kicked by five people. He certainly looks like the victim, right?
But you have to understand that you don't know what happened just before the clip started, right? You don't know. So, I've seen a video like that where I assume, okay, this guy's this is an atrocity. This guy's obviously the victim.
And yet, I find out that this guy just stabbed someone and he's being subdued by a bunch of unarmed terrified people, right? So, it was exactly backwards, right? And we know that even when things seem absolutely obvious based on the clip, it could be exactly the opposite of what you think. And so, it is with scenes from Gaza.
I mean, it's just, I mean, this was, I remember Rogan at one point was analyzing, I forget who he was talking to, but he had some clip of, you know, five guys being bombed in Gaza. And so, this were proof of war crimes. And these were obviously unarmed, you know, young men and who were just walking, they seemed to be guilty of nothing other than walking. And they got hit by, you know, look like a drone or it was not clear, but they were killed.
And yet, we have no idea what happened before that clip started, right? So, we don't know whether they just planted an IED and it was absolutely obvious that they were combatants and it was totally valid within the rules of war to target them. You just don't know, right? So, we have to become better consumers of our own emotional reactivity in response to, you know, admittedly disturbing imagery, whatever the actual accurate interpretation.
Do you have a method for that? Well, it's just to continually price in my uncertainty about those kinds of variables, you know, and the truth is, honestly, my method has been to spend much less time on social media. I deleted my Twitter account. So, now when I look at X, it's just because someone has driven me there, like, you have to see this.
And then, occasionally, I'll look at my feed. So, I have a feed on X that's not following anyone, and on which I have basically clicked nothing apart from occasionally getting sent to video that brought me there, or posted brought me there. And I am amazed at what a digital sewer it is in terms of what it's, what it is, I mean, the algorithm seems to just want me to be terrified of the world and probably racist in at least two directions, right? It wants to show me black people beating up white people and white people beating up black people, you know, in classrooms all over America, like, how much this happens, who knows, but or security camp video of just somebody being horribly murdered, for whatever reason, and or just accident, it's just, and then obviously there's, you know, the occasional cute cat video, but it's just, it's like, we have built, there's white cats beating up black cats.
But we've just, we've built a, we've created a psychological experiment and enrolled everybody. And it's, like, it's, it's, it's analogous to watching local news all the time. I mean, I learned 30 years ago that you're longer that I didn't want to spend much time watching local news, because there's always just some depressing car chase or, you know, somebody was raped, it's like, I don't need to know this. It's not actually going to change what I do.
And it's just this chondry regurgitation of human misery. And there's always at least, no matter how small the locality, maybe it's certainly in any big city, any big city is big enough to always have some horror that can be broadcast into your brain about what you're going to do, absolutely nothing. And it doesn't make sense for you to even be cognizant of it. And yet it's there to depress you.
And social media has become this on a global stage. And it's just, I mean, again, it's not that I want people to be oblivious to what's happening in the world. I mean, I do want to know, I do, I want to have a map that fits the territory. I want to know what the rates of violent crime actually are, etc.
But those data are communicated very differently. And they often don't track the imagery that we all get in our heads just by looking at a scroll, right? I mean, you see what, this is what's so distorting about these videos. I mean, most people on the left, it's certainly anyone left or center in America thinks very likely that we have an epidemic of lethal police violence against young black men, right?
If you're totally rational, if you're a black parent to have the talk with your young black son, if he goes out there, he's much more likely to get killed by the cops than his white friends. And this is just an intolerable legacy of racism in America. As far as these stats go, you know, the best understanding of what the dynamics of actual police violence and the thousand people every year they're about to get killed by the cops, we know that's bullshit, right? It's just not what's happening.
You're the likelihood that you're going to get killed once you come into contact with the cops, if you're black, is not higher than if you're white, right? But everyone's seen 12 videos that makes it seem like they're these lunatic cops performing lynchings, you know, and they haven't seen the analogous, and in fact, more numerous cases where white people have unarmed white people have been killed by cops, you know, you know, again, disgracefully, in many cases. But the actual stats are just show you how infrequent it is that an unarmed person gets of any color gets killed by the cops in America. It's just not happening very often.
I mean, it's around, you know, it's maybe 40 people a year, a majority of whom are not black and, you know, of a thousand. And among even among those unarmed people who get killed by cops, most of them are not peacefully, most of them are trying to kill the cops, they're wrestling with the cops, they're trying to get the gun out of the cops hands. It's not like the cops are routinely killing non violent people in America. And yet we have a kind of pornography of racial grievance that is continually advertising a different story to us.
And again, so given the dynamics of social media, that is always going to prevail. I mean, that's just like it because of the just the algorithmic incentive to spread the outrage. Other than some the pursuit of truth, which I think the point you were just making is actually a very good example of where the genuine pursuit of truth and context, you know, in Russia, we there's a Russian saying everything is understood in comparison, right? And what you're talking about is a very good example of where actually finding out what the data is not only is useful, but it actually can change your life, especially if you're a young black man, because you are then less likely to go into that police interaction with the expectation that you will be killed, which means you're going to act differently, which means that you're probably less likely to be killed as a result, right?
Knowing that context, knowing that what the statistics are, he's going to inform you to behave in a different way. And this is what I was going to make. I'm actually really reluctant to get involved in the Gaza conversation beyond some basic obvious things, just because I don't know enough about it. But I think one of the critical things in analyzing this conversation like many others is the importance of history.
And that's the context in which we really are human beings operate in the history of human beings. Thomas Sohu, you know, I pretty much worship at this point. He's written extensively about the idea that the best way to understand what people are likely to do in the future is to look at what they've done in the past. And you can slice that at 100 different ways.
If you find plate tablets from ancient Egypt, they're going to be likely basically discussing the same things that the human beings discuss now. You know, my son, my mother complaining about her son not being round and all those other human stuff. So when we're looking at the conflict in Gaza, I only bring it up because we've been talking about it. I've been trying to say to people, well, if we're going to talk about this seriously, let's look at previous situations in which conflicts of this nature have broken out, one for one reason or another, and how has that happened?
People give the example of Pelugian. I think Coleman, he actually did a very good job with Joe talking about this on his podcast. But beyond that, whether it's the Japan at the end of World War II, whether it's what happened in Germany at the end of World War II, whether it's previous situations in which a group of people have attacked and other people and then lost that fight. How does that normally go?
How have we treated this in history? That gives you a context that is very useful for offsetting the visceral experience you have when you're confronted with the reality of what was just horrific. So in that sense, as you know, my big concern about the direction of the West is that we are becoming divorced from our history on so many different ways. And we are being sold a bunch of lies about how we got here and who we are.
And that's just one tiny sliver of that, one tiny sliver. So the fact that the overwhelming majority of people in our societies and I can click to some extent myself on this are either uneducated or miseducated about history is a lot of the reason we are where we are because that context gives you the ability to be the guy who doesn't get killed by the cops effectively. That context, that truth, is how you know that you need to act in a particular way to get the best possible outcome in that situation. And just why I'm just always talking about the need to teach kids history and contextualize this is one of the things I personally was very fortunate to get from what was actually a reasonably good Soviet education system and also my parents, you know.
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There's an idea that's under the surface of all this, that I think Sam ties back to what you were talking about, that social media deranges people because you're seeing things that aren't necessarily true, but cognitive biases, like recency bias, I've seen a bunch of these attacks. And so my mental model just begins to map to the things that I've seen. And so this must be true. Also maps what you're talking about where people are steering by not what gives them predictive validity of future action, but instead, how do I make sense of the way that I feel?
And if they're making sense of, oh, I see this thing and I don't like the way that it makes me feel, it must be wrong. And here is the post-hoc explanation of why the baby being pulled from the rubble is wrong, not putting it into historical context or context of what war is or anything like that. I have a feeling this feeling is not good, therefore this is bad, and I need to give some rationalization. So you put that in the social media blender, and now all of a sudden, I don't know which way is up anymore, and I just react to my feelings.
The reason I think this question is so important is when people don't have a method by which they determine the truth, which is about predictive validity, you will not end up running the same mathematics. So everyone needs to agree on what the outcome is that we desire, and then they have to run the scientific method. That to me is the only way that these deranging problems of our current moment of social media, plus we haven't talked about AI, but those two things put together, I think are going to be maximum in terms of their impact on derangement, because it gives everybody an N of one frame of reference. And there have been a couple of times where you guys have said things that I have seen the public light you both up for, because they just disagree so violently.
And really, what would be an example with me? I may not have noticed it, because I really don't give a shit. Yeah, so you were saying something about the Israel-Palestine conflict, and the reason that people think that it's bad, war is bad, and that this has to stop, but I think the reality is there's actually two things going on. The moment you bring up Israel-Palestine, if you're talking about anything other than the following two narratives, you're not talking about the reality of why people respond the way they respond.
Number one is the Norm Finkelstein stance, which nobody just addresses him head on. He does not believe Israel should exist as a state. Period. End of story, every word he says after that is predicated on Israel should not exist as a state.
And if you're approaching him anyway, and people that believe what he believes, without simply debating whether Israel has a right to exist, you're arguing about the tea. He's never going to agree with you. He's just going to start yelling and shouting, because he has to square. His example of one of these PhDs that we need not invite to the conference.
Well, we actually just had him on, and we had a good hour and a half of, look, actually very useful. I think it's very useful. This is why we will continue to have some of these people on the show, because if these are people to whom a lot of other people are listening, you have to hear what they have to say. That's a self-reinforcing air loop.
Let me just finish the point. You have to hear what they have to say. And then, see, the method that people have increasingly become addicted to is the idea that the way to get to the truth is to quote, unquote, destroy someone with facts and logic in a debate. I believe, quite often, and this is what we try to do on the show, the way to do that is to have a conversation and just go, okay, let's hear what you have to say and let's ask you some probing questions, and then people can see for themselves the cognitive flaws in biases and what you're saying.
For example, in our conversation, with him and Bassam used to feel two of the big anti-Israel pro-Palestine talking heads. He became very clear that neither of them had ever thought about how this might be resolved. That's a useful piece of information to know when you're listening to these people, right? Another thing with Norman, for example, we spent the first 20 minutes hearing his family's story, and he talked about how his parents were Stalinists and he thought that was a bit extreme, so he's just a Maoist.
That's a helpful piece of information. Wait, was he being serious? Yeah, that wasn't telling him she's a Maoist. Yeah, he's a Maoist.
I'd love to ask follow-up questions. Do I need to then have a debate with Norman Finkelstein to destroy the idea of Maoism? Or is it sufficient for most people to go, okay, that's the perspective from which he's coming? I would like to answer that question directly.
You guys both have the right to live your life however you want according to my value system, so I want you to thrive in ways as you define it. But I think it is incredibly important that people that have the ability to parse through things, not based on emotion, but based on predictive validity towards an agreed-upon outcome that is noble and honorable. Therefore, this was something you brought up earlier and I wanted to address, which is I would request of people that are like the two of you that you address any problem that gains sufficient momentum in culture. It can't be derived based on I think this person is a good faith actor.
It just can't. It has to be derived around, but this idea is gaining sufficient cultural momentum. And therefore, if I choose to step into that, that into the arena of helping people make sense of the world, I'm going to address these ideas. Obviously, that's an ask that I have no right to make of anybody, but that's what I want from people that I see is uniquely capable.
Now, I have a frame of reference where I look at human beings as flesh-based AI, and I just want to point the constant and flesh-based AI at a given problem and see how he addresses it. I want to point the Sam flesh-based AI at a given problem and see how he handles it. Now, that's brought a ton of pain and suffering into both of your lives. I get that.
I don't know why you keep saying that. Sam's, it's certainly a good podcast. So, and also, there's a more deranging thing. And that thing is, Sam, I have watched people on the left and right come up with really contrite ways to discredit you.
And so, there are people that now just mimeify, like one side is just, you're just obviously racist. You don't like brown people. And so, they're never going to debate you on the point of jihadism. They're just like, he hates brown people.
Boom, done. You don't have to listen to Sam. He's totally fucking deranged. And then on the other side, it's Trump derangement syndrome, COVID broke him, and they don't have to listen to you.
And those memes have gained so much momentum that now it's a pretty small group of people that can do what you guys can do. I'm going to say, I mean, 100 maybe? And like, as we start whittling people out of that pool, I get very uneasy as someone who believes that this moment actually does matter, that we are in the grips of ideas always throughout human history, ideas rule the day. And we are now living with a deranging device in our pockets that gives us velocity and volume of information that is absolutely impossible to parse.
All while having destroyed religion, which I really want to talk to you about this, I think religion, which I don't believe in, but I think religion is the only medium through which memes can travel across time and across all IQs from a literal moron to a literal genius, somehow some way religion is the medium by which the memes can propagate. And so when people cannot parse what is true, they at least previously could just check it against noble book. These noble books have terrifying problems. And so I would love podcasts to stand to use your word.
I would love it to be the solution. But I'm just saying that that is the thing. End of one frame of reference, even if people agree on what the facts are, they do not agree on what the facts mean. They are not aimed at the same thing.
And so, when we don't have people that are capable of just walking people through the arguments, and I hate to say it, willing to face the social consequences of doing so, the crazy making just explodes. And let me ask the following to see if you guys agree with that. If there were a bill before Congress, and I know you can't vote here, but just bear with me, that forced a limitation on the amount of time that people could spend on social media. If you guys believe it's a deranging instrument, one would think you'd be for it.
Would you guys be for it? Or is there something that's the wrong way to affect the change? I mean, that's a separate conversation about just why you wouldn't want government doing that sort of thing. But I want to address the constant intuitions here about how you are correct, because I'm sure there are examples where if you just give someone enough rope, they're going to hang themselves, right?
So just flip on the mic and have the conversation. But there are many more examples of where you just you have platformed someone and given them access to your audience. And you even if you're doing the work of journalism, trying to debunk their errors in real time, some people are so unscrupulous and they're so facile in their stick. I mean, this is all they do, right?
They're just the vaccine causes autism guy or they're the Holocaust never happened guy. And it's just impossible to clean up the mess fast enough. It's just asymmetric warfare here. I don't want to derail your point.
I just want to interject one thing that may be useful for this conversation, which is I think the work of journalism is not to have everybody on and do that with them. I think you have to pick certain people based on your perception. First and foremost, the North Star for us, and I'm not saying we have always succeeded at all, but the North Star for us is do I think this person is operating in good faith as in if I challenge an argument that doesn't make sense, will they respond to that with an attempt to engage with an argument? Are they going to line up the scale?
Right. Norman Fickelstein, I have to give him credit, didn't do that. I don't think he didn't answer many questions, but he was a genuine conversation. So that's different to getting someone like Alex Jones on who's basically a character act.
Yeah, but there are many people, so this is the problem with alternative media or what I often refer to as Puckassistan or Subsakistan, where I'm quite happy to be out here. I'm happy to be just accountable to no one but myself on my own podcast. But the liability here is that you something like 4 million podcasts now, and it's just the wilderness of information, and the kinds of messages that are getting promoted and the kinds of people who wind up on Joe Rogan's podcast to take the most popular podcast, I mean, that the range in quality and the range in attitude towards just the intellectual honesty is so vast that, yeah, I do think it becomes irresponsible just to turn on the mic and talk to the guy. And you can't use the justification that so many people have, prior to you, have turned up just given this guy the mic, that now you have a journalistic reason to have him on, because so many people are talking about what Fickelstein is saying about the Warren Gaza.
I mean, he just radiates crankishness. I mean, there's a reason why this guy is a marginal figure in mainstream channels. And I think a lot of actual scholars on the topic probably wouldn't debate him. But the problem here is so insidious, and it's very hard to recognize.
I mean, occasionally I'll do a post-mortem on something that's happened on someone else's podcast on my own. And I think I did this for RFK Jr. going on Jordan Peterson's podcast. So RFK Jr.
is a presidential candidate. He gets whatever it is, like 20% of the vote, apparently, nationally. So he seems worth talking to, but I would argue the only reason why he's in that position in the first place is so many people have thought he should be talked to. And I decided not to have him on my podcast for it, because he's such a confabulator, he can make a mess.
You can't even detect as a mess until after the conversation is over. And so he did this to Jordan. I mean, he tells this story to Jordan about how Jake Tapper of, I think at that point, ABC News, was working with him for three weeks to produce a documentary on how big pharma is just utterly corrupt. And at the last minute, the documentary was about to air, and Jake Tapper called him just inconsolable, saying, listen, I've been in journalism a long time.
This has never happened to me, but corporate spiked the whole story. And the implication being, which he drew out in the podcast, is that big pharma got to corporate, right? So big pharma completely controls the situation. The whole story is false.
Jake Tapper has been trying to debunk this for years, trying to get him to stop talking about this for years. And the last time he talked about it, he, you know, Tapper wrote an article on the CNN's blog, just detailing how this was just a tissue of lies. There's literally no way for Jordan hearing that story for the first time in a podcast to know that there's anything amiss, right? And he just absorbs it like, oh, man, that's just, that's a smoking gun right there.
Wow. And, and how many of those are going to come tumbling out of RK's mouth? Who knows, right? The guy is confabulating.
And whether he's actually consciously lying or he's just so, he's just uncoupled from it comes back to the concept of bullshit. The bullshit or the reason why the bullshit is so insidious is that with a liar, the liar is actually tracking the truth. And he's trying to, I mean, it's malicious, he's trying to insert his lie into the space provided so that you don't detect it as a lie. And he's tracking, he's tracking what's true in the world, he's tracking your expectations of logical consistency.
The bullshit is just talking and so some people have a professional concession in some species of half-truth or utter bullshit. And alternative media is just, and in social media combined are amplifying this stuff to the end of the earth. So now we have to talk about, still, we have to talk about whether vaccines cause autism and we have a presidential candidate who's banging on about this. He also thinks that maybe, you know, the HIV virus doesn't cause AIDS, right?
And these kinds of things that get spoken about to an audience, to an uneducated audience of tens of millions on Rogan's podcast and others. And it's just, it's dysfunctional. And it's not what we used to have, again, it was a flawed system, but we still have within the ivory tower and within certain journalistic organs, we have a set of rules and editorial standards where we're going to say, all right, listen, we have to fact check this before this goes out. We just don't run with this live.
We have to do enough journalistic due diligence in advance of the conversation. We have to notice all the things this person has gotten wrong before they ever come to our microphone and we have to hit them with that stuff so that we can sort of pre-bunk a lot of the bullshit that's going to come out in this conversation. And if you're not doing that, I do think it is irresponsible on important issues, right? It's good theater on unimportant issues, but when things are important, you know, when lives hang in the balance, when you're influencing an electorate of, you know, who's going to be president or whether they're going to support the next war or stop the next war, I just think it's, you know, again, we're slow to realize the influence of many of our platforms, reaching millions of people.
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