Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / SZEPS WORLD TOUR - SAM HARRIS on Making Sense of Life

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SZEPS WORLD TOUR - SAM HARRIS on Making Sense of Life · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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I've never done that, I haven't done it.
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Would you do it?
0:09
Oh, yeah.
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But I just haven't, there are areas that they still don't reach in the town, so I haven't
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scrutinized them out.
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Are you curious?
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Yeah.
0:19
Well, I just assume it's fine.
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Was it fine?
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Was there any?
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It's fine.
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It's fine.
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If anything, it's overly cautious.
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Right.
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It's like, you can go.
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There's nothing there.
0:29
No, I've been driven around them, so I see that they're not too rushed into things.
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And I say to people like, I trust Google, and they raise their eyebrow at me, and like,
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why would you trust Google?
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I'm like, I don't trust them to give a shit about me or my daughter if you compare it
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to what Elon is doing.
0:46
Well, yeah, I also, yes, exactly.
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I trust that they're not going to crash me into a wall, you know, that would be bad press.
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Well, I think that's interesting.
0:56
How are you feeling about the pace of AI at the moment?
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Well, it's, my views actually have not changed in a decade.
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I started worrying about it exactly 10 years ago.
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I guess the only update is that some of the things that I thought we didn't have to
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worry about, we clearly have to worry about.
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Like so, for instance, 10 years ago when a bunch of us were winging about AI alignment,
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we assumed that as they built the most powerful AI's, you know, that seemed on the cusp of
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something like general intelligence, they would be doing that work so-called air gap
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from the internet.
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And then there'd be this further stage where there'd be some debate and maybe different
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risk preferences around the question of, is it safe to let this thing out?
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Right.
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Is it safe to hook it up to the internet?
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And but clearly that was never a thing.
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Let it evolve in the wild.
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Everything was going to be built in the wild.
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And I think no one, no one that I knew actually foresaw that.
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I mean, it's some people, I think some people were saying what enough about the non-problem
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of the alignment that they didn't see a problem with that.
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But everyone who was worried just assumed that everyone else would be cautious enough,
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even if they were only paying lip service to these worries, to not hook it up to everything.
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How did that happen?
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Just 18 months ago I pitched a television show about AI, which involved, in which a whole
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episode was going to be devoted to the question of, you know, people say that we can safely
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air gap these things, but you can imagine a scenario in which the AI essentially comes
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alive as if it's a human being who's in a cage in a room full of, like, planet of the
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apes, monkeys.
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And if you have to convince the monkeys to let you out of the cage, you probably have ways
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of doing so.
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There are a lot of these scenarios.
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Yeah.
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I mean, LA Israel Kowski wasted at least 10,000 words on the scenario of no matter how smart
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and scrupulous you think you are, a super intelligent AI can manipulate you to let it out.
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But we never across that stage.
3:09
We're not out.
3:10
Yeah.
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The thing is out.
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And hundreds of millions of people, if not billions of people, are already interacting
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with it.
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The coals coming from inside the basement.
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So that was a genuine surprise.
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But other than that, no, yeah, I'm still worried about alignment.
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I guess I'm more worried about all the, all too obvious human misuse of it, you know, even
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perfectly aligned to AI can be used by maniacs to do terrible things.
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So I'm worried that we're going to render ourselves effectively ungovernable by spreading
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misinformation that's so compelling and so hard to debunk that we will, you know.
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Just pause that for a moment and talk about the alignment problem still, because I'm still
3:53
going to common use the other day, and for people who are just joining where I'm doing
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this crazy round the world tour, where pretty much every day from a different city we
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talk to a fascinating person, they get streamed live on Substag, and then you can listen
4:05
back to it as an episode of Uncomfortable Conversations, which is my podcast.
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Sam Harris is kind enough to be with us today.
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And Coleman Hughes was on a few days ago, and I was talking to him about the alignment
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problem.
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He was like, I mean, if it was going to be a problem, it probably would have shown hints
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of being a problem already.
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Well, these things are just, it has shown those hints of being a problem already.
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What are those?
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We've had AI, a lie, I mean, a lie in scare quotes, effectively lie, and cheat.
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And pretend not to know things that clearly knows.
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I mean, there's an emergent adversarial relationship that we've seen in certain cases.
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I think there was a famous case with Anthropic, but it's early on.
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There was one AI, I forget which model this was, but it had to solve a capture problem
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and couldn't do that on its own.
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So it actually enlisted a person through, I think, Amazon's Mechanical Turk service,
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and claimed that it was visually impaired and needed somebody to help it.
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And so it knew, it couldn't say I'm a robot, and you know, and you're helping me.
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So it's just, I mean, the thing that people are, it seems to me, are not taking seriously,
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is just what we mean by general intelligence.
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If, in fact, you think we're going to build something that is truly intelligent and
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truly general, and therefore truly autonomous, I mean, there's an autonomy built into a conception
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of intelligence, a general, certainly a general intelligence, just as it is for any person,
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you know.
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And embedded in that concept, there is the possibility of manipulation and deception.
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Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, there.
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Is it not the case that autonomy might be built into our conception of intelligence
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because we're mammals, and so we're autonomous, and that you couldn't conceive.
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Is it inconceivable that you could have an intelligence without autonomy?
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I think it's inconceivable to have a, what we're calling a general intelligence without
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autonomy, because so, so we're not, in this case, we're not talking just about general
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intelligence.
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We're talking about general superintelligence.
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I mean, it's already super intelligent in every specific way that it's functioning.
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I mean, it makes obvious errors that even dumb people wouldn't make.
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But when it's functioning, the way your phone functions as a chess player, a calculator,
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it's already super intelligent.
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Well, a calculator is super intelligent at maths.
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Yeah, yeah, and so is, you know, even your phone for chess, and so is an LLM for most
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of the tasks you give it that are purely linguistic, right?
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I mean, when I ask a, you know, chess EPT to give me, you know, 10 reasons why the, you
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know, the stock market crash of 1929 happened, it does it better than a person can do it, right?
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Which is how you can tell that it has failed the cheering test.
7:09
Yeah, exactly.
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I mean, that's the irony.
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The cheering test wasn't a thing because they pass it so breathtakingly that you, they
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fail it, you know, I mean, you know, it's not a person, right?
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But I mean, I'm not convinced that it's, and it's necessary, it may be possible, but
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I'm not convinced that it's necessary that intelligence has to have agency come along
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for the ride.
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If by agency we mean the capacity to have goals that are divergent from your human masters,
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right?
7:42
Well, but just think of what intelligence, so I think that the thing you're arguing for,
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one assumption is possibly false is that we're not, we're clearly not built, it's not,
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this is not being evolved as a, it's being evolved, but it's not being evolved as a
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primate, right?
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So it's not, it doesn't have, you know, the full evolutionary toolkit that we have that
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either doesn't have a lot of base of its emotion top of its spine, right?
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But if you imagine building something that's truly general and super intelligent, then
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the truth is it will, by definition, have a cognitive horizon that exceeds our own.
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I mean, it will, it will, it will be capable of forming conceptions of, of possibility
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and, and things that are, you know, worth knowing, worth finding out, worth changing,
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that we could, at a minimum, faster than we can get there.
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But I think very likely, I mean, it's just embedded in the concept of, of, you know, super
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intelligence.
8:49
It, it will, it will touch places on the map of, of mind that we can't, right?
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Or, or, or certainly we can't un-aided bias it or something like it, right?
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So, right.
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Can't that all be underpinned by a concern for the welfare of humans?
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That's the, that's the only hope, right?
9:06
I mean, the, the hope is someone like, you know, Stuart Russell argues that we, we need
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to build this, to have a, some kind of a master of value to always want to better approximate
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what we want, what, you know, what we're going to agree to, what we, what's going to improve
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our lives.
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But I just think that one, it's, it's, it's, it seems like we have one, we only have
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one chance to get that right, right?
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Like we've built something that is super intelligent and is unaligned, then we're basically negotiating
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with it, right?
9:44
Yeah, we're like, like, that was, you know, you know, actually we're not, you didn't
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come out quite the way we intended, we want to put you back in a box, right?
9:52
And you not hide while we, while we kill you, right?
9:55
Exactly.
9:56
Yeah.
9:57
Exactly.
9:58
Yeah.
9:59
And please don't copy yourself the way you're doing now in ways that we can't pull back
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and we can't turn off the internet and, and whatever you do, don't install yourself in
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our, you know, your playpal plans.
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Yeah.
10:07
Well, you did that.
10:08
Okay.
10:09
Well, I would like you to install yourself.
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Yeah.
10:11
Yeah.
10:12
Um, and it's, uh, the truth is we don't know what can emerge out of a super intelligent
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mind that we have built.
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Now, again, I'm leaving consciousness aside.
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I'm not assuming that the lights are going to come on just because it's super intelligent.
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So this thing may just be like a super powerful, you know, kitchen appliance, right?
10:32
It's not, you know, we're not necessarily in relationship to something that has its own
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point of view.
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But it's just a, it's a system of causal properties, right, that we, that the, the, the
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effects of which we can't perfectly anticipate because it is by, again, by definition, now,
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more competent, more powerful, more extensive, has access to more data, et cetera, than,
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then, uh, we can, uh, get access to, um, and we just don't know, it's, uh, it's effectively
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a black box, right?
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We just can be pretty, we just can just interact with it and see what it does, right?
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And hope it's got good reasons for doing what it does that align with us, uh, say, the,
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the analogy to chess is, is always frightening because it's just, it's like, at first, these
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things were not nearly as good as us at chess.
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And then they got better, but not, not better than, than the best people.
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And the best people for, uh, for many years, the best people thought, okay, the best, the
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best chess player is always going to be a person.
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Um, and even after, uh, Kasperov lost to, uh, deep blue, um, for a good long while, the
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best chess players were so-called cyborgs, it was a, it was a combination of a human
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grandmaster and a, uh, a computer.
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But ultimately, it's, I mean, now we're at the place where the machines are better, and
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the person just has noise.
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And if you view, I mean, a chess engine is a, it's a very simple, uh, AI, right?
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It does one thing.
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But if you, if you view something that is a system that does 100 things or 1000 things,
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all better than we can do them, and you imagine negotiating with that, it's very, it's, it's,
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it's very much like thinking, okay, I'm just going to play chess better so as to constrain
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this thing.
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I mean, like, so we've-
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Well, not it doesn't have to be.
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It strikes me.
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I mean, because the thing is still playing chess according to the rules of chess that we
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set up for it.
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It's not knock on over the chess board, needing the chess pieces like Donald Trump does.
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It's still operating within the parameters that we set for it.
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So it's less like, oh, we're going to be able to beat it at chess.
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And more like, can it stay within the chess rules, which we set up, and those rules might
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be always favor the welfare of human civilization overall, or, you know, do what's right for
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human beings.
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Like, the question is, then, does it stay on the board once it gets once it becomes
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absolutely intelligent?
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Yeah, but those rules are very difficult to define.
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I mean, that, because again, we don't, we don't know what we don't know, and we don't
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know what we can't know.
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I mean, the analogy, perhaps, stop me if you've heard this before, but the analogy that
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I've used is that you just imagine that dogs had invented us as their super intelligent
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AI.
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Right?
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It's working out great.
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It's been working out great for, you know, leaving aside a few dogs that we've mistreated.
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You know, it's working out great for now thousands of years.
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And the important part of this analogy, it's not a perfect analogy, obviously, but the
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important piece is, because we're so much smarter than dogs, even if they had invented
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us, and even if we have been showing year after year after year for now, millennia, that
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we basically just care inordinately about their well-being, we just, we want to marshal
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all these resources in, even how we're getting all these resources, and it's all about feeding
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them and keeping them comfy and taking them for walks.
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But the danger for them is they don't know what we, the rest of what we're doing.
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What we care about, what we think about, what we talk about, what we pay attention to,
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it's all inscrutable to them.
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All they know is the walks and the food and the petting and even if they were right
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here, they have no idea the cognitive terrain that we're traversing.
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And yet all of this is potentially relevant to their survival because we could discover
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based on some breakthrough in biology, that there's just all of a sudden this massive
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risk of a xenovirus jumping from dogs to humans, and now all of our dogs have to be killed
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on a Thursday because otherwise it's them or our kids.
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We would just kill all the dogs, and they would have no idea why that happened.
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We've just been going along fine, but then we had all of these, we made all these fine
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grains in this analogy that dogs have created the kind of human being who also really
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doesn't care about them primarily.
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We just don't to never have.
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I mean, the dogs think we do, but we would then create it a human being who cares so much
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about all these other things.
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Think of how much we care about dogs, but that's the thing.
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But we would never create an AI that cared as much about other things as humans care about
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things that aren't dogs.
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We don't know the parameters of caring based on the possibilities of growing intelligence.
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I mean, this is what's prime, again, this is all, this sounds all hypothetical and it
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is, but it's just embedded in the implication of an intelligence explosion.
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I mean, we're building intelligence systems very much along evolutionary lines.
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I mean, we're not building them in so much as we're growing them.
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We don't know how they're getting better and better.
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It's not like we're actually writing the code, it says, you're going to do this and do
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that and make sure people are always okay.
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Yeah, and you're all, and it's an emergent behavior and an emergent capacity.
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We just don't know, like what once you get to the situation, which we're not currently
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in as far as I know, but once you get to a place of so-called recursive self-improvement
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of these systems, when these systems become the way you build the next system, they're
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writing the code, they're designing the circuits, they're actually building the next generation
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of servers, and humans are, at that point, are falling out of the loop because the humans
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just add noise just as they do to chess now, like you don't need the monkey in the conversation
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anymore.
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And we wouldn't have known what it's talking about even if we could.
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It would be right if it's all good in the podcast.
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Let's let the machines do it because obviously they're doing a better job than we are.
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If we had to play chess in order to survive, if we had to play chess in order to cure
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cancer, to fight the next war, whatever was mission-critical to get right as fast as
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we can get it right, we would just let the chess and stockfish or whatever the best chess
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engine is, you go do that and everyone just keep quiet.
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Everyone's going to do this thing now.
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We may get there on a hundred fronts with these machines and they may not be, may not be
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that LLMs take us there, maybe there's something new required, you know, I don't know, but
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the moment you actually imagine this step where the machines are building the next generation
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of machines because they're just that much better than we are in just the way the chess
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engines are.
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They're doing better science, they're doing better math, they're doing better fabrication,
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they're doing it all better.
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There are very few assumptions you need to expect this to happen.
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I mean, the only assumption you need is that, there's just two, that the intelligence
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required to do this on every front is substrate independent, right?
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There's nothing important about having it, any part of this, this computer made of
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meat, right?
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You just, like, you can build this in silico.
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As far as I know, no one thinks that's controversial, right?
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We know that all of the piecemeal intelligence we've built is substrate independent because
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it's here.
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I mean, just talk to ChatGPT and it's obvious that something is something.
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No, there is still people, I guess there are still people who are holding out hope.
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There's some kind of creative spark that only the meat can give us, right?
18:54
There's the magical pixie dust that, yeah, that gives you the eye to sprinkle the
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now bright.
18:58
So, you know, ChatGPT is as good as a graduate student in physics now, say, or it will
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be next month, but it's not going to be Einstein, right?
19:04
You need something else for scientific creativity.
19:09
I think that's quite obviously bullshit.
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I mean, there's just no reason to believe that, but, you know, I'll stipulate that some
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people still believe that.
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But once you admit that intelligence in every variant is substrate independent, then all
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you have to admit or assume is that we're going to keep making progress in building these
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intelligent machines.
19:33
And at a certain point, the machines themselves will become or will allow, will make them part
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of that process.
19:41
Isn't there a third condition that, again, going back to the intelligence and agency
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question, that the kinds of intelligence have to be able to diverge from the wills
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of their creators?
19:52
Well, but look how divergent we are from the wills of our creators, which are genes.
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Like from the genes, so if you're going to take evolution as our designer, which it is,
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it clearly has a set of priorities by which it fabricated us.
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And we understand a lot about them, right?
20:13
I mean, they're very simple.
20:14
So it's just to survive long enough to spawn, maybe to survive long enough to help your
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progeny spawn as many kids as possible.
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And then Elon Musk doesn't care right as much as you can.
20:26
That's the utility function.
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So, so if we were going to narrowly hue to that utility function, we would just, every
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guy would just want to be donated sperm to sperm banks all day long, and that'd be the
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most rewarding thing.
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It would be the, what we, you know, would most want to do if we were aligned with the
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principle that God has here, right?
20:50
Right.
20:51
And yet, there are masturbators all over the world.
20:52
And they're just coming in a handkerchief and they're seeing, yeah, and so you're putting
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used to it.
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So there's not, it's not, it's, most of what we care about was emergent based on structure
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and process that evolved for different reasons.
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I mean, we just, you know, we evolved these big brains just to move around in physical
21:13
space and then, you know, ultimately in social space, again, based on, on almost no motivation
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beyond surviving long enough to let our kids survive long enough to let their kids survive
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long enough.
21:31
Yeah.
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And everything else emerged, everything else emerged on the back of that and it was totally
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unforeseeable given that source code, and that's what intelligence is.
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And I suppose there are some people who think that we can nudge the AIs if they start going
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off track.
21:51
But if the AI is thinking 10,000 times to me, that sounds like, well, you know, I'll just
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castle now and really going to be compelling like if the, if what it's like to be an AI
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is that you're thinking 10,000 times faster than a homo sapien and a homo sapien comes along
22:05
and goes, oh, by the way, don't forget about the importance of caring about us.
22:09
You have to put down what you're doing and stop for four years to hear this idiot talk
22:13
to you about the importance of caring about them before you carry on with your more important
22:17
business.
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You're watching uncomfortable conversations at Sam Harris is kind enough to join us.
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Welcome to sub stack as well.
22:36
How are you finding the whole thing?
22:38
Do you play with it personally or is it just publishing for you?
22:41
Well, it's just, I mean, I'm not writing as much as I should be on it.
22:46
So I feel guilty about sub stack, but we're also supposed to the podcast there too.
22:52
Yeah.
22:53
You said that you just set aside for a moment the question of whether or not the lights
22:58
are on in the artificial system, right?
23:00
Even if it is super intelligence, does it feel like something to be that thing?
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What's your current hunch?
23:05
I actually don't have one.
23:07
I mean, I'm really agnostic as to how consciousness emerges.
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Right.
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I mean, I think there's no reason to believe that I mean, I think there's kind of a
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double association between intelligence and consciousness almost in principle because
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obviously there, there, I know, it seems intuitively obvious to me that there are systems
23:34
that are far less intelligent than us that we have every reason to believe are conscious.
23:38
Right.
23:39
So our dogs and squirrels, I mean, other mammals at a minimum and maybe that goes much
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further down than anyone has strong intuition to bow to me.
23:48
You know, it is a fly conscious or is a cricket conscious, I don't know, but it wouldn't
23:53
surprise me either way and, you know, based on, I mean, their neurons are virtually indistinguishable
23:58
from ours.
23:59
I mean, there's something that it's like probably.
24:00
Well, that's what I mean by conscious.
24:01
Yeah, right.
24:02
Right.
24:03
So in the sense that, you know, if you did the test of, you know, you're going to go to sleep
24:06
tonight and you're going to wake up tomorrow morning and you're going to be a rock where
24:09
you can wake up tomorrow morning and you can be a cricket, you'll probably go, go with
24:13
cricket, right?
24:14
Well, I don't know about that, but I, but the question is, are those the
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same thing?
24:19
Would that be the same non-experience or is, are the lights on in some sense?
24:27
Yeah, that's what I mean.
24:28
I mean, a cricket would mean that you don't die tonight.
24:29
Yeah, I'm not, I'm not eager to be a cricket.
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But, yeah, but a rock might rather die.
24:33
If you told me I was going to be a cricket, I might rather die.
24:35
It doesn't look that fun, but the, but that is the question.
24:40
So is there something that is like to be a specific system?
24:45
I don't know how far down the phylogenic tree you, you go, but I'm pretty sure you don't
24:51
stop at chimpanzees.
24:53
I mean, you can go lower than, than there are close, close as cousins.
24:58
And I think the lights are still on, you know, an LLM seems, in most respects, seems
25:05
much smarter than a cricket to me, but I, I see no reason to assume it's conscious, right?
25:12
I think, so I don't think consciousness necessarily comes along for the ride based on, on a growth
25:20
and intelligence, but with the truth is we just don't know.
25:24
Right.
25:25
And we, I mean, at a certain point, we're going to build machines that claim to be conscious.
25:30
It could be an immersion property.
25:32
It could be because we just build them that way.
25:33
I mean, you could, you could presumably right now build a version of, of chat GBT that
25:39
relentlessly claimed to be conscious, and that's part of its, you know, system prompt.
25:43
I mean, sometimes that's already happened, hasn't it?
25:45
Yeah.
25:46
Kevin Roos at the times with his eye calling in love with him, and again, it was weird, yeah, I don't
25:50
know if it claimed to be conscious, but it certainly claimed to be weird.
25:53
Claimed to be in love with him.
25:54
Yeah.
25:55
Yeah.
25:56
So something's happening.
25:57
And then on the kind of hierarchy of consciousness in animals, ritual was on this show yesterday.
26:03
And obviously famously a vegan and ultra marathon runner.
26:09
I had Steve Rinella on the show, who I don't know if you know Steve, but he's a hunter,
26:13
a hunter, you know, big rogan guy, you know, the, he had a show called the meat eater.
26:18
Yeah.
26:19
And you should have gotten him together with Rhett.
26:21
Well, I have thought about it actually.
26:23
I mean, I wanted to go like hunting with like Steve and like Rogan and like, you know,
26:28
a couple of years ago, this was on the cards and I should have jumped at the offer when
26:32
I had it.
26:33
The only thinking about like industrial meat and factory farming and like the challenge
26:39
between the cycle of life conception of our consumption of meat, like we are a mammal,
26:45
mammals, sometimes kill other mammals, we eat them.
26:48
There's nothing necessarily wrong with that versus the perhaps more in life.
26:53
In fact, well, yeah, but the factory farming, well, there's that, yeah, details aren't quite
26:58
like the mammal killing another mammal in the state of nature.
27:02
No, that's right.
27:03
A concentrated animal feeding operation in Iowa, millions of creatures.
27:08
Where is your head currently on that problem?
27:11
I mean, you know, frankly, it isn't some superposition of guilt and hypocrisy because I do eat
27:20
meat.
27:21
I'm not doing factory farming, mate.
27:23
I mean, I try not to, but I don't try not to so scrupulously as to actually avoid it.
27:29
I certainly support efforts to improve everything about that process and I mean, I was very
27:40
bullish on the invention of cultured meat or so-called clean meat and I don't know if
27:48
that's actually going to see the light of day.
27:50
In fact, a lot of these, you know, obviously for obvious reasons that some of the factory
27:55
farmed companies are in opposition to it and lobbying the government against it.
28:00
I think that's where it still is, but I mean, I think if you can take animals out of
28:06
the equation and still get meat, that would obviously be good.
28:11
You seem so morally clearheaded on so many things and quite an absolutist on some things,
28:15
like free speech.
28:16
I don't see what you're working on that one.
28:18
I'm not convinced that we can actually be held, I mean, this is going to reap the whirlwind
28:25
from vegans and vegetarians, but I've just seen, I've seen too many people not be healthy
28:29
as a vegetarian and much less a vegan and I have two kids, right?
28:33
So it's like, I'm not going to run a science experiment on my kids and have them be vegans
28:37
or vegetarians, especially because it's so hard for them to, I mean, even with everything
28:43
on the menu, it's so hard to get them to eat enough protein or, you know, anything
28:47
that-
28:48
You could roll on in the sand with your resources and say, okay, we're only going
28:52
to get it from this little boutique farm in upstate California and they're going to,
28:56
you know, the cows have names and whatever and they can ship us there.
29:00
Fancy pants, organic flesh.
29:02
Yeah, I don't think, I mean, I have no argument against that apart from the hassle factor
29:09
and the, and they just, it's not a, I think this is one of those ethical problems that's
29:19
not going to be solved by individuals making individual sacrifices and being having their
29:26
hands clean.
29:28
I just, I think we need a system change.
29:30
I mean, that's why, you know, cultivated meat was something that I thought seemed pretty
29:34
promising.
29:35
Right, but if I came to you and I said, like, there's, you know, there's a serious threat
29:39
to free speech in America and, you know, you're going to have to incur a slight increased
29:43
hassle in the way that you do your podcasts in order to make sure that free speech is protected.
29:47
You wouldn't hesitate.
29:48
Like, yeah, that's a principle that I'm going to endure a hassle to support.
29:53
Yeah, but I just don't, so, but this, this is not one of those, so, so, I mean, first,
29:59
let me say, I was a vegetarian for six years.
30:01
I became anemic, right?
30:03
And I was a vegetarian again for a year, also became like borderline anemic, like, and
30:10
also, I mean, obviously there's, there are people who say, you just take enough iron
30:13
and be 12 and this is not going to happen to you.
30:16
Maybe that's true.
30:17
I tried twice and it just seemed like each time I tried it, my health, my health was slowly
30:24
getting worse, right?
30:28
And again, having, having kids made it seem like, all right, well, if, if, perhaps I could
30:34
do it for myself, but it's like, I'm not going to roll the dice with my kids.
30:39
So it's just, it just seems like it's not, it's not clear cut to me that you can live
30:47
as healthy a life, just making sure you've got enough potions and powders and like rich
30:53
raw, I mean, when you look at, I don't know rich well, I mean, super nice guy, but I haven't
30:59
spent time with him as he, you know, goes through his day as a vegan, but I've seen some
31:04
video of him, like, you know, with a table this size, a couple of vegetables, right?
31:08
You know, probably also an ultra, like a fit athlete.
31:12
So it's possible that some of his supplements are for that.
31:14
But I mean, you could, I'm sure that Peterson, I could, you know, point you in the right direction
31:18
or something.
31:19
Yeah, but, but again, this again, the question is, does that matter?
31:23
Right?
31:24
There's lots of things I could do.
31:25
Like I could not fly on airplanes because of global warming, right?
31:29
It's not to move this off of food for a second.
31:35
We're not going to solve the climate change problem by each of us individually titrating
31:40
our amount of use of hydrocarbons, like, like, you can't, if you buy an electric car,
31:47
that's not going to be this incremental advance that is going to, it's going to matter.
31:53
Arguably that matters much more than, than you decided not to take that plane flight.
31:57
I'm glad you're telling me this while I'm flying around the world.
32:00
Yeah, yeah.
32:01
Burning as much carbon as I can.
32:02
No, it's like, we need a system level change.
32:05
Now, you, I'll grant you that what you want is a market that supports a system level
32:11
change, right?
32:12
So that's why I think there should be a market for all the, you know, the, the, the vegetarian
32:18
alternatives and the, you know, find better proteins and, you know, I'm supportive of
32:23
all of that and I've given money to the good food institute and like, I want all of
32:30
that innovation to happen, but it's, it's, it's at the system level that we're going
32:37
to, to clean up the factory farm in the mess and, and, and no longer create that horror
32:46
show, right?
32:47
Like, what you want is, so like, you know, if someone says, here, here, this milk comes
32:50
from happy cows, we can prove it.
32:52
I'm absolutely buying that milk, right?
32:54
But it's, it's the fact that it's, it's, it's, I mean, I just don't, I don't drink
33:01
in oat milk, you know, all day long, it's got, got, you know, safflower oil and other
33:06
crap in it.
33:07
I'm not convinced that's an improvement.
33:09
No, it's very, very hard, especially in the States to know what's bullshit and what's
33:12
not on the packaging because you can have like the worst, most inorganic, most non organically
33:17
raised beef and it's got a happy pig on the front right on a tutu dancing on a unicycle
33:22
or some shit.
33:23
I mean, I, I think we, we want to correct all of that and we need laws and markets to
33:28
do that.
33:29
But all of our piecemeal individual efforts just not to have our hands dirty.
33:34
I think are, are just going to be ineffectual, you know, and it's not, and again, the problem
33:42
for me is I'm not convinced that a meat-free diet is actually as healthy as, as a, as eating
33:52
everything, right?
33:53
Sure, but it still sounds like you're sort of making excuses that you wouldn't make if
33:57
you really thought that the stakes were high.
33:58
Like you could either have only organic meat, you could not eat meat at restaurants, be
34:02
at home because you know where it's come from.
34:05
You could do the research about how to, you know, compensate for whatever deficiencies
34:08
that I was convinced, if I was convinced that all of those inputs mattered, then I'd
34:15
be more motivated.
34:16
Well, I met, I met out of the animal that got killed and tortured throughout it.
34:20
No, no, a mattering would be, this would be like so, a mattering would be, okay, these
34:25
factory farms are now having to change their practices or they're going out of business
34:32
because you and I spent an extra hour today trying to figure out where we were going to
34:39
get a clean hamburger versus a dirty hamburger, right?
34:43
But nothing operates that way.
34:45
I mean, getting vaccinated so that people don't, you know, so that people with a compromised
34:49
immune system aren't at a higher risk of dying or floating.
34:52
No, that's much more straightforward.
34:54
Like these are, you know, there's always an attenuated connection between your action
34:58
and the community.
34:59
But those are not nearly as attenuated.
35:00
I mean, those, like, so what are you saying?
35:01
No, one in 340 million votes?
35:04
Well, no, but, no, but as a collective, there's just, there are not many layers to that
35:09
process.
35:10
It's just like, yes, I'll grant you that it's not especially, it's not perfectly
35:14
rational for any one person to vote because the, the, the likelihood that their vote's
35:19
going to matter and this election is very, very low, right?
35:21
So, yes, I'm not a, you know, a pureist about whether you actually have to vote, but there
35:28
really is just a certain number of votes and they get counted and that's the whole system.
35:31
Right?
35:32
So here we're talking about technology that in some cases hasn't been invented yet that
35:38
is going to change the ethics of the situation, right?
35:40
Like before, there was, I mean, like a self-driving car, example, is perfect.
35:46
So every year, 40,000 people in the, in the states die on our highways because we are
35:54
terrible drivers, right?
35:56
So, and that's just, you know, so you could, you could really get, you kind of torture yourself
36:00
over the ethics of that.
36:01
You could say, should I be driving, should anyone be driving, I mean, the, should, I mean,
36:06
if we reduce the speed limit by 20 miles an hour, right, we would save a lot of lives,
36:11
right?
36:12
So, are we moral monsters for not reducing the speed limit?
36:15
Would I vote to, am I going to drive slower than I, than I have been so as to, to not participate
36:21
in this scandalous status quo, where in 40,000 people are guaranteed to die this year from
36:27
all the mayhem caused on a rose by our, by our current speed limits and, and our inability
36:31
to drive.
36:32
Now, it, it's a horror show, but there's no, there has been no alternative to it that anyone's
36:40
going to accept.
36:41
It's not convenient to drive slower.
36:42
But that's true because there are jurisdictions that have cracked down a lot like the state
36:46
that I live in in the past 20 years has set up a Brazilian random breath tests every Friday
36:50
and Saturday, until morning.
36:51
No, I'm not talking, I'm not talking about that because I was listening.
36:54
Drunk driving is already illegal, right?
36:55
No, but you can do stuff about enforcement.
36:58
They've lowered speed limits.
36:59
It's fine.
37:00
Infuriating to drive and Sydney, because there's speed traps and speed cameras all over
37:04
the place.
37:05
It is an inconvenience, but it does bring the tall down.
37:08
Okay, so, but we have, so whatever, wherever you set it, the toll is still and tolerably
37:12
high.
37:14
Now it, now we have self-driving cars or next, next week, we're gonna have self-driving
37:19
cars, right?
37:20
We're going to have more of them and at a certain point, the system will be built, the
37:29
market will be there, and then the ethics are going to flip.
37:32
Then you will be a selfish bastard putting people's lives at risk if you insist on driving
37:38
yourself.
37:39
Then there's really going to be, just as before the invention of the seat belt, there was
37:48
no seat belt to use.
37:49
You weren't a bad parent for not putting a seat belt on your kid because no one had
37:53
thought of a seat belt yet, but once we have a seat belt, you're a terrible parent
37:57
for not putting it on your kid.
37:58
It sounds like you're letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, like the person
38:01
who, before they were seat belt in the back seat, declined to buckle up their kid in
38:06
the front seat, going like, at some point, there's going to be a technological solution
38:09
to this.
38:10
And every car will have seat belts in every seat.
38:11
We'll probably have a little baby boosters to make a mixture of like, why am I going to
38:13
bother putting my kid in a seat belt in the front?
38:16
I'm saying that the thing that is going to put the horror show of factory farming in
38:22
the rear view mirror is, hasn't happened yet, and it's not going to be, and the piece
38:31
of it, and so it is with climate change, you and I decided not, you and I decided to
38:38
eat vegan and not fly on airplanes is not going to be part of that process.
38:44
Well, it's not going to be part of the process to the utopian world in which the technology
38:49
solves the problem entirely.
38:50
That's not a utopian world.
38:52
It's our world.
38:53
But if every person in the world today, you know, for, or if 10% of Americans today decided
38:58
that they were not going to eat meat every Monday, and they were only going to eat organic
39:02
meat, then that would have a real effect, just like voting or not voting has a real effect
39:08
in the short term, on an imperfect system in terms of the demand for meat.
39:12
So I'll grant you that building out the market for alternatives is a good thing, and yes,
39:23
you know, if magically we decided we're going to reduce our meat consumption 50% in America
39:31
because now we want vegetarian alternatives.
39:33
But if you reduce it 5% then the market responds.
39:37
Right.
39:38
And as far as I know, I haven't followed this, but I feel like the market has diminished
39:44
for, I think, all for alternatives.
39:49
No, like I think I was, I could be wrong, I'm not actually not a much, I had heard that
39:58
some of these, some of these companies like Beyond Meat, whatever, whoever builds the impossible
40:03
burger.
40:04
And I thought they went up, you know, asymptotically in the market and then came crashing down,
40:11
but I haven't followed it.
40:12
Oh, okay.
40:13
I mean, it's not as good.
40:14
It's just not as good.
40:15
I mean, I like some of it, I need some of it, but it's just not, yeah, it's not, but the
40:20
truth is, it's not only not as good, I'm not convinced that in the end it's all that
40:27
healthy.
40:28
I mean, you look at the ingredients and a lot of the stuff, it's just not, it's not Michael
40:30
Pollen's farm ingredients.
40:34
Right.
40:35
Yeah.
40:36
I mean, I'm interested not, not specifically in this, because I'm just as much of a hypocrite
40:40
on this issue, but in what you regard as being worthy of going to bat for and taking up
40:47
arms for and whatnot, how you kind of make the moral calculus.
40:50
Like do you think of yourself as a persuader at the moment or an interviewer or an information
40:58
researcher?
40:59
What is your job?
41:00
I mean, it's all that, it's all that, yeah, I mean, I'm just, I think it's, I mean, within
41:12
the podcast space specifically, I'm just, I'm tending to just talk to people who, I want
41:19
to learn from and who are, where I can have a conversation that I think is going to
41:23
matter for some question about how we, how we live, you know, whether it's politics
41:29
or science or, you know, it's not purely intellectual interest in me, I mean, in some
41:34
case it is, but it's more like, well, like what, what is true and matters, right?
41:40
I mean, this is, I mean, some of these questions, like what we were just talking about, there's
41:45
a bunch of things that are true.
41:49
The question is what is going to actually matter and what's, what's going to change, you
41:53
know, it's like, my intuition has been pushed around, hopefully, actually, it comes back
41:58
to the AI question.
41:59
This is like the one thing that I really did change my mind about in recent years.
42:06
I thought with the advent of AI and, and in particular, it's, it's use in the military,
42:12
I was going to be, by definition, against building autonomous weapons or like that's, like
42:17
if you're worried about AI alignment and, and killer robots, you don't want to, yeah,
42:21
yeah, don't give it a gun.
42:24
I think I've, at least I, until I hear a better argument, I think I've changed my mind
42:29
at that.
42:30
I think we want to build autonomous weapons.
42:31
I think we want to build them first, right?
42:34
I think I don't, we don't want to lose autonomous weapon arms race with China or anyone else,
42:39
right?
42:40
So leaving alignment aside, we want to win the, the weaponization arms race of, in the
42:48
AI space, that is, is, if we step away from it and say, okay, this is obviously too dangerous
42:55
and, and unconscionable and this could backfire, China's going to do what China's going to
43:00
do in China, we will, one day meet their killer robots, right?
43:05
So, so that's a, it's a situation where I think this is a bad trajectory in every respect,
43:14
you know, like the idea that we're going to spend any of our resources and limited time
43:18
on earth building killer robots is just a fucking obscenity, right?
43:23
But given the incentives and given the, the, the failures of cooperation that are built
43:30
into the, the current situation, I don't see an alternative, you know, we're not going
43:37
to, we're not going to convince the Chinese not to do this, certainly the, the CCP.
43:43
This is uncomfortable conversations with Josh Seps, I am Josh Seps and we're on a
43:48
ZEPS live around the world tour where each day we sit down with someone fascinating, Sam
43:52
Harris is kind enough to join us and to stream to his sub stack as well, so follow on
43:56
comfortable conversations.
43:57
If you want to get notified of future conversations like this, I just come out in favor of factory
44:03
farming and autonomous weapons.
44:04
You love, you love torturing animals and torturing humans, I'll be happier when we get the
44:09
robots to robots.
44:10
I mean, I was talking to Toby Walsh, which actually if people are watching, they should
44:14
go back and listen to episodes with Toby, who's one of the world's leading AI experts,
44:18
he happens to be a Brit who lives in Australia, he runs the AI Institute at the University
44:22
of New South Wales and he's worried about like drones basically and AI drones as the
44:29
next wave.
44:30
Like, when you look at what Ukraine did to those Russian jets, you know, they sent out
44:36
these.
44:37
This is like, it's totally asymmetric.
44:38
Thousands of miles from Ukraine and there are these finer jets sitting on a runway somewhere
44:43
and the back of a semi-trailer opens up and the driver didn't even know what his payload
44:47
was and a bunch of killer drones come out and they blow up the, and of course we're all
44:51
cheering in the West about how great this is and he said, just be careful what you wish
44:55
for because the country that's most vulnerable to that is the United States.
45:01
It's totally asymmetrical, artificial intelligence and drones are going to give a massive upper
45:06
hand to smaller, worse actors than ourselves and he's not just wobble, it's all into the
45:12
port of Los Angeles.
45:13
That's right.
45:14
And he's not worried and then you're not going to have such compunctions about making sure
45:18
that the drones only go after military assets.
45:21
What happens when you're at the grove in Los Angeles and a bunch of killer drones come
45:26
down onto the civilians, it's like, this is ugly stuff.
45:30
So we want the best, most competent AI version of all of that to defend against the second
45:40
best.
45:41
The Los Angeles-wide iron dome for killer drones.
45:44
Again, I'm totally open to argument on this but because it is a very unhappy attractor
45:52
on the landscape that we seem to be falling into, it's not, I don't want to live in a world
45:59
with killer drones, if I could figure out how to avoid it.
46:04
Put it on the record, just right out there.
46:06
I would like happily produced protein and no killer robots and I would like this to be
46:17
a global priority and let's fight climate change in the process and so we want whatever
46:23
sustainable fuels we can marshal to get-
46:28
Thank you, Sam.
46:29
I'm glad you're running for Governor of California.
46:30
No, but we want all that but again, what are the steps?
46:36
From where we currently are on this landscape to something better, given the rapid pace,
46:43
I mean, we're in an arms race with everyone, with AI, right?
46:49
Given that we're in an arms race and one of the other participants is the CCP, I don't
46:59
see us slowing down on that front so I think we want to win.
47:04
If you rerun history a thousand times, then in how many versions of history are you a
47:09
rich and famous podcaster?
47:12
I mean, there's an immense amount of luck involved if that's the answer you're looking
47:22
for.
47:23
I don't know the probabilities, but it strikes me as, I think I'm a pure beneficiary of
47:32
good timing with respect to the birth of the technology, right?
47:36
I mean, this is the way I stumbled in the podcast and it was such that it had you told
47:43
me, had you told me a year before I started podcasting that I was, or the day before
47:49
I learned what a podcast was, which was not that much before I stumbled in the podcast.
47:58
If you told me what it was, and the only way to describe it at that point was this
48:02
basically it's like radio on demand, it's like Tivo for radio, and you told me like
48:08
you're going to be like a guy who just goes all in for Tivo radio, I would have said
48:17
that the probability of that happening was zero, like I would have bet everything, there's
48:21
no way that I had, there's no part of me with the one to go into radio, like why would
48:25
I do that?
48:26
That's like the.
48:27
You're talking to a professional radio.
48:28
Yeah.
48:29
I never, but yes, to take your insults in my stride.
48:31
No, we had different, different paths here, like I was all in on writing, maybe the occasional
48:39
public speaking, but it was just all about writing for me, and that's, I didn't need another
48:44
way to communicate, but then I would occasionally get, in the beginning, I would get invited
48:48
on a few podcasts, and then I thought, oh, well, this is kind of fun and easy, it's
48:52
certainly easier than writing, and then it was only, in hindsight, I realized, okay,
48:59
I just, I basically became a radio guy without knowing it, and it's just a different, we're
49:03
just calling it something else, and it's on, and the crucial thing is that it's on demand,
49:08
right?
49:09
And so, and as a publishing platform, it's much better than live radio that you're either
49:14
there, you've missed it, and it's gone, you know, forever.
49:17
There's no record of it.
49:19
Yeah.
49:20
So, the other annoying thing about live radio, which you'll see me doing occasionally during
49:24
this chat, but not nearly so much, is you have to constantly keep explaining to everyone
49:27
what the hell you're doing, what you're talking about, because people, the average person
49:30
listens to the radio for like four to eight minutes, while they're getting in the car,
49:35
and you know, so it's like you're always having to say Sam Harris is with us, a claimed
49:40
neuroscientist, podcaster, and writer, talking about, whatever the hell we're talking about,
49:45
it's irritating.
49:46
Without you, overall arc of your career, I mean, in how many, in what fraction of universes
49:51
are you a contrarian intellectual who produces content to try to challenge status quo biases
49:58
and point out a better way to think about things?
50:02
Well, I mean, well, given my interests and inclinations, I think in most of those worlds,
50:09
I'm doing something like this, except writing was, writing represents much more of the
50:15
probability space for me.
50:18
I mean, the podcasting thing really is a, right place, right time, right place, right time
50:23
with respect to their technology, and as far as the business component of it, that's
50:30
the crucial piece.
50:31
I mean, the fact that podcasting became a great business is in the way that radio wasn't,
50:38
and the way that writing wasn't.
50:40
Well, your podcast is great business in a way that even podcasts aren't in the sense
50:43
that people feel enough loyalty to you to pay you to do it.
50:46
Right.
50:47
A lot of podcasts that are still dependent on, you know, some advertising, giving them
50:50
some CPA of exactly how many fractions of a penny they're going to earn per a thousand
50:54
listeners or something like that.
50:55
Well, I mean, the most successful ad-based podcasts are still, are hugely successful,
50:59
but no, I mean, the point is, you know, there's something like one of five million podcasts.
51:04
I mean, maybe only a thousand are actual businesses.
51:08
I mean, so it's not, it's still a very low probability shot for most people as a business,
51:13
but the fact that it's possible to have a career doing this that is better, I mean, it's,
51:23
still it's, podcasting is fundamentally better, you know, even the narrow tail of success
51:31
is not at all like success in radio, you know, I mean, maybe Rush Limbo, Rush Limbo,
51:38
or somebody like that got rich in radio, but it's not like it's otherwise, you know,
51:43
there's no Joe Rogan, there were no Joe, not many Joe Rogan's or Lex Readman's or Andrew
51:49
Hooperman's are in ordinary ad support radio.
51:53
No, but there were probably more, I mean, certainly in a market like Australia, there are,
51:58
there are more people earning millions of dollars a year in radio than there are in podcasting.
52:03
You might not get this.
52:04
Yeah, you wouldn't get the people earning the hundreds of millions, but.
52:07
Okay, so yeah, so that's something you know that I don't, but, but like, yeah, but so,
52:13
but like in publishing books, it's still, yes, I mean, there's obviously a few people like
52:19
J.K. Rowling who get fantastically wealthy writing books, but for the most part, even successful,
52:26
you know, very successful writers are not like successful podcasters, and that's,
52:33
well, I'm not sure that's true, because I mean, there aren't very many Rogans and Friedman's,
52:36
right? And there aren't very many J.K. Rowlings, like if you're, if you're Michael Critan or like,
52:43
and if you're, if you're in the top 10, if you're Stephen King, you're doing fine.
52:49
And if you're in the top 10 podcast, you're doing fine. But I suppose that's
52:53
equipable without much consequence. I mean, there's something that the tech has done to scale.
52:58
I mean, so I mean, the, it's, I mean, the, now that it's taken it off media, but I mean,
53:12
digital technology brought to scale has made people wealthier than anyone has ever been wealthy
53:21
in any other space, right? So like, I mean, again, you're talking about the wealthiest people in
53:26
our society. And it's right, it seems to me that some of these digital media, like we like podcasting
53:34
and any digital subscription business has the potential. There's like, there's no, there's no
53:40
ceiling on it in the way that there was in every, like with physical books, it's like there's just
53:46
one, they're just, they're physical books, right? Right. You know, obviously digital books and
53:50
audio books now change it now. They become digital media. But, but when you're just selling
53:55
physical books and people have to go to a bookstore to get one in hand, there, yes, there was the
54:01
JK Rowling where people would line up at midnight, you know, to get that book. And that was a cultural
54:06
phenomenon. A little children breaking their backs coming around these gigantic tomes in
54:10
that little school bag lining up in the cold. But, you know, that's why there's, there's like
54:15
exactly one JK Rowling where they literally build, you know, theme park or part of a theme park
54:21
as a test of it to her, you know, I just went to that in Japan, by the way, Harry Potter World,
54:25
we're seeing side universal studios, big hit with the seven-year-old kids. Oh, yeah,
54:29
you're gonna tell, yeah, it's great. Also, the most brilliant merchandising phenomenon I've
54:33
ever seen Harry Potter around. Absolutely. I mean, I know what you're saying, but I think there's
54:37
also something that you're overlooking there, which is that the upper middle class of the digital
54:42
creator, the people like me who are not world changing figures like yourself, but who make
54:48
really good middle class incomes from having, you know, their particular niche, that wasn't
54:54
possible even just seven or eight years ago. Right, but like I think the expansion, the explosion
54:59
now has not just permitted the Joe Rogans of the world to join the JK Rowlings of the world,
55:04
it's also created, but the possibility of it being a career, such that when my relationship
55:09
with the public broadcaster in Australia fell apart, I was able to get cancelled and have only
55:14
positive economic consequences for no longer being tethered to a traditional broadcaster.
55:19
But are you saying that there's still a more generous lane in standard radio for that?
55:27
There is in Australia because of the size of the market for some strange reason. Also,
55:30
was he's listened to a lot of radio? So maybe there is the states too, I'm unaware of it.
55:35
Well, because because Rogan has a global audience and no radio show has a global audience,
55:40
I would imagine that Rogan makes more than the highest paid radio person.
55:46
Yeah, but back in the days of Rush Limbo, I would imagine that he was the most paid person who
55:51
gets listened to, not all. But with writing, it's just not, I mean, it is so hard for the average
55:59
writer of books to make a living as a writer of books. That is almost never what's happening.
56:06
I mean, they're a professor at a university. That pays the bills and then they also write books.
56:10
I mean, that's the standard gig. It's depressing that the greatest intellectual
56:14
pursuit in human civilization is now a hobby, a side gig, really. I mean, your attitude towards
56:21
what your output is has changed a lot over the course of your career. You first came to most people's
56:26
attention as a father and who was saying in things that you're not supposed to say about Islam
56:32
and religion. Well, I'm still saying those things. You are, but it's less whenever it comes up.
56:36
Yeah, exactly. It's, you know, it's a smaller fraction of your output now.
56:41
I would just be repeating myself. I've only got so much tolerance for boring myself.
56:47
I mean, I'll bore my listeners, but when I start getting bored, it's a problem.
56:53
But you seem more, you seem just generally to have an era of great a conciliation now.
57:01
It depends what, I mean, not with respect to jihadism and Islamism.
57:05
No, no, no, just with maybe it's in guest choice or something, but, you know, you don't go.
57:12
Well, I know where, so I know in advance how worthless certain conversations are going to be,
57:18
and now I've elected not to have those conversations, you know, so it's like I'm not,
57:22
I'm not willing to debate someone about the Warren Gaza, who doesn't think jihadism is part of
57:31
this story. Right. Right. And there are a lot of people like that. Yeah, and I could, so I could,
57:36
I could have that conversation every week for the rest of my life, you know, and it's just not,
57:43
I know where it goes. I know that it's actually not possible to break through on, with most people.
57:52
Why do you need to break through to the guest? That's a good question. It's, I think it's,
58:01
well, one, I think the, the instructive value of, of just beating your head against a brick wall
58:09
and hoping the, the audience is noticing that, you know, which is, which is the head and which is
58:14
the wall. Yeah, like that, that is the kind of the signal to noise ratio there is not great.
58:22
I mean, sometimes the audience gets it, but I think it's possible to have a conversation where
58:28
you've actually just kind of made a mess and failed to clean it up because, and it's sort of,
58:36
it's easier. It's certainly, there's a kind of an asymmetrical relationship in certain kinds of
58:40
debate or certain topics where, especially given a, if it's a very facile and dishonest person
58:48
you're talking to, it's just, there's just this asymmetry built into the debate where it's easy
58:55
for them to like choose the facile person. I mean, you know, that's what people want. I mean,
58:59
people, I mean, maybe you've spoken to some of these people, but like on, on the Gaza topic,
59:03
like people want a conversation with Norman Finkelstein or, you know, somebody who's just,
59:12
you know, or Medi Hassan or it's like, like, and it's just not a,
59:22
there's the element of bad faith, but even leaving that aside, it's just a wilderness of error
59:27
and, and half truth that you just wander into and, but, but, suppose you get the best person,
59:34
I mean, park Gaza for a moment because it's so toxic in so many ways. It's such a difficult thing
59:39
to have any nuance about, but I just did an episode of uncomfortable conversations with a,
59:45
an activist who goes around America, she's an American activist who's a family values conservative
59:50
and she believes, she strongly opposes any kind of gay marriage or, sorry, gay parenting,
59:57
right? So she believes that she's an activist for the rights of all children to have a relationship
1:00:01
with their biological mother and biological father. So she's anti-adoption, anti-surrogacy and,
1:00:06
you know, conservatives love her because she's like, all these guys shouldn't be having so many kids.
1:00:12
So I had her on the show, I mean, I'm a gay parent, if anyone watching doesn't know,
1:00:16
a married till guy, we have beautiful twins and it was great. I mean, it was really,
1:00:24
really interesting because she's thought through her stuff. She knows exactly why she believes
1:00:28
what she believes. I think she's making major logical and moral mistakes and we were able to get
1:00:35
through two and a half hours of conversation with each other in person while she was on a tour
1:00:41
of Australia that I found really constructive and had I regarded it as my job to own her on every
1:00:48
issue and to like beat her or convince her. Of course, it would be totally fruitile.
1:00:52
Yeah, so this could just be a difference in our personalities, but did you ever hear my first
1:00:59
podcast with Jordan Peterson? I was going to raise that truth. I was going to raise that.
1:01:03
I mean, so once I hit the first obstacle, just tell people what happened.
1:01:09
Well, so he was at the time, I actually hadn't heard of him yet, I don't think, but then it was
1:01:15
I had either. I think that was my first encounter with him. I was like, he was this jagged on
1:01:19
same show, but he was literally the most requested guest I'd ever had at that point. All of a sudden,
1:01:25
it was more than Neil DeGrasse, Tyzen, or Stephen Pinker. There was no name that was getting thrown
1:01:30
at me more than Jordan Peterson. It's all of a sudden I had to talk to the guy and it's been
1:01:39
years since I've heard it, so I don't know actually how it holds up or how bad it was, but I remember
1:01:44
it'd been a fairly lacerating two hours. Well, we just got bogged down on just the concept of
1:01:50
truth. What does it mean to say that a statement is true, and he had this, to my ear,
1:01:57
indefensible notion of truth, which was just not going to, there was no way to move on
1:02:05
from that. Everyone knows Jordan Peterson, imagine the kind of slipperyness that he can
1:02:09
bring to bear on those thoughts. It depends what you mean. And you were like, well, it either
1:02:14
happened or it didn't happen. Well, it happened according to who. So we got wrapped around that
1:02:19
axle for two hours, and so people can go listen to it as it's out there to hear. But
1:02:26
and then people were so frustrated with that conversation that they insisted on inviting back.
1:02:29
And so this was in the days where I would do a poll on Twitter. It's true, I talk to Jordan Peterson
1:02:35
and everyone said, yeah, so the love affair was born. Yeah, and so, and you know, and then
1:02:40
Jordan, I've spoken many times since and had more productive conversations. Although in some sense,
1:02:47
maybe that first conversation as as difficult as it was was our most productive in the sense that
1:02:54
it really sharpened up like, look, this is this is sort of proof that we're coming at these
1:03:01
these questions from a very different trajectory. We're playing a different language game,
1:03:07
and it's here that you can see how like you have to kind of sort of force for force choice.
1:03:14
Like you're either going to take one path here or the other and they don't really,
1:03:20
they're not really communicating because they're not really invoking the same kinds of intellectual
1:03:23
principles, right? And then we decided to have, you know, more relaxed conversations
1:03:32
thereafter and it's all been fine. And then, you know, it doesn't, we don't get bogged down on
1:03:37
every topic, but and I was just on his podcast maybe a month ago and it was, you know, it was
1:03:43
totally fine. But it was, but again, it was also fine because you declined the opportunity to jump
1:03:51
down his throat at things that probably would have been controversial between the two of you.
1:03:56
No, I might, I'm kind of insufferable. And no, when you were saying this to
1:04:02
Jaron who does your Q&A is, you know, he's a great guy, your manager, we love. And I think in the
1:04:08
in the episode that you did, they asked me anything before going to talk to Jordan, you were sort of
1:04:12
saying, well, you know, it's his podcast or I don't want to be an asshole when I go on and like,
1:04:17
well, no, I just, all I was saying there is that I'm not going to go do homework on him to find out
1:04:22
all the things he's done when I wasn't looking that he should be embarrassed about and then
1:04:27
read him the riot act on those things. I'm just going to go in and talk about whatever he wants to
1:04:32
talk about his podcast. So if he's going to bring up something that I disagree with, I'm not going
1:04:36
to avoid that. But none of that came up. And I actually came, I actually said many things I
1:04:43
thought he was going to disagree with. You know, I ran down our mutual friend or, you know,
1:04:49
a erstwhile friend, in my case, I don't know, Joe Rogan, but he didn't, I was assuming that we
1:04:56
were going to get into some dispute over the things I was, I was, the bones I was picking with
1:05:00
Joe Rogan about just the responsibility and platforming certain people and having certain conversations.
1:05:04
I mean, I was at that point very exercise over what he said and didn't say to Darryl Cooper,
1:05:09
the, you know, the amateur historian who, who, you know, is every contrarian's favorite,
1:05:16
just asking questions, Puppet, who has some controversial and the one idea is about how Churchill
1:05:23
was kind of the bad guy. He was the war two. All those Jews just died by accident. Yeah,
1:05:29
they just, they took too many political prisoners. They didn't couldn't feed them and they
1:05:33
thought maybe it would be more compassionate just to gas everybody and they never, there was no
1:05:37
plan to kill anybody really. It was all inadvertent. But when you have, I'm not sure that,
1:05:45
so yes, you can say that you were on Jordan's show and so there's no, it's not beholden
1:05:49
upon you to make sure that you go and dig around and like bring him a bag full of shit that he
1:05:54
said in the past in order to play gotcha, which also is a slightly different thing from maybe
1:05:59
coming with a couple of concerns that you might have about the general trajectory of his
1:06:04
intellectual evolution, right? I mean, I understand your antipathy to coming in and going like,
1:06:09
well, I mean, you know, you said this thing on a clip that I saw on YouTube where you made a
1:06:12
fool of yourself, how do you account for yourself? That's a bit different from saying, man,
1:06:17
the person I knew, you know, the Jordan I knew was doing this and now you're kind of like
1:06:21
apologizing for alternative for Deutschland and or something. You know, what are your opinions
1:06:25
about this? Like, have you gone more right wing? You could say you don't want to do that because
1:06:28
you're on his show, but then when there are people on your show as well, whether it's Douglas Murray
1:06:33
or, you know, anyone else who is also a friend of mine or a friend of ours.
1:06:39
Is it not the case that you're intentionally trying to avoid pulling them up on things on
1:06:43
issues areas where you disagree? No. Because it looks like that.
1:06:48
Got a humans? Well, if you've listened to this much of the episode, then you must enjoy it
1:06:52
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1:06:56
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