00:24:03 Sam Harris: In my mind, it really doesn't matter how much money he spends on himself, right? Because anything he spends on himself really is just a rounding error on the amount of money he will ultimately be giving away. The difference between him living in a studio apartment and him having a 30,000 square foot house in one of the most expensive cities on earth would be almost impossible to discern against his actual wealth. Obviously, he's an outlier, but something like that applies to the rest of us. I do think that if we're going to solve our problems collectively, It's not going to be a matter of convincing the most affluent people and societies to make significant sacrifices. I think we need to improve technology. We need to increasingly produce what we produce in a carbon-neutral way, and then we need to prioritize helping people and safeguarding the future. And I really do think we can massively change how we allocate resources without stigmatizing wealth. And part of this has to do with creating virtuous cycles that leverage people's desire for better things. This has happened with electric cars. Elon Musk started building electric cars that did not represent a sacrifice for anyone. He made electric cars some of the most desirable cars ever built. I mean, you have to spend something like two million dollars on a combustion engine car to have a car that is faster than the current version of the Model S. So, if you want a fast car, it's completely rational to want an electric one at this point. And I think that's the path forward on many other fronts, in particular with the problem of climate change.

00:35:18 Sam Harris: You mentioned Elon, yesterday he successfully launched his Falcon Heavy rocket and landed all the booster stages, right? So this fundamental change of thinking of rocket launches as something that should be totally reusable, and you've got to figure out how to land these things, land the first stage, on its face sounds like a crazy idea, but once you set that goal based on rethinking the first principles of the whole enterprise, now we've discovered there's a solution. But that requires such a vast use of resources to rethink something so fundamental in an area that's so expensive already. I mean, obviously, the goal here is to cut the costs and to make it a bigger industry. It's easy to see that you could have gone down that path, and for a very long time for Elon, it looked like he was going down this path to a waiting cliff, right? There was no guarantee of success. What an amazing time to be alive. Yeah, it's really nuts.

00:36:18 (someone): I just want to say that, right? Like watching rockets launch and sort of like re-land and then redeploy.

00:36:24 Sam Harris: Well, that footage is so, there are a few things which every time you see them, you don't really habituate to how weird and futuristic they seem. This is footage that I'm sure at some point will become jaded enough to say well that's of course that's the way that's supposed to work but watching those boosters land perfectly in unison it just looks like a science fiction movie from the 80s that you know was just preposterous and then when you when you think you sort of alluded to why that happened right when he's being interviewed i remember him talking about it

00:36:36 Sam Harris: This is footage that I'm sure at some point will become jaded enough to say well that's of course that's the way that's supposed to work but watching those boosters land perfectly in unison it just looks like a science fiction movie from the 80s that you know was just preposterous and then when you when you think you sort of alluded to why that happened right when he's being interviewed i remember him talking about it

00:37:01 (someone): In the sense of I just thought about what was possible and I thought it was possible It was physically possible to reuse rockets and so he thought about the problem in a different way and he has a very Great ability to attract not only capital but people to working on those problems and the result can be amazing, but it's also Important to note that not all of those results are amazing. I mean we see this sort of like SpaceX's the world and we probably don't see that hundreds or thousands of companies that rethink the problem as well and fail but I mean that's how we make incremental progress as a Right, but that is I guess that's probably another mental model you have written about there's a survivorship bias

00:37:46 Sam Harris: that we're constantly being advertised the evidence of only those success stories, and we're not given any true indication of the ocean of failures that is behind many of those. Maybe we should talk about that. I mean, I guess this also connects to another model, which is just understanding base rates. I mean, just how many new businesses succeed, for instance. It's like this is not something that you necessarily understand when you calculate the probability that any new venture is gonna work out for you.

00:38:19 (someone): I mean, our view is based on ego, right?

00:04:56 Sam Harris: And of course, my enemies will summarize this as Sam Harris thinks that it should be legal to discriminate against blacks and gays and women. Can you say something about artificial intelligence, AI, and your concerns about it? Yeah, well, this is a very interesting topic. The question of how to build artificial intelligence that isn't going to destroy us is something that I've only begun to pay attention to, and it is a rather deep and consequential problem. I went to a conference in Puerto Rico focused on this issue, organized by the Future of Life Institute. And I was brought there by a friend, Elon Musk, who no doubt many of you have heard of. And Elon had recently said publicly that he thought AI was the greatest threat to human survival, perhaps greater than nuclear weapons. And many people took that as an incredibly hyperbolic statement. Now, knowing Elon and knowing how close to the details he's apt to be, I took it as a very interesting diagnosis of a problem, but I wasn't quite sure what I thought about it because I hadn't really spent much time focusing on the progress we've been making in AI and its implication. So I went to this conference in San Juan, held by and for the people who are closest to doing this work. This was not open to the public. I think I was one of maybe two or three interlopers there who just hadn't been invited, but sort of got himself invited. What was fascinating about that was that this was a collection of people who were very worried, like Elon and others who felt that we have to find some way to pull the brakes, even though that seems somewhat hopeless, to the people who were doing the work most energetically and most wanted to convince others not to worry about having to pull the brakes.

00:18:36 Sam Harris: effective altruism there. I guess his one salient point was that creating economic value, i.e. doing business, is generally the best way to help people at scale and reduce unnecessary suffering. And I guess I think we could easily concede that insofar as that's true, You know, and wherever it happens to be true, it would be very easy for us to say, okay, well then, sure, let business solve our problems. And so there's, you know, and I don't think you would resist that conclusion wherever it's true. I mean, I think there, one could certainly argue that Someone like Elon Musk by building desirable electric cars has done, if not more good, a different species of good than many forms of environmental activism have to move us away from a climate change catastrophe. So, if that's true, let's bracket that, and it's hard to know what exactly is true there, but I certainly have an intuition that there's a place for business and even a majority place for business to affect our climate outcome and that it might be greater than charity. he seemed to think that was a real, you know, some kind of coup de gras against effective altruism and even philanthropy in general. But I think that blow just passes right by us, doesn't it?

00:20:03 (someone): Yeah, so the thing that I'll say that's the grain of truth in that criticism is that under some, in some circumstances, markets can be extremely good ways of allocating resources. So take the problem of people having access to the internet and to computing technology in the United States, at least for people who are middle class or above, then, you know, businesses are dealing with that, like, at least relatively well.

00:39:36 (someone): Fuel people and feed them for six months on the journey and give them stuff for the return journey, etc. That's very, very dangerous. public probably won't accept the cost of the risk so my story is that we should leave human space flight to adventurers prepared to accept high risks funded by the billionaires musk and bezos people like that because there are people who would be prepared to go to mars on a one way trip in fact musk himself has said that he'd like to die on mars but doesn't impact He's now, I think, 51 or 52 years old, so 40 years from now, good luck to him. There are other people like that who will go, and they will go on a mission which is very risky, and therefore far cheaper. than anything that nasa would do it because that's the first and it's not our taxpayers money anyway so my scenario is that the may well be a small. Colony of people living on mars by the end of the century probably. Adventurers rather like Captain Scott and Adamson and people like that. They'll be trying to live in this very hostile environment. I think this will happen. Incidentally, I don't agree with Musk that that'll be followed by mass emigration of humans because living on Mars is much worse than living at the bottom of the ocean at the South Pole. Dealing with climate change on Earth is a doddle compared to terraforming Mars. So there's no planet before there's people, but the reason I digressed into this topic is that if you think of these crazy pioneers on Mars, they'd be inadapted, but they'd be away from the regulators.

00:53:35 Sam Harris: Elon Musk is as self-made as anyone. He can take absolutely no responsibility for his intelligence, his drive, the fact that he could make it to America and America was stable and he did it in a time when there was immense resources to help him do all the stuff that he's doing. So, again, you're still at the pond, and it feels like the conversation you would want to have with the person who says, well, if I give any more than 10%, it's going to screw me up, and I'm not going to give much, and I'm not going to be happy, I'm not going to be effective. It sounds like there's still more Peter Singer-style therapy to do with that person, which is, well, listen, come on, 12%, 14%, that's really moving you into a zone of discomfort. And there is no stopping point short of, well, listen, I could make more money if you would let me get on an airplane now and fly to the meeting I'm now going to miss because I don't have enough money for a ticket, and then you begin to invoke some of the, I think you call it, earning to give principles, which we can talk about. But unless you're going to bring in other concerns there where you can be more effective at helping more drowning children in shallow ponds, you don't have an argument against Singer.

00:54:52 (someone): Yeah, I think so there's a distinction in consequentialist ethics between what gets called actualism and possibleism. And so supposing you have three options, you can stay home and study, you can stay home and watch TV.

00:55:11 Sam Harris: If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org.

01:59:49 Sam Harris: If we make it, if we get to the 22nd century and we've solved the AI alignment problem and now we're just pulling wealth out of the ether, I mean, essentially just, we've got Deutsche's universal constructors building every machine atom by atom. and we can do more or less anything we want, well then, this can't be based on an ethic where wealth is at all stigmatized. What should have opprobrium attached to it is a total disconnection from the suffering of other people and comfort with the more shocking disparities in wealth that we see all around us. Once a reasonably successful person signs on to the effective altruist ethic, and begins thinking about his or her life in terms of earning to give on some level. There's a flywheel effect here where one's desire to be wealthy actually amplifies one's commitment to giving so that, in part, the reason why you would continue working is because you have an opportunity to give so much money away and do so much good. and it kind of purifies one's earning in the first place. I mean, I can imagine, you know, most wealthy people get to a point where they're making enough money so that they don't have to worry about money anymore. And then there's this question, well, why am I making all this money? Why am I still working? And the moment they decide to give a certain amount of money away a year, just algorithmically, then they feel like, well, okay, if this number keeps going up, that is a good thing, right? So like I can get out of bed in the morning and know that today, you know, if it's 10%, you know, one day in 10 is given over wholly to solving the worst suffering or saving the most lives or mitigating the worst long-term risk.

00:03:18 Sam Harris: And most recently, he's the author of a new book titled, Starry Messenger, Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization. And we focus on the new book. We talk about what makes science a unique human endeavor, the tension between respecting scientific consensus and overturning it, which leads to confusion about paradigm shifts and scientific controversies. We talk about the social importance of probability and statistics. climate change, our relative blindness to exponential cultural change, social media, social inequality and affirmative action, identity politics and a post-racial future, the wisdom of focusing on class rather than race, and other topics. It's always fun to talk to Neil. As you'll hear, he is always good company. And now I bring you Neil deGrasse Tyson. I am here with Neil deGrasse Tyson. Neil, thanks for coming back on the podcast.

00:04:19 (someone): Yeah, thanks for having me. I feel like an old-timer.

00:04:22 Sam Harris: Well, you are a repeat and much beloved guest, and I'm pretty sure I've been living with you more than you've been living with me of late because I digested your last book 100% as an audiobook. I tend to bounce between audio and hard copy when I really want to get something into my brain. For you, I just happened to, there was some great fall weather where I am, and I took a bunch of long walks, and you were walking with me. It was really a miracle of technology and a wonderful use of time, which I highly recommend to people.

00:04:58 (someone): I did narrate the book myself.

00:05:00 Sam Harris: Yes, as you should with that voice of yours.

01:58:38 (someone): And so I do think there's an argument, an argument against that. And I think that is definitely a reason of caution for making kind of a very large commitment. And then the final aspect is, yeah, what sort of message you want to send? And probably my guess is that you just want a bit of market segmentation here where some people should, you know, some people should perhaps show what can be done. Others should show, well, no, actually you can have this amazing life. while, you know, not having to wear the hair shirt and so on. You know, I think perhaps you could actually convince me that maybe I'm, you know, sending a long message and would do more good if I had some other sort of pledge. And maybe you would be right about that. I definitely, when I made these plans, I wasn't thinking through these things quite as carefully as I was now. But I did want to just kind of show a proof of concept.

01:59:30 Sam Harris: Yeah, I guess I'm wondering if there's a path through this wilderness that doesn't stigmatize wealth at all. I mean, the endgame for me in the presence of absolute abundance is, you know, everyone gets to live like Bill Gates on some level. If we make it, if we get to the 22nd century and we've solved the AI alignment problem and now we're just pulling wealth out of the ether, I mean, essentially just, we've got Deutsche's universal constructors building every machine atom by atom. and we can do more or less anything we want, well then, this can't be based on an ethic where wealth is at all stigmatized.

00:24:08 Sam Harris: I think it probably shouldn't be. But Elon is making himself look ridiculous by trumpeting his free speech absolutism, only to then rescind it without acknowledging the apparent hypocrisy. And the resulting ad hoc policy that he's now supposedly implementing, that no real-time information about the whereabouts of people will be tolerated, just seems impossible to enforce or even to adequately define. I mean, there's obviously a ton of celebrity coverage that is publicity, or legitimate journalism, or just random fun information, which could suddenly look like the, quote, real-time doxing that Elon is worried about. Anyway, despite the fact that he's being hailed as some kind of radical champion of free speech, and he's hailing himself that way, Elon is finding that he simply has to make the same judgment calls that any platform has to make if it doesn't want to turn into 4chan. And he's not playing 4D chess here. He's quite obviously making everything up as he goes along. Which, honestly, is fine. It might be impossible to make Twitter a good place for communication. I'm not going to fault Elon for failing to do the impossible. What I do fault him for is for being intellectually and ethically unserious, which is to say, totally reckless, when he touches real issues in front of 120 million people on the platform. One of the first things Elon did after taking over Twitter was tweet an article that claimed that the attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband was not at all what it seemed. It was rather a gay tryst gone wrong.

00:08:04 Sam Harris: But he is now goofing around in front of 120 million people. So, when he's high-fiving anti-Semites and election deniers, or bonding with them over their fake concerns about free speech, he doesn't appear to know or care that he's increasing their influence. In many cases, he might not have any idea who these people are. Of course, in others, like with his friend Kanye, he obviously does. There is something quite reckless and socially irresponsible about how Elon behaves on Twitter. and millions of people appear to love it. I should probably address the free speech issue briefly. There's a lot more to say about this, but before I left Twitter, I was noticing that people seemed really confused about what I believe about free speech. and Twitter being Twitter, it proved impossible for me to clear up that confusion. Many seem to think that I used to support free speech unconditionally, like when I was defending cartoonists against Islamist censors and their dupes on the left, but now I somehow don't support it because I supposedly have Trump derangement syndrome. Well, first, I've always acknowledged that there's an interesting debate to be had about the role that social media plays in our society. And I'm not going to resolve that debate here by myself. But the fact is, no one has a constitutional right to be on Twitter. In my view, the logic of the First Amendment runs in the opposite direction. It protects Twitter's new owner, Elon, from compelled speech. The government shouldn't be able to force Elon to put Alex Jones back on the platform, any more than it should be able to force me to put Alex Jones on my podcast.

00:01:47 Sam Harris: Social media is surely the seat of that dysfunction. But Twitter in particular because journalists and politicians appear immovably anchored to it. But as I'm going to say a few things about Elon, let me just confess my uncertainty about doing this. As I've said or implied before, Elon has been a friend. I'm not sure what the status of that friendship is now, frankly, and that has a lot to do with Twitter. And I've had to confront this problem before. I've had many friends, and now former friends, who have large public platforms, and who have said and done things in public over the years that I have found fairly reprehensible, and have had to figure out whether to say something about that. And I'm still uncertain about the ethics of all of this. I don't know what having a friendship or a form of friendship should count for at moments like this. My default is certainly to more carefully calibrate what I say or even whether I say anything at all in these cases. Whereas, if it's a stranger out there doing the analogous thing, I'll say something without much reflection about that. And I'm not sure which way the balance should swing. Should I be treating strangers more like friends? Should I be treating friends and former friends more like strangers? I honestly don't know what the answer is. But in the case of Elon, he's taking up so much bandwidth culturally that I feel like I have to say something. I just wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't comment on what he's doing over there at Twitter. So for better or worse, I'm going to do that now.

00:06:22 Sam Harris: I think I was one of maybe two or three interlopers there who just hadn't been invited, but sort of got himself invited. What was fascinating about that was that this was a collection of people who were very worried, like Elon and others who felt that we have to find some way to pull the brakes, even though that seems somewhat hopeless, to the people who were doing the work most energetically and most wanted to convince others not to worry about having to pull the brakes. And what was interesting there is that what I heard outside this conference, And what you hear, let's say on edge.org or in general discussions about the prospects of making real breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, you hear a time frame of 50 to 100 years before anything terribly scary or terribly interesting is going to happen. In this conference, that was almost never the case. Everyone who was still trying to ensure that they were doing this as safely as possible was still conceding that a time frame of five or ten years admitted of rather alarming progress. And so when I came back from that conference, the edge question for 2015 just happened to be on the topic of AI, so I wrote a short piece distilling what my view now was. Perhaps I'll just read that. It won't take too long, and hopefully it won't bore you. Can we avoid a digital apocalypse? It seems increasingly likely that we will one day build machines that possess superhuman intelligence. We need only continue to produce better computers, which we will unless we destroy ourselves or meet our end some other way. We already know that it's possible for mere matter to acquire, quote, general intelligence, the ability to learn new concepts and employ them in unfamiliar contexts, because the 1,200 cc's of salty porridge inside our heads has managed it.

00:34:01 Sam Harris: They may not be human-like, although presumably we'll build them to be as much like ourselves in all the good ways as possible, but this interests me for many different reasons, because one, in terms of existential risk, it's on my short list for things to actually worry about, but The flip side of that is that it's one of the most hopeful things. If anything seems intrinsically good, it's intelligence, and we want more of it. Insofar as it's reasonable to expect that we're going to make more and more progress automating things and building more intelligent systems, that seems very hopeful, and I think we can't but do it. The other point of interest for me, and this is my hobby horse, is that is actually what we were talking about on stage last time some years ago when I wrote The Moral Landscape. I'm interested in collapsing this perceived distance between facts and values, the idea that morality somehow is uncoupled to the world of science and truth claims. And I think that once we have to start building, and we even have to start even now with things like self-driving cars, once we start building our ethics into machines that within their domain are more powerful than we are, the sense that there are no better and worse answers to ethical questions, that we should all be moral relativists, that all cultures are equal with respect to what constitutes a good life, that just, I mean, there's going to be somebody sitting at the computer waiting to code something, and if you don't You've actually got to build in some moral values. You have to build in the values, and if you don't build it in, you're building in those values.

00:01:43 Sam Harris: Well, billionaires control so much of what's important that there's nothing new there. And from the right, there has been a lot of celebratory nonsense about how much is guaranteed to change under Elon's stewardship. If I was going to summarize my opinion here, I think I'm agnostic as to whether or not Elon can actually do much to improve Twitter. There's some obvious things he could and should do, and I trust will do, like cleaning up a lot of the bots and not doing some of the very stupid things that Twitter has done in the service of its moderation policy in the past. The people on the left that think that Twitter did not have a problem with heavy-handed moderation either weren't paying attention or agreed with that heavy-handed moderation for ideological reasons, right? I mean, literally someone got kicked off for life, I believe, for tweeting, men are not women, right? That was considered hate speech in the context in which she tweeted it. Meanwhile, ISIS and the Chinese Communist Party, I mean, all of these groups have accounts in good standing at that point, right? So that's crazy. And insofar as Elon is going to insist upon a more transparent and ethical moderation policy, That will be to the good, but in truth, if moderation were easy, someone would have figured it out by now. I'm not especially close to this problem technically and what algorithms can do to solve it, but it just seems like there are always going to be apes in the loop. at least to adjudicate someone being kicked off and reinstated. You need people at a certain point to process these claims of who should be kicked off and who shouldn't.

00:03:38 Sam Harris: I just wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't comment on what he's doing over there at Twitter. So for better or worse, I'm going to do that now. First, the underlying politics of the moment. In my view, there's a needle you really had to thread over the last half decade or so if you're going to be politically honest and ethically sane. And not that many people managed it. On the one side, you had to recognize how bad Trump was and is, not just as a person, but as a cultural phenomenon. You had to see how appalling it was that we elected such a person to the presidency. And then you had to be further appalled when we almost did it again, even while he was disavowing and openly violating the most sacred principle of our democracy, a commitment to the peaceful transfer of power. His behavior before, during, and after the events of January 6th amounted to a direct attack on the rule of law in this country. This was the first time in our history that a president has sought to hold onto power in this way. It was absolutely obvious at the time, but it has only become more obvious on the basis of subsequent investigations, that Trump knew he lost the 2020 election. And he put our democracy at risk by attempting to hold onto power, by perpetrating a conscious fraud of election denial. among other things, attempting to force his vice president, Mike Pence, to overturn the results of the election on January 6th. The real Trump derangement syndrome was not to have seen how bad all this was.

00:11:19 Sam Harris: Hell itself probably has a moderation policy. So-called free speech absolutism is just a fantasy online. Almost no one really holds that position, even when they espouse it. The fact that Twitter's terms of service might have been politically slanted or not applied fairly, I totally get why that would annoy people. And I suspect Elon is improving that. But this simply isn't a free speech issue. No one has a right to be on Twitter. Again, if we want to change the laws around that, we're free to. I'm not sure how that would look, and it seems like it would have some pretty bizarre implications, but that's what we'd have to do. So, my argument for keeping people like Trump and Alex Jones off Twitter is a terms-of-service argument and directly follows from the deliberate harm they both caused on the platform in the past. Here are two men who knowingly used Twitter to inspire their most rabid followers to harass specific people. Not just on Twitter, but out in the world. The fact that they might not have tweeted, please go harass this person, is immaterial. They knew exactly what would happen when they singled out specific American citizens for abuse and spread lies about them at scale to a fanatical mob. They could see the results of their actions. For years, people were getting doxxed and stalked and having their lives ruined for years. Nothing about this was hidden. Elon apparently agrees with me about Alex Jones and said he would never let him back on the platform. But he doesn't agree about Trump. Well, that's fine.

00:00:06 Sam Harris: Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, the end of the year is upon us. I'm going to talk a little bit about Twitter and Elon and free speech here. The end of my year was marked by, among other things, my deleting my Twitter account, which has been surprisingly significant. I've talked about this a little bit on the podcast. on other people's podcasts, but it was really like leaving a bad relationship, and psychologically it was a pretty interesting thing to do. But Twitter has been everywhere. I'm still seeing the signs of its chaos everywhere in the press, so I feel like I should take a few minutes to reflect on what I think is happening there and how it relates to what's happening in American society generally. Twitter is in many ways the seat of our societal dysfunction. Social media is surely the seat of that dysfunction. But Twitter in particular because journalists and politicians appear immovably anchored to it.

00:25:35 Sam Harris: One of the first things Elon did after taking over Twitter was tweet an article that claimed that the attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband was not at all what it seemed. It was rather a gay tryst gone wrong. And then when it became obvious just how crazy his source was, I believe it was a website that had previously claimed that Hillary Clinton was dead and that a body double was campaigning in her place, when it became embarrassing to have tweeted that, He just deleted the tweet without comment. Delete the tweet, fine, but when you see that you have amplified a crazy conspiracy theory that turns a savage attack on an innocent person into a Trumpist meme and punchline, you should apologize and correct the record. He did the same thing when he brought Kanye back on Twitter. He tweeted some meme where he was high-fiving him, and then deleted that meme without comment once Kanye's anti-Semitic podcast tour fully ran off the rails. Again, Kanye's anti-Semitism was already obvious, and Elon was signal-boosting all that lunacy by celebrating his return to Twitter in the first place. That was a totally irresponsible thing to do. And speaking of doxing and security concerns, Elon publicly vilified his former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, in a way that was objectively dangerous. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes, NAMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app.

00:24:08 Sam Harris: I think it probably shouldn't be. But Elon is making himself look ridiculous by trumpeting his free speech absolutism, only to then rescind it without acknowledging the apparent hypocrisy. And the resulting ad hoc policy that he's now supposedly implementing, that no real-time information about the whereabouts of people will be tolerated, just seems impossible to enforce or even to adequately define. I mean, there's obviously a ton of celebrity coverage that is publicity, or legitimate journalism, or just random fun information, which could suddenly look like the, quote, real-time doxing that Elon is worried about. Anyway, despite the fact that he's being hailed as some kind of radical champion of free speech, and he's hailing himself that way, Elon is finding that he simply has to make the same judgment calls that any platform has to make if it doesn't want to turn into 4chan. And he's not playing 4D chess here. He's quite obviously making everything up as he goes along. Which, honestly, is fine. It might be impossible to make Twitter a good place for communication. I'm not going to fault Elon for failing to do the impossible. What I do fault him for is for being intellectually and ethically unserious, which is to say, totally reckless, when he touches real issues in front of 120 million people on the platform. One of the first things Elon did after taking over Twitter was tweet an article that claimed that the attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband was not at all what it seemed. It was rather a gay tryst gone wrong.

00:08:32 Sam Harris: And I've also looked at some of the Twitter Files releases that are only available on Twitter. Now, apparently Elon was dunking on me after I closed my account, and obviously misunderstanding my views about Trump and the Hunter Biden laptop story, along with everyone else. He said something suggesting that though I wrote a book against lying, I now believe that it was ethical and even necessary to lie to try to deny Trump the presidency. He surely got that impression from the two-minute clip from the Trigonometry podcast that went viral in right-wing circles. Of course, this is symptomatic of the very problem at issue. I believe that clip was made by an anti-vax lunatic and then spread to the ends of the earth by a pizzagate lunatic, and it misrepresents what I clearly meant in the context of that interview. In any case, I've never suggested that it was ethical, much less necessary to lie, to resist Trump. All I said was that I understood the impulse to ignore the Hunter Biden laptop story until after the 2020 election, because it had been dropped as an October surprise, purposely close to the election, so there would be just enough time for the controversy over it to detonate and have its intended effect, and not enough time to debunk it, if it could be debunked. The emergence of the laptop definitely looked shady. It looked like it could be disinformation, and there was every reason to be circumspect about it. This wasn't a choice of consciously withholding the God's honest truth, much less lying about it, in order to sway an ordinary election. It was a choice to ignore a very murky story for a few weeks in the face of an election that was already being disputed even before it was run by a sociopathic president who would not commit to a peaceful transfer of power.

00:04:56 Sam Harris: And of course, my enemies will summarize this as Sam Harris thinks that it should be legal to discriminate against blacks and gays and women. Can you say something about artificial intelligence, AI, and your concerns about it? Yeah, well, this is a very interesting topic. The question of how to build artificial intelligence that isn't going to destroy us is something that I've only begun to pay attention to, and it is a rather deep and consequential problem. I went to a conference in Puerto Rico focused on this issue, organized by the Future of Life Institute. And I was brought there by a friend, Elon Musk, who no doubt many of you have heard of. And Elon had recently said publicly that he thought AI was the greatest threat to human survival, perhaps greater than nuclear weapons. And many people took that as an incredibly hyperbolic statement. Now, knowing Elon and knowing how close to the details he's apt to be, I took it as a very interesting diagnosis of a problem, but I wasn't quite sure what I thought about it because I hadn't really spent much time focusing on the progress we've been making in AI and its implication. So I went to this conference in San Juan, held by and for the people who are closest to doing this work. This was not open to the public. I think I was one of maybe two or three interlopers there who just hadn't been invited, but sort of got himself invited. What was fascinating about that was that this was a collection of people who were very worried, like Elon and others who felt that we have to find some way to pull the brakes, even though that seems somewhat hopeless, to the people who were doing the work most energetically and most wanted to convince others not to worry about having to pull the brakes.

00:08:04 Sam Harris: But he is now goofing around in front of 120 million people. So, when he's high-fiving anti-Semites and election deniers, or bonding with them over their fake concerns about free speech, he doesn't appear to know or care that he's increasing their influence. In many cases, he might not have any idea who these people are. Of course, in others, like with his friend Kanye, he obviously does. There is something quite reckless and socially irresponsible about how Elon behaves on Twitter. and millions of people appear to love it. I should probably address the free speech issue briefly. There's a lot more to say about this, but before I left Twitter, I was noticing that people seemed really confused about what I believe about free speech. and Twitter being Twitter, it proved impossible for me to clear up that confusion. Many seem to think that I used to support free speech unconditionally, like when I was defending cartoonists against Islamist censors and their dupes on the left, but now I somehow don't support it because I supposedly have Trump derangement syndrome. Well, first, I've always acknowledged that there's an interesting debate to be had about the role that social media plays in our society. And I'm not going to resolve that debate here by myself. But the fact is, no one has a constitutional right to be on Twitter. In my view, the logic of the First Amendment runs in the opposite direction. It protects Twitter's new owner, Elon, from compelled speech. The government shouldn't be able to force Elon to put Alex Jones back on the platform, any more than it should be able to force me to put Alex Jones on my podcast.

00:24:03 Sam Harris: In my mind, it really doesn't matter how much money he spends on himself, right? Because anything he spends on himself really is just a rounding error on the amount of money he will ultimately be giving away. The difference between him living in a studio apartment and him having a 30,000 square foot house in one of the most expensive cities on earth would be almost impossible to discern against his actual wealth. Obviously, he's an outlier, but something like that applies to the rest of us. I do think that if we're going to solve our problems collectively, It's not going to be a matter of convincing the most affluent people and societies to make significant sacrifices. I think we need to improve technology. We need to increasingly produce what we produce in a carbon-neutral way, and then we need to prioritize helping people and safeguarding the future. And I really do think we can massively change how we allocate resources without stigmatizing wealth. And part of this has to do with creating virtuous cycles that leverage people's desire for better things. This has happened with electric cars. Elon Musk started building electric cars that did not represent a sacrifice for anyone. He made electric cars some of the most desirable cars ever built. I mean, you have to spend something like two million dollars on a combustion engine car to have a car that is faster than the current version of the Model S. So, if you want a fast car, it's completely rational to want an electric one at this point. And I think that's the path forward on many other fronts, in particular with the problem of climate change.

00:13:46 Sam Harris: And I think, as it sounds like you do, that he's probably not committed, not truly committed to anything all that scary. So he's actually less scary than some of the other Republican candidates in terms of how they would likely govern. Also, I don't think he stands a chance of becoming president, so I'm not worried about him in any deep sense. But he is a genuinely comic figure, and it's hard to imagine people who truly like him not seeing that. The fact that anyone's taking him as a truly successful and brilliant billionaire who has gravitas because of how much he's accomplished, That's very hard for me to believe, but I'm sure most of the people who support him do more or less take him in that sense.

00:14:36 (someone): I mean, for the last many years, I've been writing on a defense of human rationality. arguing contrary people like uh... my friend john height that were actually far more rational reflective than people give us credit for even people even in our political domain uh... we we are capable of rational thought ration liberation i have to say you know this the republican uh... debate in trump in general is proving to be an embarrassment for my theory yeah i i i i i would feel like getting refuted more and more each day by watching the reactions to Trump. And I feel, you know, and it's kind of sad that at some level... Well, let me back up. You know, Chomsky has famously argued that the rational thing to do is not to care about the debates between the political parties, because to all intents and purposes, they're the same. They're all the parties of big business and imperialism and so on.

00:01:47 Sam Harris: Social media is surely the seat of that dysfunction. But Twitter in particular because journalists and politicians appear immovably anchored to it. But as I'm going to say a few things about Elon, let me just confess my uncertainty about doing this. As I've said or implied before, Elon has been a friend. I'm not sure what the status of that friendship is now, frankly, and that has a lot to do with Twitter. And I've had to confront this problem before. I've had many friends, and now former friends, who have large public platforms, and who have said and done things in public over the years that I have found fairly reprehensible, and have had to figure out whether to say something about that. And I'm still uncertain about the ethics of all of this. I don't know what having a friendship or a form of friendship should count for at moments like this. My default is certainly to more carefully calibrate what I say or even whether I say anything at all in these cases. Whereas, if it's a stranger out there doing the analogous thing, I'll say something without much reflection about that. And I'm not sure which way the balance should swing. Should I be treating strangers more like friends? Should I be treating friends and former friends more like strangers? I honestly don't know what the answer is. But in the case of Elon, he's taking up so much bandwidth culturally that I feel like I have to say something. I just wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't comment on what he's doing over there at Twitter. So for better or worse, I'm going to do that now.

00:21:20 Sam Harris: But that is not where we currently are. Anyway, recent weeks have shown that the so-called free speech absolutists, including Elon, can't possibly take their own absolutism seriously. Elon has admitted that Twitter will be throttling negative speech under the rubric that freedom of speech doesn't entail freedom of reach. Great. This is identical to my observation that algorithmically boosted speech isn't normal speech. No one has a constitutional right to have their speech algorithmically boosted. I obviously agree with Elon's apparent policy on this point. But it is an absolute repudiation of what many people were hoping for from his tenure at Twitter. And it's a repudiation of the results he claimed to be delivering. That's worth noticing. If you have the wrong political opinions, like maybe you're a Nazi, Elon intends to make your speech virtually unseen and unheard on Twitter. Or he might just kick you off the platform. He decided to kick Kanye off Twitter again because he tweeted a weird swastika inside of a Jewish star. Honestly, that was further than I would have gone. Elon said that this violated Twitter's policy about calling for violence. But I don't actually see a swastika, in any form, as a clear call for violence. So I think I'd be more of a free speech absolutist than Elon in this case. Anyway, the deeper point is that Elon knew that Kanye was an unhinged anti-Semite when he made a great show of letting him back on Twitter.

00:36:36 Sam Harris: This is footage that I'm sure at some point will become jaded enough to say well that's of course that's the way that's supposed to work but watching those boosters land perfectly in unison it just looks like a science fiction movie from the 80s that you know was just preposterous and then when you when you think you sort of alluded to why that happened right when he's being interviewed i remember him talking about it

00:37:01 (someone): In the sense of I just thought about what was possible and I thought it was possible It was physically possible to reuse rockets and so he thought about the problem in a different way and he has a very Great ability to attract not only capital but people to working on those problems and the result can be amazing, but it's also Important to note that not all of those results are amazing. I mean we see this sort of like SpaceX's the world and we probably don't see that hundreds or thousands of companies that rethink the problem as well and fail but I mean that's how we make incremental progress as a Right, but that is I guess that's probably another mental model you have written about there's a survivorship bias

00:37:46 Sam Harris: that we're constantly being advertised the evidence of only those success stories, and we're not given any true indication of the ocean of failures that is behind many of those. Maybe we should talk about that. I mean, I guess this also connects to another model, which is just understanding base rates. I mean, just how many new businesses succeed, for instance. It's like this is not something that you necessarily understand when you calculate the probability that any new venture is gonna work out for you.

00:38:19 (someone): I mean, our view is based on ego, right?

00:35:18 Sam Harris: You mentioned Elon, yesterday he successfully launched his Falcon Heavy rocket and landed all the booster stages, right? So this fundamental change of thinking of rocket launches as something that should be totally reusable, and you've got to figure out how to land these things, land the first stage, on its face sounds like a crazy idea, but once you set that goal based on rethinking the first principles of the whole enterprise, now we've discovered there's a solution. But that requires such a vast use of resources to rethink something so fundamental in an area that's so expensive already. I mean, obviously, the goal here is to cut the costs and to make it a bigger industry. It's easy to see that you could have gone down that path, and for a very long time for Elon, it looked like he was going down this path to a waiting cliff, right? There was no guarantee of success. What an amazing time to be alive. Yeah, it's really nuts.

00:36:18 (someone): I just want to say that, right? Like watching rockets launch and sort of like re-land and then redeploy.

00:36:24 Sam Harris: Well, that footage is so, there are a few things which every time you see them, you don't really habituate to how weird and futuristic they seem. This is footage that I'm sure at some point will become jaded enough to say well that's of course that's the way that's supposed to work but watching those boosters land perfectly in unison it just looks like a science fiction movie from the 80s that you know was just preposterous and then when you when you think you sort of alluded to why that happened right when he's being interviewed i remember him talking about it

00:03:38 Sam Harris: I just wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't comment on what he's doing over there at Twitter. So for better or worse, I'm going to do that now. First, the underlying politics of the moment. In my view, there's a needle you really had to thread over the last half decade or so if you're going to be politically honest and ethically sane. And not that many people managed it. On the one side, you had to recognize how bad Trump was and is, not just as a person, but as a cultural phenomenon. You had to see how appalling it was that we elected such a person to the presidency. And then you had to be further appalled when we almost did it again, even while he was disavowing and openly violating the most sacred principle of our democracy, a commitment to the peaceful transfer of power. His behavior before, during, and after the events of January 6th amounted to a direct attack on the rule of law in this country. This was the first time in our history that a president has sought to hold onto power in this way. It was absolutely obvious at the time, but it has only become more obvious on the basis of subsequent investigations, that Trump knew he lost the 2020 election. And he put our democracy at risk by attempting to hold onto power, by perpetrating a conscious fraud of election denial. among other things, attempting to force his vice president, Mike Pence, to overturn the results of the election on January 6th. The real Trump derangement syndrome was not to have seen how bad all this was.

00:22:44 Sam Harris: So I think I'd be more of a free speech absolutist than Elon in this case. Anyway, the deeper point is that Elon knew that Kanye was an unhinged anti-Semite when he made a great show of letting him back on Twitter. What did he think was going to happen? Admittedly, it was surprising to see Kanye show up on Alex Jones's crazy show in a gimp hood praising Hitler. Even Alex Jones appeared shocked by that. But still, we knew where Kanye stood on the Jews a long time ago. And then there was all the craziness around Elon suspending the accounts of the kid who was tracking his private jet, along with the private jets of other celebrities. This college kid had created a bot, which did nothing more than aggregate publicly available information. The problem was, Elon had previously used this kid as an example of his unalloyed commitment to free speech. He said, look, I'm even protecting the speech of this guy who is tracking my plane and increasing my security concerns, only to then suspend the kid's account, along with the accounts of real journalists who had merely reported on the story. I'm totally sympathetic with Elon's security concerns here. Having the exact GPS coordinates and arrival time of his plane continuously published vastly increases his personal security risks, as well as those of his family. I'm not sure why this information is publicly available in the first place. I think it probably shouldn't be. But Elon is making himself look ridiculous by trumpeting his free speech absolutism, only to then rescind it without acknowledging the apparent hypocrisy.

00:18:36 Sam Harris: effective altruism there. I guess his one salient point was that creating economic value, i.e. doing business, is generally the best way to help people at scale and reduce unnecessary suffering. And I guess I think we could easily concede that insofar as that's true, You know, and wherever it happens to be true, it would be very easy for us to say, okay, well then, sure, let business solve our problems. And so there's, you know, and I don't think you would resist that conclusion wherever it's true. I mean, I think there, one could certainly argue that Someone like Elon Musk by building desirable electric cars has done, if not more good, a different species of good than many forms of environmental activism have to move us away from a climate change catastrophe. So, if that's true, let's bracket that, and it's hard to know what exactly is true there, but I certainly have an intuition that there's a place for business and even a majority place for business to affect our climate outcome and that it might be greater than charity. he seemed to think that was a real, you know, some kind of coup de gras against effective altruism and even philanthropy in general. But I think that blow just passes right by us, doesn't it?

00:20:03 (someone): Yeah, so the thing that I'll say that's the grain of truth in that criticism is that under some, in some circumstances, markets can be extremely good ways of allocating resources. So take the problem of people having access to the internet and to computing technology in the United States, at least for people who are middle class or above, then, you know, businesses are dealing with that, like, at least relatively well.

00:06:38 Sam Harris: I've also heard that many people are interpreting my leaving Twitter as an act of protest over what Elon is doing to the platform. In particular, his reinstating of Trump. It really wasn't that. I do think Elon made some bad decisions right out of the gate. And Twitter did get noticeably worse, at least for me. But I'm actually agnostic as to whether he will eventually be able to improve the platform. I doubt he'll ever solve the problem I was having. But he might make Twitter better for many people, and he might make it a viable business. He certainly has the resources to keep at it, even if advertisers abandon Twitter for years. So my leaving Twitter wasn't some declaration that I know, or think I know, that Elon will fail to make Twitter better than it currently is. I have no idea what's going to happen to Twitter. Rather, the lesson I was drawing from Elon was not that he was making Twitter worse by making capricious changes to it. The lesson was how one of the most productive people of my generation was needlessly disrupting his own life and damaging his reputation by his addiction to Twitter. And this has been going on for years. Elon's problem with Twitter is different than mine was because he uses it very differently. He spends most of his time just goofing around. But he is now goofing around in front of 120 million people. So, when he's high-fiving anti-Semites and election deniers, or bonding with them over their fake concerns about free speech, he doesn't appear to know or care that he's increasing their influence.

00:01:43 Sam Harris: Well, billionaires control so much of what's important that there's nothing new there. And from the right, there has been a lot of celebratory nonsense about how much is guaranteed to change under Elon's stewardship. If I was going to summarize my opinion here, I think I'm agnostic as to whether or not Elon can actually do much to improve Twitter. There's some obvious things he could and should do, and I trust will do, like cleaning up a lot of the bots and not doing some of the very stupid things that Twitter has done in the service of its moderation policy in the past. The people on the left that think that Twitter did not have a problem with heavy-handed moderation either weren't paying attention or agreed with that heavy-handed moderation for ideological reasons, right? I mean, literally someone got kicked off for life, I believe, for tweeting, men are not women, right? That was considered hate speech in the context in which she tweeted it. Meanwhile, ISIS and the Chinese Communist Party, I mean, all of these groups have accounts in good standing at that point, right? So that's crazy. And insofar as Elon is going to insist upon a more transparent and ethical moderation policy, That will be to the good, but in truth, if moderation were easy, someone would have figured it out by now. I'm not especially close to this problem technically and what algorithms can do to solve it, but it just seems like there are always going to be apes in the loop. at least to adjudicate someone being kicked off and reinstated. You need people at a certain point to process these claims of who should be kicked off and who shouldn't.