#41 — Faith in Reason
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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.

My guest today is Eric Weinstein.

who is a mathematician and physicist and economist and all-around interesting guy who's currently the managing director of Thiel Capital. Now, as most of you know who have listened to previous podcasts, my interviews are really more conversations than interviews. I would guess I usually take up about, I don't know, 40% of the space.

But if this exchange seems a little more self-referential than normal, I would just like to give you a little context as to why, which I briefly do in the beginning of my conversation with Eric. Eric actually reached out to me, suggesting that he could help me think a little more clearly about how to engage the kinds of controversial issues I tend to deal with. So while we talk about many different things, the subtext is that he's performing a bit of an intervention on me.

So I hope that explains why I didn't ask him more questions about all the fascinating stuff he's into. That'll have to wait until next time. In any case, Eric is a very interesting guy, as you will easily discern. And he was also very generous in his efforts to talk some sense into me. So without any more preamble, I give you Eric Weinstein. So I'm here with Eric Weinstein. Eric, thanks for coming on the podcast. Well, thanks for having me over. So I was trying to remember how we got connected and...

I now recognize why I was confused. I heard you on Tim's podcast, and I loved that conversation and was poised to get in touch with you. But then you got in touch with me, I think, just on your own on Twitter, having noticed some of my collisions with people. You expressed, and I have the quote here, but by email, you were dismayed to find that people who you expected would be rational and not

not at all anti-intellectual, were in conversation with me on various topics proving to be just that. And you said that you found them trying to rescue the failed bits of multiculturalism at seemingly any cost to logic and ethics. And this was at the time Noam Chomsky and Glenn Greenwald, who you said that of, and you wanted to just reach out and see if you could help. And I obviously am very happy you did that, and I'm happy to have any help I can get

But then in the setup to this podcast, you had the somewhat comical and perhaps disconcerting experience of pinging some of your friends about me, only to find that at least two of them also counted themselves among my enemies. Maybe enemies is too strong a term for one of them, but you are friends with Nassim Taleb, the quant author of The Black Swan, and he has made his hatred, might not be too strong a word, but he certainly made his

displeasure with me fairly indelible on Twitter. That is odd for you to discover in the setup here. And also David Eagleman, the neuroscientist who I had kind of an aborted debate with, and that was far less prickly, but still a failure of communication, which from my side happened very much along the lines of these other failures you notice, where there's a kind of, I guess I often think of it as a

my opponent or the interlocutor who becomes my opponent finds him or herself wanting to play a good cop, bad cop routine with me. I have a criticism of religion in most cases here that people find whether they're religious or not. In most of these cases, the other person is not religious, but they find it somehow synonymous with the breaking of some taboo or they consider it uncivil in a way.

they try to take a position against what I think is undeniably just the intellectually honest position to take at this moment in human history.

the conversation breaks down. And so, yeah, you and I are going to talk about the limits of reason on some level and see if we can advance the tools we have mutually to have rational conversations. But it's just interesting that even the agenda we have here today in this conversation got subtly eroded by you, perhaps you can tell me, but I would imagine a crisis of confidence on your side where you, because you're reaching out to your network

to figure out who is this guy, and you receive some pushback. But perhaps in the midst of answering that, you can say a bit about who you are and your history of intellectual interests and how you come to this conversation. - It'd be a pleasure. I mean, I think one of the things that caused me to come down when it's obviously much more convenient to do this over Skype or over the internet,

is I've seen too many good marriages and rich friendships break up over ASCII and Unicode, and that there's something about the electronic medium which denies us empathy, face-to-face contact, and very often we get off on a wrong foot and we don't know how to write it in real life. And so in part, it's my distrust of whether these are essential conflicts or

This could be like the Trotskyist-Leninist-Stalinist versus the Stalinist-Trotskyists. These are hairsbreadths of difference in that they tend to get much more exaggerated in terms of the heat that they generate. And then there's also this very interesting problem, and in fact around my office we call it the limits of discourse problem after some of your adventures and misadventures.

And the question is, who can play? When two people sit down to discuss a topic, is there any set of descriptors which can predict whether the conversation will be rich or whether it will derail over more or less intellectually trivial features? Yeah. So what is your background, briefly, in just your intellectual history and your current interests? Where are you focused mostly? I mean, I think by education and credential, I would be a mathematician,

I've held positions in mathematics, physics, and economics departments. I've worked in hedge funds and finance, risk, and I'm now managing director of Thiel Capital, working with Peter Thiel in San Francisco on a wide variety of things through the Thiel Foundation, our macro trading outfit, and various venture funds and

trying to make the world a better place in both the private sector and public intellectualism. So I know Peter, and not well, obviously, I've just met him a few times, but the first idea for this conversation was actually to have the three of us speak, and scheduling may have made that difficult. But also, I think it's a good thing, given what I've said on the podcast about Trump and his recent speech to the RNC,

I just think we would, and I would love to talk to Peter, you know, Peter shouldn't take this part the wrong way, but I just think we would have had to have spoken about Trump at length in a way that would have just subsumed everything else in the conversation. And I'm happy to speak about politics with you, but it's,

Again, this is one of those issues that proves so difficult to talk about. So I don't know what the outcome of my talking to Peter about Trump would be, but what do you think it is about politics, perhaps second only to religion, that makes conversation either reliably impossible or just so difficult? It's a great question, of course. I have a 2016 version of this answer that might not be the same as the answer I'd given in another election year.

I think right at the moment, the problem is, is that a lot of us, and I assume you and I are roughly the same age. I'm 50. You're pretty close. 49, yeah. Okay. I think that fundamentally we're trying to express ourselves through people who don't represent us. And this isn't their time. This is our time.

And there's no way I can represent myself through Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, or Donald Trump. They don't share my experience. I don't have the same reference points that they do. My life doesn't resemble theirs. They went through different formative experiences than I did. And I think that part of the problem is that we're trapped in prisons of language and we're grooved in ways of thinking that we're adapted to, and I think poorly adapted to the world of the 1980s.

80s and beyond, I feel like the Reagan era more or less went from 1980 to 2008. And then we've been in a zombie period where we don't have new theories. We just sort of have these old theories that don't die because we don't have anything to replace them with.

and they wander the landscape, wrecking havoc. And I think that what you're doing, and what I would like to think that I'm trying to do, and perhaps Peter is doing, is trying to come up with different languages and new ways of speaking so that people don't end up in these cul-de-sacs intellectually, which seem to be attracting most of the population. So I think in some sense, Sam, it's our failure. It's your and my failure and Peter's failure

that we are not expressing ourselves as ourselves. So I'm here as your future running mate, potentially for 2020. I think we're doomed. That says more about me than you. I really think, if I can make an analogy, let's assume that the marketplace of ideas is something we take seriously. We've been in sort of an era previously, which you might think of as like a mutual fund area where there's only long only. Are you for multiculturalism or against it? Are you

for immigration or against it. And I think that all of the really interesting positions right now are sort of hedge fund like positions and we'd call them relative value trades.

you know, am I, I'm for a mild increase with a lot of scrutiny on refugees, uh, to, to increase our refugee intake because I think it's humane. And I think that they make great Americans because they're so grateful that somebody took them in, in their hour of need if we screen properly. And I'm against other forms of immigration, like skilled immigration, uh, increases where we tether people to their employers through H1B visas. So the idea is I don't have any

pro or anti position on immigration, I have a long short position. And I think that because most people don't have an idea that you can hold a long short position, we're trapped in this nonsense discussion about, in my opinion, three topics which are dividing us, which are trade, immigration, and terror. And

Fundamentally, because you and I have not done a great job of pushing out simple models and good language for dealing with these things, I think that the generation before us talks in completely inadequate terms. And so it's up to us to rectify it. So that's one of the reasons I'm excited to be here. Yeah, yeah. I think we could probably add race to that list. And then I think it covers at least 80% of our problems.

So what is it that you worry about now in terms of intellectual trends and bad ideas that are regnant? I mean, I have this line that I think is true, and I certainly have used enough to hope it's true, that bad ideas are worse than bad people. There are not that many bad people in the world. I think on any appropriate metric, there's probably 1% psychopaths walking around

But what you find more and more often when you pay attention is just that they're

There are good people under the sway, or more or less good people, certainly psychologically normal people, under the sway of bad ideas. And they think they're doing good, or they're committed to some principle that may be even locally good, or at least ethically defensible, but doesn't survive scaling, or they're not paying attention to the associated costs of living that way or thinking that way. And what I constantly find myself encountering

are people who are absolutely sure they are on the right side of an important issue, but they're behaving, to my eye, patently unethically. And I think it probably does have something to do with what you just described as being non-obvious to them, that you can have a nuanced or a long, short position on any of these topics and have that be not only coherent and intellectually defensible, but perhaps

the only intellectually defensible position in the end. And yet, because it doesn't survive the broad strokes litmus test of are you for immigration or not, or against Islam or not, or for religious pluralism or not, it comes under immediate stigma and kind of straw man attacks. Anyway, that's one thing that I noticed that worries me. But what sort of

shibboleths and fake ideas and bad ones are you worried about this moment? All of them. I mean, I'm really actually worried about the abstraction that makes this, uh, makes it so difficult to think because one of the things that, um, and this is kind of a half compliment, half critique, uh, for you is that I think it's so hard to do what you're doing to, to sort of

recreate an entire intellectual world from scratch that is of a piece, that is interoperable, self-consistent, moral, decent, but which allows you to get everywhere. And I see you as sort of having this

It's almost like you've built a yacht that only you can sail with all of these cables and riggings. And so that's not going to work. I am estimating your vocabulary must be something 40,000 words or more. I don't have that. And I think that we have to, in fact...

first understand that most of us aren't going to be able to pull off the trick that you're trying to do. It's too difficult. I've called you the intellectual Alex Honnold before because you're like this intellectual free soloist where one false move and you're doomed. - Now watch me fall. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think it can't be that we actually push people to do that. But I think that there's a hidden villain in the story. And I think that the hidden villain

are these very often three-letter organizations, WSJ, NYT, DNC, RNC, FOX. And what they're doing is a really interesting trick of subtracting narratives that have this long, short character.

And so I've come up with this model, which unfortunately we're not doing this on video. I'd go to a whiteboard. But if you picture an X, Y axis, an X and a Y axis, and the X axis is some sort of

elite rent-seeking policy, something that the elite rent-seekers want. - Can you define rent-seeking? - Rent-seeking is the ultimate insult from an economist. It says that you're trying to profit without really producing anything. And so if you're, let's say, what was the founding myth?

of the Carlisle group, they figured out that Eskimos had some right to a tax write-off from a failed Eskimo business. And so it turned out that you could sell those rights in some way and you could profit from it. So it probably wasn't intended to be, you know, for a Jewish businessman to figure this out, but that would be some form of rent seeking. And so the real villains in the story aren't the elite, as we say, because I don't think, you know,

Top intellectuals and great scientists and fantastic athletes are the problem. I think it's the elite rent seekers. And they have certain things they're trying to accomplish. And most of us don't really know who they are. They don't really want a lot of publicity. But they're very skilled operators in our system. And when they want a policy, what happens is that whatever organs are attached to that group, they tell a story that where there's smoke, there is always fire. And the smoke is opposition policy.

to their proposal and the fire is some sort of moral failing. And so if you'll permit me visually, imagine that you're going counterclockwise around the XY plane. So the first quadrant I call the dupes, sometimes the ivy covered dupes. These are people who have gone to maybe elite schools. They think that they are the elite, but in fact, they're probably making less than half a million a year. They may have a second home.

but they're not really in control and they don't realize that they are in fact being propagandized. And it's very difficult to work with this because they're convinced that they're the ones in the know. In the second quadrant, you have first principles thinkers, contrarians, and people who are fiercely independent. In the third quadrant, you have troglodytes,

people who are opposed to the elite policies, but also may have the moral failings that the elite wish to tar them with. And in the fourth quadrant, you have the shadowy rent-seeking elite. And so what happens is that the Y axis is the moral virtue vice axis.

And the media narrative is like a straight line running from the southwest to the northeast. It says that there's an absolute correlation between people who agree with the elite policy and moral virtue. And so what's happening constantly is if I'm a restrictionist on immigration, but I'm also a xenophile, I have a lifelong love of travel.

I care about learning languages, most of my friends come from foreign places. There's some sort of a story that you couldn't possibly be a restrictionist xenophile. You couldn't possibly both support the police and be absolutely outraged at their killing of innocents in unforgivable circumstances.

What we're finding is that every time we try to tell a story about being in the second quadrant, we get mapped to the third quadrant because we oppose these things.

But we don't have the moral failings that they would expect. And worse, people who aren't putting the same kind of intellectual energy, but who have an instinct that the elite policies are wrong, they end up in the troglodyte quadrant in quadrant three, unfortunately, because their intuition says, I think our immigration must be completely out of control. Who calls illegal aliens undocumented workers?

If I take an illegal drug, is that an undocumented drug? If I do an illegal act of violence, is that an undocumented act? The Orwellian newspeak triggers many people. And if they can't figure out how to hold the right long, short position, they may just have an instinct to actually start behaving badly and maybe believe that Mexicans are the source of our problems if they're crossing illegally over the border rather than becoming mostly landscapers.

you know, or people in the service industry. And so in part, what I'm looking to do is to take the small number of people who are strong enough to try to voice this way of thinking and say, you know, it's entirely possible to oppose these policies, which are nakedly rent-seeking, and still be quite virtuous. That expansion of the left-right model to the four-quadrant model

I think is going to liberate a lot of people who've been drifting to the right who wonder what happened to the left. When did it become a crime to support liberal ideas within what is traditionally thought of as left of center politics? When you started that description of the four quadrants, though, I imagine that you, and perhaps I think you suggested that it is very much a top-down, somewhat

star chamber effort to bend humanity to the will of the elite. And I guess that may be going on as well. It's just, I feel like my encounters with really confused dogmatic thinking from both the left and the right has been more democratized than that. So it's hard for me to imagine that some of the salon writers, say, who attacked me or people on the left who now

my friend Majid Nawaz calls the regressive left, people for whom any criticism of Islam as a set of ideas and of its consequences in the world becomes synonymous with bigotry and even racism. I feel like the people who purvey that confusion are just

journalists trying to get by and bloggers, people who are not in touch with whatever rent-seeking elite you imagine may be behind the scenes. So how- What's the transmission? Yeah, are there two things going on that are fundamentally disconnected or is there actually communication between these names we don't know and-

the journalists and pseudo-journalists who we do? - There is. I mean, first of all, the people who you're talking about in Salon, I would probably have in the first quadrant. They would think of themselves as very intellectual, very knowledgeable. But let's look at the exact construct of how you get into trouble with some of them. They don't mind you being against religions, but it's very important that you are against all religions equally, that no religion is worse or better than any other religion. Right? So this, the idea is,

That is, in some sense, the policy that all religions must be treated the same way. And let's take my religion and Jainism rather than anything involving Islam. So I come from a Jewish background. You cannot tell me that we Jews are no more nor less violent than the Jains. Deuteronomy suggests that savagery is in our past. We probably started this whole Abramic murderous frenzy against the apostates.

and we have to take responsibility for it. Now, we don't kill apostates anymore because of some fancy footwork to deactivate the bad code, but the idea is that somebody who was neither Jewish nor Jain would feel incredibly uncomfortable making the comment that I just made. And so the idea is that...

He who breaks the equality between religions, who voices any difference that some are better or worse on different points, must have a moral failing, which that they are secretly bigoted. And so the idea is that you are breaking the inference pattern. You don't seem to be

There's no vibe that you give off generically that indicates to me that you particularly hate any particular religion or group of people. But the idea is that by breaking that one principle, the next move is that you are allowed to infer the moral failing that must have led you to do that.

Let's now swap out the two religions that we just talked about and talk about, let's say, Islam and Christianity. So if you wish to say that there's more of a connection at the moment between Islam and terror than Christianity and terror, at least in 2016, this is prima facie obvious. There's just from statistics that nobody who's looking at what's going on

I think can claim that suicide bombings are higher in Christianity than they are in Islam. However, I should say just as a caveat there that you will have people and there have been articles written on this topic, I think even in Salon, claiming that right-wing Christian terrorism in the U.S. is a worse problem than Muslim terrorism. And they get to that number by

first starting counting the bodies after September 11th, right? And obviously there's been very few terrorist incidents of any type in the US since then. And they throw in attempted terrorist attacks and acts of eco-terrorism. For instance, you destroy a car dealership, that's domestic terrorism. It gets counted against Islamic terrorism. So in any case, there are people who believe

contrary to all rational analysis of the evidence, that Christian terrorism in the U.S. is a much bigger problem and is a likely bigger problem going forward. And I'm not against a careful, I mean, I have no prejudices against, I might point out something that almost never gets pointed out, that if I'm not mistaken, all of the people who have successfully

penetrated the US Capitol building as suicide terrorists have been Jewish. I think there's only one guy and he was an Israeli. Now, of course, that can go crazy on Twitter, but I think this is what we would call steel manning our opponent's point. We can point to

We can help our opponents make their case and then try to show them that we come in good faith because what we're really interested in is not pointing fingers at any particular group. We're interested in figuring out how to restore civility. A much better argument against that would be to say that every A-10 warthog

is an instrument of terror. And I really want to talk about message violence and the way that states communicate message violence, which would probably be something that Noam Chomsky would want to discuss. And I think that that's a fair point. But where it gets suspicious is where you start to see the motivated reasoning, which is how do I shut you down so that you don't point at something which feels very dangerous? And I think that you have an instinct to point at very dangerous things, not

to make the danger worse. But we don't yet have a truly terrible terror problem. You know, ex-ante, ex-post, if it's your child is murdered, you know, your terror problem is as bad as it gets. However, what you and I are both worried about is where we are headed, future instability, and how we could get into a mess that we will

not really be able to get out of without significant damage and injury to the American experiment that I think that both of us are very excited about, even if we're troubled about where it is at the moment. And I think what you're really doing is you're looking forward and you're extrapolating and you're thinking ahead and you're getting penalized in some sense.

for that act. Oh, interesting. Maybe I'll unpack that a little bit because that's all too true. But you used this phrase steel manning, which I haven't heard much, but obviously it's the opposite of straw manning in someone's argument. And I think it's a...

crucial feature of what I would generically call intellectual honesty. If you're going to argue against a position, at minimum, you should be able to summarize your opponent's view in a way that he wouldn't find fault with. And better still, if you summarize it in a way that's even better than he or she would come up with on his own, then that is the thing you take down in your argument.

That is the way any really civil and productive debate should operate. And what I find most difficult to deal with, our podcast listeners will have heard this a thousand times, but are the misrepresentations of my positions wherein the critic isn't even interacting with the view I hold, and I'm getting smeared for this fake view.

And I think that's a general principle of public conversations and just one's interpersonal dealings with people who you don't agree with. Steelmanning is something we should just have in our heads as something we need to do and expect should be done toward us in these conversations. But the other point you make is true, which is, and this is often a point of confusion, it's not that I think that...

the immediate risk of death from terrorism for any American or any Westerner, really, or really even any person in the Muslim world, though they run a far greater risk than we do outside of it. It's not that I think that risk is immediately intolerable and worse than any other thing we could be worried about. You and I are far more likely to die in a car accident in the U.S. than a

as a result of terrorism. But what I worry about are, as you said, I worry about where this is all headed. And in at least two senses, there's obviously the risk of much bigger forms of terrorism. We can worry about nuclear terrorism and biological terrorism. And I think it would be at this point,

actually surprising if something orders of magnitude bigger than we've seen doesn't happen in the next 50 years. This is not science fiction. It's not an irrational fear. I think given how bad we are at stopping the proliferation of technology, and given that technology is only becoming more potent, and given that there's nuclear materials that are not getting uninvented, and

given that the proliferators and the terrorists only have to be right once, as the security people say, and we have to be right all the time, the idea that we're not going to have, at minimum, a dirty bomb go off in a major city, rendering some part of it uninhabitable for decades, that seems actually far-fetched to me.

given our capacity to overreact to things. So take what may in fact be the worst case scenario. You have a nuclear bomb that goes off in the port of Los Angeles or in Times Square and it kills, it's a small one and it kills, let's say, 100,000 people outright. 100,000 people, more than 100,000 people die in our society every year from medical errors. The last time I looked, it was something like 200,000 people die from iatrogenic insults

because doctors and nurses don't wash their hands or give the wrong medication, etc. And yet, so we absorb those deaths year after year after year, and we absorb every other species of death, whether it's from smoking or car accidents or our own use of firearms.

And yet, if a bomb went off in a city and killed 100,000 people, our reaction to that, rightly or wrongly, I mean, you could defend a different reaction to that than our reaction to heart disease, say, but our reaction to that and our overreaction to that would...

very likely just derange human history for a generation at least. So I think you have to price in our capacity to overreact to these things into the real world cost of these things happening. And so in any case, that's just to expand upon what you already just said. I think it's a

And the problem is there's usually not time enough to spell out everything in the context of saying, "Listen, we need to be worried about this phenomenon of global jihadism. And there's a reason why we are appropriately worried about what is being said and not being said in one community among all the other religious communities. We're worried about the reform of Islam. We're not worried about the reform of Methodism and Mormonism and Scientology, and for good reason."

And that's something that at a certain point can't require a 10 minute defense. It has to be, we have to have the shorthand version of that that's accepted everywhere we talk about these things. Well, one of the things that I say that's unpopular in some quadrants is that things that rhyme tend to be more true. Now it's not,

it's not universal. Obviously when somebody says if the glove don't fit, you must acquit, um, that, that may or may not be right. But in general humans, uh, when they have something very important to say, try to hone it to a fairly well and they make it mimetic. They make it easy to remember. It's probably in some sense, uh, you know, sort of syntactic sugar for the brain so that it remembers, uh, the wisdom. And I believe that it's important to have the hyperlinked statement so that when you

If you don't agree with the statement, you can click on it. You can see the paragraph version. The paragraph yields to the essay, really yields to the book. So depending upon how much information you need to support an idea, it's there. So if you made a statement, for example, that global jihadism is actually one of the most serious things that we're facing, somebody says, come on, Sam, you know, shark attacks are incredibly rare, but because of shark week, we're in a constant state of terror. Um,

Okay, well then that person would need to click on the hyperlink to see why it is that you actually aren't going down that path. And so I think it's important that the user and the listener be able to be in dialogue with your statement. So I think you need to make the same statement at four different levels that fail over into each one into the next when you're making these points. And I think that there are too few of these honed statements at top level that neatly point

um, to the backups because in general, whenever I run something to ground that you're trying to say, I may not get it at first. I may not understand it. And I may not. Uh, so I, I often am arguing with my misinterpretations of you. And, um, every time I think I've got you on something, uh, I discover some podcasts, some books, some talk where you've actually covered it. Um, maybe not everyone, but it's, it's happened to me enough times. Um,

in listening to you that I'm feeling that I now expected at the default. I need a better me to speak for me in those cases. Does anything come to mind as an example of something that was initially problematic that you ran to ground and were satisfied or not? I think, for example, some of the spirituality stuff. I think that...

Well, I have some things that I haven't run to ground yet. For example, I think you've said that people can't change their beliefs the way they change their clothes. I think I'm actually pretty good at that. I think I maintain different rooms in my mind. I actually have what I call a jihadi sandbox where I listen to the nashids, I watch the videos, I read Inspire and Dabiq and all these things, and I let the jihadi in me become animated so that I can study my own reaction.

And I wonder, sometimes I see you as, this is like me being really critical of you, as the guy running into a screening of The Godfather and saying, what's wrong with you people? Don't you realize it's just photons projected against a wall? And I need to know in part how you reconcile my need for fiction, theater, distortions of belief. I believe that in fact, in my least distorted states, it's usually achieved

by having lots of different fictions, falsehoods, and incomplete pictures that together yield a fairly complete picture. But I'm fond of the double distortion of somebody wearing glasses where their eyes are distorted and their glasses are further distorted, but the compound of the two is an undistorted picture. So there are ways in which I worry that the sort of new atheist project

really has a very limited market because it's very important for me, for example, on Friday nights to put away my atheism and go into a Jewish traditional Shabbat dinner where it's not that we're wink, wink, nudge, nudge going to have Shabbat dinner. We actually kind of go through it and try to do the prayers straight up. And at some point, my daughter was in a Jewish preschool and

and they asked her something about believing in God, and she said, oh, I only believe in God on Fridays. And I think that that's actually a more healthy perspective. That's something which I don't know whether you've talked about it or dealt with it. No, no, I haven't. Well, I don't know that I could sign on the dotted line with your daughter's statement there, but I think there's something a little euphemistic creeping in there perhaps for her or for you. But I think the general picture you paint of

a multiplicity of beliefs which aren't necessarily reconciled in any single brain or certainly any single moment and a kind of piecemeal worldview that we change in and out depending on context. I think part of that's inevitable. I think it's, and I said this somewhere, it probably was, I think it was my first book, The End of Faith. I

It's probably computationally inevitable. I think there was an example I gave where if you just looked at the computational requirements of checking a list of propositions for logical contradiction, and this is an NP-complete problem where as you add propositions, the runtime for even a computer the size of a universe with components the size of protons with switching speeds at the speed of light, you still would...

After 15 billion years, you'd be fighting to add, I think it was the 300th belief to the list, right? So it's like, we are not going to be perfectly coherent, even if our minds worked as just checking a list of propositions for syllogistic error. So...

There will be contradictions. And there is a, just neurologically speaking, a committee in there that is pulling the gears and levers of emotion and behavior. And we have a very strong emotional attachment to certain things which can cloud our cooler judgments about what is real. But I just think that in science and in

clear thinking generally, we do our best to, at least in those conversations when we're asked, you know, what do you really believe is real? We do our best to only promote to kind of the canonicity, you know, in our worldview, those things that we think we can defend based on evidence and arguments and logic. And we can be wrong about that.

It's just the possibility for incoherence in one's worldview can be pretty startling because there are people who, in this case, in The End of Faith, my wife and I were in Paris and we had, as a conscious decision, decided not to go near the American embassy. This was brilliant. Yeah. And then we were also, and those of you who haven't heard this, you can listen to the, I think it was my last podcast where I'm actually reading The End of Faith on the podcast and I read this episode.

And we were trying to get a hotel room with a view of the embassy garden. And the phrase American embassy was just functioning in two discrete and incompatible ways in our minds. We just had a folie a deux. And it wasn't reconciled for us until a friend said, don't you realize we had actually checked into the hotel with a view of the American embassy. And a friend said, what the hell are you doing? You're right. It's the 4th of July. You're right next to the American embassy.

Then the walls came down and we realized we had been both seeking and seeking to avoid proximity to the American embassy all day long. Now, that's an especially crazy instance, which even now I can't understand how it was true of me, but no doubt there are many things I think are true, which are incompatible with other things that I think are true. Only conversation with oneself and experiences reading and

argument with others can bring those to light. So for instance, your jihadi sandbox, I also have that jihadi sandbox, and I have a blog post that I've referenced a few times on the podcast entitled Islam and the Misuses of Ecstasy, where I try to describe in a series of embedded videos just how deep my sympathy with the

surface features of Muslim religion and spirituality runs. And I think the call to prayer is one of the most beautiful things

ever to appear on earth. I love the sound of it. I love the sound of it. Yeah, yeah. And there's a great one that I linked to in that blog post. And I love Qawwali music, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the Pakistani singer. Song in Boston. What a show. Oh, yeah, yeah. Unfortunately, I never got a chance to do that. And I love the poetry of Rumi. And I even get what the- Have you talked about this

on any of your shows? - Not at length, but I've mentioned it. - I wanted to come down here and talk to you about this in particular. - Sure. - Because I think one of the things that's going on is that you do not spend enough time talking about all of the fantastic contributions of this culture.

You point in one case at the really appalling lack of scientific achievements of Muslims, let's say since the Nobel Prize has been given out. I think there have been three in the sciences and one of them was to the great Ahmadi Muslim who contributed to the standard model of physics. So he would be considered not a Muslim in Pakistan.

But I think one of the problems is you're not advertising the emotional valence that I've secretly suspected you must have. So, you know, when I, when I, when I struggle with this, I have a friend group that is disproportionately Islamic and, um,

it's been one of the great experiences of my life since I was 16. My, my, my closest friend, um, you know, welcomed me into his family, his culture, uh, completely eyeopening experience. And this is a friend from high school or friend from college. And, um, he, uh, you know, his family engaged in traditional practices with the hand kissing and touching feeds and all sorts of

I guess the feet touching was a different kind of field of respect. But the family was so courageous. I mean, his sister was brutally gang raped in India and the father supported his daughter talking about it openly when you would imagine that the feelings of shame and the issues of honor would have been dominant. And so

in my life um i have traveled uh always openly as a jew in the islamic world and i've been treated incredibly well i believe that if the nazis were ever to recur the floorboards under which i would be hidden would likely be muslim floorboards so it's very painful to not have this long short language where in general um i've been in you know

in a largely Islamic social context since I was 16, people don't ever address you as, oh, crusader. I mean, that kind of speech that you get used to watching ISIS videos, which most people don't watch, but I've watched a great deal of them just because I need to know about this. You're talking about two completely different worlds that are connected. And I think it's really important to advertise that

more heart, more empathy, more emotion, because otherwise the very dry analytic way in which you go about thinking about this, I think gets too much play in a certain sense. You were so logical.

That the fact that the texts say these very clear things or that there's ambiguity, but there's a hierarchy for resolving the ambiguities. This appeals to your analytic mind. And I think both you and I have an analytic bent and we would be much more tempted were we highly religious to go down the sort of, well, you know, it says here in the text that this is true. And if I really believe this is the infallible word,

of the creator and that I'm going against God not to follow directions, we would be tempted by that interpretation. And so I think in part, it's a little bit perverse that you almost have more sympathies with the

literal versions of the religion than you do with what you call, and I think it's somewhat disparaging, nominal members of these religions. And if I can tell one story from my own, because I know it better. I grew up in an atheist Jewish household, and my wife, who is from India, grew up as a Jew in Bombay.

And so our commonality was Judaism. So we got married in a Jewish context. Now, when I went to the rabbi, I said, I want to do this by the book. So he laughed and he said, well, why don't you write the ketubah for your wedding contract? So we wrote something, we gave it back to him. He says, this, he says, I can't work with this. This is garbage. So he says, you know, why don't you come back with another version? So we did it. And he said, this is poetry. This is poetry. This is the bride price of virgins.

treat it like a contract so we went back to the original tried to do a modern version of it uh you know and sort of an isomorphic version and finally says this is the worst i've seen i've been marrying people for decades so finally i exploded at him and i said rabbi gold i said you know i i've put hours and hours into this and uh i don't think it can be done and he looks at me and he says uh-huh and i said what is that about he said well

He said, you're trying to get married in a more than 5,000-year-old tradition, and you have an idea that there is a by-the-book.

And it's very important that you understand that it is impossible to be a Jew by the book, because this particular contract says the bride price of virgins will be in zuzim, some currency that hasn't existed for years, and that the contract itself cannot be a formality, it actually has to mean something. And since nobody knows what a zuz is anymore,

um it's literally impossible to fulfill now i don't know if that's exactly right or exactly wrong but his point was is that it's all create your own judaism there is no true judaism and i think that that was liberating for me because i was having a very hard time following some rules not others

I don't really like pork, but really good prosciutto and pepperoni is a pleasure. It was always too far to walk to the synagogue on Saturdays. So I think that it's very important to realize that there is no way usually to fulfill these texts. And as a result, this lines up with what Majid Nawaz talks about, about multiple interpretations are the beginning of de-radicalization.

And I think what you struggle with a lot is that you're very sympathetic to the literal and you're much less sympathetic to the, uh, doped with nonsense or, you know, clearly our Judaism in the modern era is doped with Christianity, which I think is a pretty good thing. Um, if it goes too far, I get very alienated, but I think it's important to realize that the nominal versions of these religions, um,

are in some sense the true versions of these religions within the civilized modern era. And the literal attempts to go back to, I don't know, sixth century or some thousands of years before Christ are, uh,

This is nonsense. So to rewind all the way to the point of my not expressing my sympathy with the liturgy and iconography and spirituality and- Food, architecture, music. Yeah, of these cultures enough. I guess the way I have decided to go long short there is not so much focusing on those features. Although-

I have a little bit, but more to point out that my real sympathy and solidarity is with the people who are suffering most under theocracy. And those are, in this case, actual other Muslims who are not disposed to live under theocracy. So it's liberal Muslims, it's Muslim women, it's apostates, it's

free thinkers. And I try to come around, if I don't do it in every paragraph, I try without letting too many minutes elapse on the clock to come around to the point, just the stark acknowledgement that obviously no one suffers the consequences of global jihadism and Islamist theocracy more than Muslims do. And it's the Muslims I hear from, the ex-Muslims and the liberal Muslims who I

I am always thinking about in addition to worrying about the civilizational consequences of jihadism. And I'm also aware that my sympathy with spiritual aspiration and spiritual experience, my finding something intelligible in the poetry of Rumi doesn't survive collision with the doubts in the brains of much of my audience. I speak to atheists and secularists who

who have no idea what I'm talking about when I talk about meditation, and they certainly have no idea what Rumi's talking about, and many of them don't want to know. And so there's, you know, I don't really, I'm not censoring myself on the basis of that, but it's just Rumi's not so interesting to much of my audience, or at least hasn't been thus far. The other reason why I focus on literalism is because I think there is an asymmetry

here and a real advantage to the literalists. And I don't know how we ever get out from under this thing because

The issue for me is that there is a more and less plausible reading of any scripture. And this is what I ran into with Majid in our conversation together. So the implausible readings don't survive very well because they are in fact implausible. You can't really read any of these traditions, to speak of the Abrahamic ones, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, you can't read any of their scripture

and get as a plausible reading the value that homosexuality is just as good, ethically speaking, as heterosexuality, or that women are and must be the political equals and the moral equals to men, right? So what you have to do is you have to bring those modern values to the text and cherry pick and leverage in ways that is a bit of a paradox

pantomime of scholarship, it's not really... I mean, you know that you want the answer to be in advance, right? It's not like you're discovering those values in the text, because actually the antithesis is in the text. Wherever those topics are touched, for the most part, it's certainly clearest on the case of homosexuality. It's just, it's anathema, right? So it's anathema in...

The Hebrew Bible is anathema in St. Paul. It's certainly anathema in the Quran and the Hadith.

And so it's a, if you want gay people in the 21st century to have all the rights and privileges and respect that you do, and a right to want, well then you have to find some rationale by which to ignore these texts now, or at least those parts of the text. So, I mean, one thing I would like people to be is just honest about that process. But the problem is that once you become honest about that process, there is something that

fundamentally corrosive about that because you are bringing merely human values

to this project. And based on your own moral wisdom, the 21st century upgrade to your ethical firmware, you are valuing those modern moral intuitions more than you are valuing the word of God in that case. And being honest about that I think is in fact necessary for modern people to really modernize and tolerate a plurality of views and

in this case, accept things like gay marriage,

But in the face of that, the fundamentalist, the literalist always has the advantage of being able to say, you see, these apostates are not living by the letter of the text. It says right here what you should do. So who is living by the letter of the text? Now you might say ISIS. Yeah. I mean, they're, they're certainly aspiring to, they're doing their best job. But let me again, drag it back to Judaism because, uh, I'm always happier, uh, playing in my own backyard than, uh,

hopping the fence into somebody else's. I think, uh, Sam, that even what you just said is not, it's not exactly right. Um, the way, and again, I wish this was original to me, but it came from, uh, Ben Zion gold who, uh, just, just left us. And, uh, what he said to me is he said, you realize that our rules for freeing slaves after, I don't know what it is, seven years or something like that were progressive in their time. Um,

and he said do you wish to be loyal to the spirit of judaism which was progressive in its in its day literal judaism but if you tried to implement slavery now you'd be absolutely regressive so you are in fact forced into choosing between letter and spirit and why is it that you have decided that the letter is the true and the spirit is the false and i think that you know you you were pawing at this with the quran and i think this is an incredibly important

which is that the Quran resists, and I'm going to dip into science a little bit, a sort of regulated expression model. So if you think about the discovery of the operon in DNA, where you have something that digests, I don't know, sugar and, uh,

You don't want that protein produced en masse when there's no sugar around, so you have some repressor that sits on the DNA. And when there's sugar around, the repressor is lured off of it and the proteins are transcribed and they digest the sugar. And so there are parts of the code that you want to be active sometimes and not active others.

So the problem, of course, with Islam is that it really is very well constructed to resist a lot of this innovation, which I think is baida bida, it's this concept that you're not supposed to innovate around the literal. But the fact is that regulated expression has always been a part

of these religions. And so if you find somebody who is claiming, no, no, no, it's a literal, this is just literal, and we have to live by the letter of the book, and you point out the contradictions, and you point out all of these things, you point out the thing about spirit, you can start to say, you know, God, if God exists, is certainly open source. We've cracked the nucleus of the cell, the nucleus of the atom. We've learned a tremendous amount, and God is inviting us to understand how he or she

has put this whole construct together. And so, you know, is it, clearly the Quran is not the last word, nor is the Torah, because in fact, God has left so much information, should he or she exist,

that wasn't available then, which is our text. If I spit into a tube at some point and sent it off to 23andMe, and I was astounded that it came back Jew. It was like 96.8 Ashkenazi Jewish. And so... With multiple parentheses around your name? Those were added later. But I think that part of the problem is that...

I mean, it's almost like the ISIS variant really appeals to your logical, consistent mind saying, you know, if it is about the text and the text is perfect, this is the, this is the closest any nation on earth has come to trying to carry this out. And, you know, I was always bothered. Why is it,

that, that homosexuals are thrown off of buildings. And I had to, you know, chase it down as you must know, to the Hadiths where it says, you know, that sodomites should be taken to the tops of cliffs and thrown off and buildings stand in for cliffs. And then, you know, the ultimate weirdness is the denial that there is any link whatsoever between these texts and,

And let's say this particular method of execution of these supposed sodomites. And I think it's actually entirely possible to push back against these things by looking at the fact that everybody who sets themselves up as a literalist is in fact going to be failing by one form or another. And so when you realize that we are all failing to live within these religions, that it is impossible to be as they instruct.

everything opens up. So I think that in part, this is actually a Sam Harris trap based upon your capacity to decamp and to explore internally consistent ideologies which you do not share.

Before I push back against any of that... Come to Jesus. Yeah. Let me just say that I have come to Jesus in the sense that I acknowledge that the trend that we have to foster is just what you described. We need...

modernizing reformists, looser interpretations of all these traditions. And that's the end game for civilization. The end game is not for everyone to wake up on a Tuesday agreeing with me that all of this is divisive nonsense and they have to hang up their shingle as atheists or skeptics.

But first of all, my concern is that any analogy to Judaism is very likely misleading in the sense that Judaism really is an idiosyncrasy for many reasons, theologically, historically, as a matter of just demographics at this moment. And I mean, it's true to say of Judaism and impossible to say of most other religions that you can find people who

for whom the religion, their Judaism is very important. And they might even be rabbis and they might even be conservative rabbis, although they're not going to be ultra-Orthodox. And they believe almost nothing in the books, right? They're wedded to the tradition. They like the music. They like Shabbat. They like the food. The food isn't so great. That I think is objectively true. Sam, do you know the only problem with Jewish cooking? No. 72 hours later, you're hungry again.

So I think analogies to Judaism are dangerous because so many Jews, even quote religious Jews, are deeply secular and some believe almost nothing supernatural in the service of their religion. And I've debated, the one instance I keep coming back to is I was debating, I think it was Hitch, it was a debate that Hitch and I did with T.

two rabbis, David Wolpe and Rabbi Artson, I think it was. And at one point I said something that presupposed that, I think it was Wolpe, who's conservative, he's not reformed,

I said something that presupposed that he believed in a God who can hear our prayers. And he turned to me, he said, just aghast, he said, "Well, what makes you think I believe in a God who can hear our prayers?" And then I was momentarily flabbergasted. It's like, so what do you actually believe, given that you do this as your full-time job? But you can't really map that onto Islam or Christianity. Certainly it's American variant.

in any realistic way. But my problem with some of what you said there is that, yes, you can take the claim about slavery in the Hebrew Bible. Yes, you can say, well, there's the letter here, but then there's the modernizing spirit or the liberalizing spirit of the text. But

I just have two issues with that. One is that it was possible even 2,000 years ago to understand ethically that slavery was wrong and to have a tradition that just repudiated it or certainly never endorsed it. That kind of wisdom was among the Jains or the Buddhists. I'm sure there are Greek philosophers who I can't think of at the moment who thought slavery was wrong. It was possible to have that insight. And my other fundamental concern is just that

it would be possible for you and I to invent a religion right now that was better than any existing religion. In fact, we could make it just as irrational. We could put a hell at the back of it, like believe this list of propositions and be committed to these behaviors, or you will spend eternity in hellfire after death. But the list of propositions and behaviors we would come up with would be fundamentally benign and constructive and

much better operating system for a global civilization in the 21st century than any of these Religions, I'm not sure about that. Okay Well then but if you're not sure about that then take your favorite of the old-school religions right and just from remove a few of the bad precepts You know just change the bit about homosexuality and slavery and you've you've in in 30 seconds You've improved Judaism and Christianity and Islam. So well in part

I'm not sure the best way of making this point. There are several things I care about other than truth. And one of them is fitness in the sort of sense of natural sexual selection. 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 and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app.

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