Debate Analysis

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

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Primary speakers:Sam HarrisJordan Peterson

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

Jordan Peterson: This is a consequence of hyper-connectivity and stunning ease of communication.

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

Jordan Peterson: We have to ground our perceptions in an axiomatic framework.

Sam Harris: The old norms that the gatekeepers, for all their faults, had standards.

Jordan Peterson: I don't trust anything the New York Times prints at all. The gatekeeping institutions have also revealed themselves as catastrophically flawed.

Sam Harris: The antidote to that, to the failures of institutions, is not new standards. It's really to apply the old standards.

Jordan Peterson: I've spent a lot of time over the years speaking with Sam Harris. We've spoken publicly half a dozen times and privately far more than that. We're coming at the same problems, I would say, from quite different perspectives and establishing some concordance over time. Today, we went down the rabbit hole of rabbit holes, I suppose, discussing the fragmentation of the narrative landscape on the social media front and what that means for cultural incoherence, weakness, demoralization, deceit, self-deception, and inability to understand one another. So, join us as we attempt to clarify the catastrophe of infinite plurality. Well, Mr. Harris, it looks like it's time for our approximately annual conversation.

Sam Harris: Yeah, nice. You're the clock that ticks once a year.

Jordan Peterson: Yeah, well, I suspect that's more than enough. So, tell me what you're thinking about lately, Sam, on the intellectual side and what you're doing.

Sam Harris: Well, it is actually relevant to the chaos in our politics at the moment. I'm increasingly worried that we have effectively rendered ourselves ungovernable based on the way we have shattered the information landscape. I think independent media of the sort that we're indulging now is part of that problem. I don't know if you're aware of it or not, but I've been fairly vociferous in criticizing some of our mutual friends. In my case, some may be former friends, but fellow podcasters and people in independent media. I just think they've been part of this shattering, and it's been fairly obvious. The cases are different, but many people have been quite irresponsible in the way that they have transformed people uncritically and let them spread. You're truly divisive and dangerous misinformation. I'm thinking especially in the aftermath of October 7th and the global explosion of anti-Semitism. We've had some very big podcasts like Tucker's and Joe's platform Holocaust deniers and revisionists. It's been quite insane out there, and that's just one piece of it. You can talk about COVID or Trump or Ukraine or any pick your ugly object out there. There's just a radical divergence of opinion into these echo chambers we build for ourselves. It seems to be very difficult to cross political lines. It's somehow deeper than politics, actually. I'm just increasingly worried about that, and I'm trying to hold up my side of the conversation in ways so as to cross those lines, but I'm just noticing that it's in many cases it's proving impossible.

Jordan Peterson: I am aware of that. It's actually part of the reason I thought it would be useful for us to talk today. I want to think about how to respond to that to begin with. Well, I think the first thing that we should probably note is that this is a consequence of hyperconnectivity and stunning ease of communication. It's obviously the case that the landscapes of communication that once held us together for better or worse are now so multiplicitous that they're numerous. What does that mean? I think what it means in part, and this is where I think our conversation might get particularly interesting, is that we don't have a shared story anymore. I think a culture is literally a shared story, and a story is a structure. It's been part of our ongoing discussion for a very long period of time. The relationship between the perceptual framing that is constituted by a story and let's say the domain of objective facts. This is a very thorny problem, but it seems to me that you have a culture when people share the same story or the same stories. They have the same shared reference points, and with an infinite landscape of communication, that fragments indefinitely. And then no one, see Sam, let me tell you, I might as well, just to annoy you, just to get the ball rolling. I spend a lot of time thinking about the story of the Tower of Babel. There's two stories in Genesis that describe how things go wrong. And one story is the flood, and that's the consequence of absolute chaos bursting forth, essentially. But the Tower of Babel is a story about both totalitarianism and fragmentation. So what happens is the engineers get together because that's who it is. It's the city builders, the tool makers, those who create weapons of war, the city builders, the engineers. They get to bet together and they build these towers for the aggrandizement of the local potentates. So there was competition in the Middle East of that time to build the highest tower for the glory of the local ruler. That presumption, so you can think about that, is misaligned aim on the sociological front. The consequence of this misaligned aim is a kind of what? Because the aim of the culture is wrong, words themselves lose their meaning. That's what happens in the story, right? Everybody ends up speaking a different language, and then the towers fall apart. So it's because the story that's being told is one of human self-aggrandizement, that's part of it. And the culture pathologizes and then disintegrates. And so I see that happening in our culture. There's a technological element of it, obviously, that technological utopians are driving this. The transhumanists are driving this. And we're aiming at the wrong goal, and the consequence of that is that our language is falling apart, and we don't share the same reference points. That's part of what's happening. So I'm curious about what you think about that, you know, how that fits in with your concern, your emergent concern. Like, when you say fragmentation, Sam, what is it that you think is fragmenting? Because it's not the objective view of the world precisely, although the scientific enterprise even seems to be shaky and corrupt and falling apart in many ways.

Sam Harris: Well, so I agree with that. I think the analogy to Babel is quite apt. I don't think bringing Doge into Babel would have helped much. I think it is technological. I mean, it's just the fact that there is because of the, I think, a large story of social media, but it's really the internet generally. Because of the information technology we have built, people can find endless confirmation of whatever their cherished opinion is. And it's no longer... There's some cultural immune system that has been lost, right? If you had to go to the physical conference out in the real world to meet the other people who were sure they had been abducted by UFOs, well, then you would be meeting these people. You would see the obvious signs of dysfunction in their lives. And there would be more friction to the maintenance of this new conviction, just based on the collision with other ancillary facts that have social relevance to you. But online, again, this even precedes social media. This is true of the internet back in the late 90s. You can just go down a rabbit hole and find endless confirmation that's fairly anonymized, right? The 20-minute documentary that blew your mind and convinced you that the World Trade Center towers were brought down by the Bush administration. You didn't know that they was made by some 18-year-old and his mother's basement. And you didn't have to know that. You were just looking at the product online. But if you had had to meet this person, all of a sudden you'd realize that this is the maintenance of this fiction becomes quite a bit harder. So we're living now, I think, in the second generation of that moment where it really is bottomless. I mean, the ocean of misinformation and half truth and misunderstanding is bottomless. And the tools we have built to rectify misunderstandings and to spot lies and to be better truth seekers are there, but they have been, in some sense, this is asymmetric warfare. They're no match for the information waste product that can be produced more quickly. I mean, this is just the old problem.

Jordan Peterson: It's easier to produce noise than signal, obviously, or pseudo-signal.

Sam Harris: I mean, there's so much that purports to be signal, right? And again, this is probably socially more inconvenient for you than it is for me. But I mean, many of your bedfellows or former bedfellows are the principal parts of this problem. And the gods and goddesses on this landscape, I'm thinking of someone like Candace Owens, who's, you know, quite literally trafficking in blood libels now on her incredibly popular podcast. I mean, she's just gone berserk as far as I can tell. And yet, what is the style of conversation that would disconfirm all of that for her audience? I don't know, because I think what was happened is we've trained up a culture of people or cultures of people that simply don't care about facts, really. They want a story that aligns with their, in some sense, their confirmation bias. I mean, they have certain things they want to believe. There's certain ideas they like the taste of. And then they just want people catering to that appetite. And there's a good business in that.

Jordan Peterson: I know as a clinical psychologist that any given teenager is going to fall prey to pure pressure from time to time. If you listen hard enough, people are likely to tell you everything.

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

Jordan Peterson: Rangers are desperate to fit in and obviously desperate to have friends. And not to be the isolated target of exclusion and bullying.

AD: How do we as parents get involved and engaged?

Jordan Peterson: The reason people don't have these sorts of conversations is because they don't want the emotion. And the longer you let it go on, the more mess you're going to have to clean up.

AD: Our daughter was bullied at her school. How do we protect our kids when this is happening?

Jordan Peterson: Don't let your kids drift away when they're teenagers. They don't want to. But they will if you don't pay attention. Well, part of that, I think, is the consequence of the fact that we have to ground our perceptions in an axiomatic framework. And that, I mean, this has been my concern with the primacy of the story right from the beginning. And I think the deeper question is, A deeper question is, you know, is there some, is there some necessary structure to that fundamental axiomatic framework? You know, the postmodernist claim was that the postmodernist claim, the fundamental postmodernist claim is that there is no uniting meta-narrative, right? We live in the postmodern world now. The postmodern world is a place of local truths. And the French intellectuals, they not only decided that that was necessary and an improvement. And now we see the consequences of that. We're in a landscape of infinite narratives. And the question is, how do you define a rank order of narratives such that some are valid? And some are invalid. You know, the idea of misinformation is obviously predicated on the notion that certain narratives are invalid. And that seems self-evident to me. I wouldn't exactly call myself a fan of the direction that Candace Owens has decided to walk down. But I'm not going to say anything more about her. And so, you know, what I've been trying to struggle with is, and this has been the basis of many of our discussions in the final analysis, is what is the proper grounding for a narrative framework? And I mean, my understanding of your position is that that's why you've turned right from the beginning to the world of objective fact, so to speak. The problem is, is that there's a lot of facts and which ones to prioritize and which ones to ignore is a very thorny question. And, you know, one of the things you referred to obliquely was that, well, when you and I were young, because we're about to say, mage, I think you're four years younger than me, we had narratives that united us as a culture. There was a certain, well, there were fewer people. There was more ethnic homogeneity, at least in the local environments in the world. There was, there were information brokers that were extraordinarily powerful. The universities, the newspapers, the TV stations, the radio stations, and they weren't very easy to get access to, and they had gatekeepers, and at least some of the time those gatekeepers seemed meritorious as well as arbitrary. And, you know, it could easily be that the fragmentation of the landscape is a consequence of technological revolution, and also perhaps of the, well, you had pointed to the irresponsibility of the participants in that landscape. I mean, I think it's also, or even more primarily that they're, they're flooded with information and very finding it very difficult to keep up.

Sam Harris: Well, they're also just not disposed to function by the old norms that the gatekeepers, I mean, for, for all their faults, they had standards, right?

Jordan Peterson: I know, but, but, but, Sam, those, those, I agree with you, and, but I also would say that those institutions, the gatekeeping institutions have also revealed themselves as catastrophically flawed in the last five to ten years. I mean, I'm interested in your take on this, like you brought up October 7th, and the rise of anti-Semitism, and I've been tracking that with a couple of friends of mine, and we've been spending a lot of time fighting it off in all sorts of ways, some of which are public, and some of which art. And I'm appalled by it. What's happened in Canada on the anti-Semitic front since October 7th is something I never thought I'd see in my lifetime. It, it embarrasses me to the core. My, my Goddamn government came out the other day. Those bloody liberals, and they talked in the aftermath of October 7th about combating Islamophobia, as if that's Canada's problem, which it isn't. And so, but, and then, you know, you saw what happened across the, the, the United States and Canada with regard to the universities, Columbia University in particular, and their absolute silence and complicitness. Well, these terrible demonstrations were going on, not that I think that the demonstrations themselves should have been, well, we can talk about that. Letting terrorist radicals take over the universities doesn't strike me as a very good solution. So, so I'm curious about what you think about that, because, well, so, so like I think the gatekeepers have abandoned the gates, like I don't trust the new, I don't trust anything the New York Times prints at all. I think they're reprehensible. The universities, I think, are beyond salvaging. I can't see how they can be fixed. Anyways, man, lay it out. Tell me what you think.

Sam Harris: I think those, all the way up until those last two statements, I can sign on the dotted line. I think the, the, all of these institutions have embarrassed themselves in recent years and for, for the reasons that I think you and I would fully agree about. You know, this became most obvious during COVID, but it's, you know, the October 7th is more of the same, but I would just point out that the antidote to that, to the failures of institutions is not new standards. It's really to apply the old standards. I mean, we need the institutions. Spoken like a true conservative. Yeah, yeah, yeah, fine. Well, I mean, so it's no, no, but yeah, but the antidote, the antidote to fails or failures of science, say, you know, or scientific fraud is, is not something other than science. It's just more science, real science, good science, scientific, scientific integrity. And so it is with journalism or any academic discipline or anything that purports to be truth seeking, we have standards. And they, and then we, there's nothing wrong with our standards. What's, what's dangerous about the current information landscape, where we have just this, this contrarian universe, where anything that is outside the institutions is considered to have some kind of primacy, right, where everyone is kind of a citizen journalist, a citizen scientist, where you just kind of flip the mics on and talk for four hours and that's good enough. What's, what that's selecting for are the people who have no standards to even violate, right? I mean, these are, these people are incapable of hypocrisy. I mean, there was one thing is good about the New York Times and Harvard and any other institution you would point to that has, has, you know, obvious egg on his face at the moment is that at a minimum, they're capable of being shamed by their own hypocrisy. And the people who aren't in the, I would agree with you that there's been some institutional capture, where we have people in those institutions who just shouldn't be there, right, but there, but we would make that judgment again by reference to these old standards of academic or journalistic integrity. But can't his own just doesn't have that, right? And I, you know, I'd be sorry to beat up on her exclusively. I can, I can move to other names if you want, but I mean, she's, she's not, it's not, it's not the reason that I don't, the reason that I'm not inclined to,

Jordan Peterson: but I'm not inclined to discuss her isn't because I agree with what she's doing. It's because I think the best way to deal with what she's doing is not to discuss notice her. Okay.

Sam Harris: But I was, I could say the same thing about Tucker Carlson, right? And, and you might, whether you agree with me or not, this is my view of him that he's not in the truth seeking journalistic integrity business. He's in the, he's, he's got some other political project that entails spreading a fair amount of misinformation quite cynically and, and consciously and smearing lots of people. And in the case of, you know, I don't know how deep his anti-Semitism runs, but in the case of that particular topic, midwife in a very misleading conversation with an amateur historian, who he considers that the greatest historian working in America today, Darryl Cooper, the podcaster. And, you know, the opinion expressed, again, this is like, this is at the highest possible level in our information ecosystem to the largest audience, you know, few historians in human history have ever had a bigger audience than Darryl Cooper had on Tucker's podcast and then quickly followed by his appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast, right? And on that podcast, he spread the lie, the, you know, the, the recycled, you know, David Irving point that, you know, the Holocaust is not at all what it seemed and, you know, and you wouldn't believe it, but the Nazi is really never intended to kill the Jews. They just, they just rounded up so many prisoners in their concentration camps and found that, that they just didn't have enough food during winter to feed them. And they just were putting this just impossible situation. And might might not seem more compassionate to euthanize these starving prisoners in the end, right? I mean, that's how they, they accidentally stumbled into the final solution, right? That's, that's what he spread again to the largest possible audience. And in Tucker's case, you had a very, I would say, you know, sinister midwife in of that conversation. In Joe's case, he just doesn't know when he's in the presence of recycled David Irving and is, and is just happy to have a conversation with a podcaster of whom he's a great fan. And, but yet he's still culpable for not having done enough homework to adequately push back about what's being said to his, again, to his audience, which is the largest podcast audience on earth. So it's, it's journalistically, and I know Joe doesn't consider himself a journalist. He's considered himself a comedian who's just having fun conversations. Great. But what that is tantamount to at this moment, especially in the context of the worst eruption of antisemitism we've ever seen in our lifetimes globally, that's tantamount to taking absolutely no, no responsibility for the kind of information that is flowing unrebutted into the ears of your audience, right? That's why I got angry at Joe, right? I love Joe. Joe is a great person. He's completely in over his head on topics of that sort, and it has a consequence. It has an effect.

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Jordan Peterson: Well, you know, one of the one of the problems I suppose in some ways. Sam is that in this new information landscape. We're all in over our heads.

Sam Harris: Yeah, but some of us are alert to that possibility and worried about it and taking steps to course correct and notice our errors.

Jordan Peterson: Well, let's let's also let's also try to make a distinction here, you know, I mean, there is a distinction that's important to make between accidentally wandering into pathological territory, you know, and and causing disruption because of the magnification of your voice and there's a big difference between that and exploiting. The fringe for your own self aggrandizement and there's plenty of the ladder online and I'm I've been concerned for some substantial amount of time that online anonymity also drives that mean you talked about the utility of embodied interaction in separating the wheat from the chaff right so one of the things you see online is as you pointed out. If you have a crazy idea, you can find 300 other people who have even a crazier idea of the same sort and you can get together with them, which you couldn't have done 20 years ago, because there's only one of them per 100,000 scattered all around the world, but they can aggregate together quite quickly online. The the places that females gather online, for example, are right with that kind of pathology and all sorts of psychogenic epidemic spread without any barrier whatsoever in consequence, because young women in particular are since are susceptible to psychogenic epidemics and so that's a huge problem. It's also the case that in real world conversation, if I'm talking to you, you know it's me and I have to live with the consequences of what I've said to you, assuming we ever meet again, and I have to live with the fact that other people hear about it as well, but if I'm if I'm anonymous. Then I can say whatever the hell I want, I can gather the fruits of that and I can dispense with any of the responsibility and so my sense is that online connectivity magnifies our voice to a degree that it's virtually impossible to be responsible enough to conduct ourselves appropriately, because the reach is just so great. And anonymity, anonymity literally gives the edge to the psychopaths, predators, and the parasites, and this is a huge problem. You know, as a biologic, we can think about it as biologists for a moment, Sam, I mean, I would say two things, when the cost of communication is zero, the parasites swarm the system. Right, because communication is a resource and abandoned resources attract parasites, and what is it now? 50% of internet communication is bought, and the huge part of the reason for that is that communication is free, but it's not free, right, because you have to attend to it. It actually has a cost, so the price of free is the wrong price. You know, let me give you an example of this, just tell me what you think about this, you know, one of the things I've done recently with my daughter and her husband, mostly, and a bunch of professors is start this Peterson Academy, and we have an online social media element to that, which tracks about 15,000 regular users. And we keep a pretty close eye on it, and we refunded the money of 10 of our students, because they were causing trouble on the social media platform. 10 out of 15,000, that's all, and it markedly improved in their absence. And so, you know, there's an interesting dynamic there, you know, we don't know what online anonymity does, we don't know what free communication does when the actual price isn't zero. It certainly serves the parasites extraordinarily well, and we are learning that bad information is easier to generate and spread than good information. Right? None of this is personal, right? And none of this really, I know we've already talked about the fact that all of this, all of this, what would you say, edgy conversation can be monetized and used to attract attention towards bad actors. Let's leave that aside. I agree with that completely. I think it's appalling, but there are structural problems here that are even deeper, you know, and I think, well, anonymity is a huge problem. But then also I think, well, what the hell are we going, what kind of world would we define and live in rapidly if every bloody thing that you had to say online was verified with a digital identity? I mean, they've taken a lot of steps in that direction in China. That doesn't look very good to me.

Sam Harris: Well, I think the structural problems run even deeper because I agree with everything you said about the effect of free and the effect of anonymity, and I draw two lessons from your experience with your online forum. One is that having it behind a paywall made it made it much cleaner than it otherwise would have been. You only found 10 people you had to kick out to clean the whole thing up. But the other point is that those 10 people can really have an outsized toxic influence on a larger culture. So I think we want social media platforms that draw that kind of lesson, but it's not just anonymity and it's not just people who are grifting or otherwise incentivized to be liars or spreaders and misinformation. There are people who, with reputations, you would think they would want to protect. I mean, people with the biggest possible reputations and the biggest possible careers who in the presence of social media have gone properly nuts. And I would put as patient zero for this contagion Elon Musk. I have witnessed a complete unraveling of the person I knew, and I believe I knew him fairly well, under the pressure of extraordinary fame and wealth, but really well kind of weaponized by his addictive entanglement with Twitter. I mean, he was so addicted to Twitter that he needed to buy it so that he could just live there. Right. I mean, that was Twitter was his whole life before anyone heard about his impulse to buy it or anyone heard about his concern about the the woke mind virus. I mean, before COVID, he had gone off the deep end into into Twitter being everything. How do you, how do you know this? Like, I know, I know, I know this, I know this because I was his friend at the time and I, I was there, you know, in his, very close social circle when, you know, Twitter was causing obvious problems for his life and his businesses when he would tweet, you know, for 20, you know, funding secured, you know, and the SEC. He, you know, raised his, it raised the offices of Tesla and sees as everyone's computer. Right. I mean, that was, he was, he was, he was screwing up his life through Twitter. And yet it was unthinkable that he would get off of it. So, so potent a drug was it for him.

Jordan Peterson: Let me ask you about that. Let's speak to think about this biologically again. One of the ways you could define addiction is as the pursuit of positive emotion. That's bound to us a very short time frame. So you get addicted when you optimize positive emotion over a very short time frame. So, so for example, the addictive propensity of cocaine is dependent on the dose, but also the rate of administration. So the reason that snorted cocaine or injected cocaine is more potent than the same dose of like swallowed cocaine is because it crosses the blood brain barrier faster and raises the dopaminergic pitch quicker.

Sam Harris: So there's rate and also the reward component appears to correlate subjectively not with the peak in actual pleasure of the the result in stimulus, but in the peak of the expectation that the pleasure is about to arrive.

Jordan Peterson: Yeah, yeah. Well, the dopaminergic system is an expectation system and cocaine. Okay. So now, so here's what we have with social media with with the bots with the with the AI algorithm optimizers, right? So this is what's happening. You can see it happening to YouTube too is that the systems are optimized to grip attention. But the battle is for the for shorter and shorter. What would you say for shorter and shorter durations of attention focus. So the battle is not only for attention, but for the shortest possible amount of information that will grip the maximum amount of attention. Now, the AI systems are using reinforcement learning to determine how to optimize that and that's driving that fragmentation like you can see it on YouTube because YouTube is tilted more and more towards shorts like tick talk, right? These fragmentary bursts of maximally attractive information and they could capitalize on rage because rage has a positive emotion element. Now, I want to put this into the context of what you said about Twitter and you and I could have a conversation about X and Twitter that's personal as well. So you said, you know, Elon got hooked on X and and enough to buy it. And so let's let's assess that situationally and biologically. Now, I've spent quite a bit of time on X. In fact, it's the social media platform that I've used personally the most. It's the one I'm most familiar with. And I would say it's been a very it's very complex platform for me.

Sam Harris: Yeah, hasn't it at various points convinced you that you should no longer use it? Didn't haven't you gotten on and on multiple times, multiple times, multiple times. I learned that lesson exactly once, but it really did stick. I have not looked at.

Jordan Peterson: Yeah, well, that's partly what I want to talk to you about. I mean, so part of it is, you know, I get a lot of my podcast guests and my ideas for podcast guests from X from because I follow about 2,000 people. But I'm very extroverted. And there's an element of impulsivity that goes along with extroversion. I'm very verbally fluent. And so I can think up new ideas in no time flat. And I'm likely to say them. And so it's very easy for me, if I'm on X to react to a lot of things. And so for me and mouth. Well, that, but it's weird. It's a weird thing because some of the things that some of my impulsive moves, so to speak, which have got me in quite a lot of trouble, I'm not the least bit unhappy about, you know, I got, you cannot believe how much flack I got for tweeting out something arguably careless on October 8th.

Sam Harris: What was that? I've not been on Twitter. I never saw that. What was the, what was it?

Jordan Peterson: I said, give him hell, Netanyahu. Yeah, yeah, right. So that took like eight months of cleanup work to deal with. Seriously, it was, no, it was.

Sam Harris: But, but, but, and while I got kicked off X, yeah, you're not going to get any dispute from me about that. I mean, Netanyahu, just to, just to close the loop on that Netanyahu is, is obviously very polarizing figure and probably a fairly corrupt figure. He's got lots of problems that have implications for Israeli politics, but I'm not convinced that even the perfect prime minister, who has no optical problems, you judge from our side, would have waged this war any differently. I mean, I just don't, I don't know what, what they should have done differently. At every stage along the way, and I don't know that any other prime minister would have taken a different path.

Jordan Peterson: Well, the situation to me looks like, and you tell me what you think about this, and then we'll go back to the, to the, to the problem of AI optimization of grip of short term attention and the manner in which X in particular falls into that category. So my sense with, with the situation Israel was, has been right from the beginning that Iran in particular would and has set up the situation. So if every single Palestinian was sacrificed in the most torturous possible manner to irritate, annoy and destroy Israel and agitate the Americans, that would be 100% all right with Iran.

Sam Harris: I think someone said that the Mullahs in Iran will fight Israel to the last Arab. I think that's the line that I capture.

Jordan Peterson: Yeah, well, that's exactly how it looks to me. And so I look at that situation and I say, well, I think, well, like, what do you do in a situation like that that's moral if you're Israel? Anyway, so I don't want to go down that rabbit to deeply, but that's, yeah, yeah. Well, but that, but okay, but so I've had this like complex relationship with X and some of it's been real useful because I follow a lot of people there and I keep an eye on the mainstreams of the culture and I extract out my podcast guests. And I can see where the real pathology is emerging and I can keep an eye on it. And the price of that is that, you know, now and then I stick my foot in it in a major way. And sometimes that's good and sometimes it's not. And now I've sort of built a variety of fences around me that are part of my organization that, you know, they're in there. And they're, they're kind of these intermediary structures that we've been talking about that put a lag in between what I read and how it's going to work. Well, that, that's one, well, you know, and this is part, it's the destruction of those things that we're starting to, you and I are starting to talk about here. Because, you know, it's, there's never been a time in human history where you could publish your first past opinion about anything to 20 million people in one second. Right? No one could ever do that. And, and we're not, we're not, we're not neurologically constructed to live in a world where you can yell at 10 million people whenever you want about anything.

Sam Harris: Yeah, the problem for me is that what's happening now going back to this, this core topic of what, what in particular is wrong with X and the time course at which people are reacting to information and producing information in turn. There's a lot wrong with that and it's what it's done to our culture and it was what it's done to specific people. I mean, again, Elon for me is the enormous, the 800 pound canary in the coal mine is that it is, you know, it's effectively made them behave like psychopaths. I'm not saying, I mean, if you look, if you just look at X and this is what, what convinced me to get off of it, you, you would think there were many more psychopaths in the world than there are in fact. I was seeing people who I knew in every other context would be psychologically normal or at least normal enough behave like a psychopaths to me toward me in front of me. And in some cases, these are people I actually knew there's some people I, in some case, the people I had dinner with and I knew what I was seeing on X was, what would have been impossible across the table from me at dinner.

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Sam Harris: Right, right.

Jordan Peterson: Well, that's an interesting definition of a pathological sub-environment, isn't it? Like, you can tell a family is pathological when the rules that apply in the family don't generalize to the outside world. And you're making your pointing out that the game dynamics of Twitter have that aspect is that the game that's being played in Twitter doesn't suit the world well. It's not an iterable game in the world. And it could easily be the fact that it maximizes for short-term emotional reactivity is exactly what gives it that psychopathic edge. Because the definition of a psychopath in many ways is the person who will sacrifice the future and you for immediate gratification. Right. That's the pathology of psychopathy as a form of extended immaturity.

Sam Harris: Yeah. Well, there's a lot of aggressive immaturity on display on X. And again, Elon is one of the primary offenders. So one instance for me that made this especially clear and the role played by X especially clear was when he jumped up on stage during one of these these campaign events or I forget if it was campaign or I guess the election already been won. Some event with Trump and Elon, you know, quite famously quite infamously did what appeared to be a Nazi salute twice to the crowd and got a reaction from much of the world of horror and insult. And now, honestly, you know, as his former friend and his somebody who just imagines he his worldview has not, you know, fully disintegrated into a tissue of weird internet memes. It was impossible for me to believe that he was sincerely announcing his solidarity to the project of Nazism by by making those salutes, right. So I didn't view those as Nazi salutes, even though just ergonomically they were in fact, Nazi salutes. I just thought, okay, I don't know what he's doing, but the idea that he's picking this moment to say I'm a Nazi seems frankly impossible. So I was I was interested to see what he was going to do in response to the controversy. What he did in response and again, this controversy is coming in a context that doesn't look at all good for my very charitable interpretation of his behavior because it's in a context where he's funding the far right party in Germany assuring us that there's absolutely nothing wrong with that party. Whereas the party does in fact contain whatever Nazis there are to be contained in Germany, not that it's only a Nazi party, but it isn't in addition to everything else. It's got the Nazis. He's playing footsie with lots of fairly aggressive anti-Semites on his own platform. He's a great fanfare. He had brought back Nick Fuentes and Kanye and these people are anti-Semites, if not actual Nazis. He is facilitating a very unhappy recruedessence of anti-Semitism on the platform he owns and now he's doing Nazi salutes in public. What is a genuinely not anti-Semitic well intentioned person who cares about his reputation and is still capable of embarrassment due in the aftermath of this? Well, it would have been just trivially easy for him to have said something totally sensible and apologetic that would have been honest and would have taken this thing out of the moment perfectly. He could have said, listen, I know how that looked. I don't know what I was doing up there. I was just captured by the energy of the moment. Obviously, I was not doing a Hitler salute. I'm not a Nazi. I've got no interest in amplifying their message on X or anywhere else. If you're a Nazi, please don't follow me. I hate your whole project. You're completely wrong about everything. End of tweet, right? He did nothing like that. All he did was troll his audience, making Nazi jokes and puns on X. So you can fault his character for that. But what I also think we should fault is the medium itself, right? This is the way his brain is performing to the technology.

Jordan Peterson: Well, look, you know, you know the fundamental attribution error. This is what the one thing social psychologists have discovered that's actually valid. That's a bit of an exaggeration. But the fundamental attribution, yes, it does and things. The fundamental attribution or error is the proclivity to attribute to character what's actually a consequence of situation. You know, in these, we should be very careful. And I think we are at the moment. Be very careful to assure that our first presumption is that it's the pathology of the technology. That's the fundamental driver. And the people are to be clear that that's the long in it.

Sam Harris: That's my account of what has happened to Elon almost in his entirety. I think Twitter has, you know, he is the greatest living casualty of what Twitter does. What Twitter does to someone who becomes properly engorged by it. And that's, yeah, yeah. So, but what, and one of the reasons why I got off, frankly, was apart from my own misadventures on the platform, which were nothing like Elon's. I looked in the kind of the fun house mirror of what was happening to him in his life. And I thought, you know, here's a very smart guy who's got much better things to do than fuck up his life in this way. And yet he can't seem to stop how much, how much am I like him, how much is there this component of addiction and dysregulation and failures of impulse control and a need to just, you know, get, get my thoughts out on a time course of seconds rather than more carefully, you know, over the course of days. And so then I yanked it for that reason. And the one thing I found is that when you don't have it as an outlet, right, when you literally can't publish that quickly, then things have to survive a much larger informational half life. So then there's this thing online that happened that I'm tempted to react to. It has to survive until I do my next podcast, which might not be for three or four days. Right. And so, and, and, you know, obviously 90% of the things I thought I had to react to don't survive that, that time course.

Jordan Peterson: Yeah, you know, I made a deal with my wife that was like that because, you know, I can see things going sideways. I think with their degree of accuracy and that disrupts me emotionally now and then. And I made a deal with my wife several years ago that I can't complain about anything I won't write about. Right. Well, it's the same thing and it bears on the same issue that you're describing is that if it's not important enough to write about, then you should ignore it. Right. You're not actually, it's not significant enough. It's not significant enough to sacrifice some genuine time and thought. You, you shouldn't be commenting on it. And that, that's, that's, that's kind of a maturity, but it's also, it's a, it's a weird thing because it's not exactly like. It isn't something that people had to contend with previously because you couldn't publish immediately. There was, there were barriers of cost and difficulty and gatekeepers and, and distribution. And so that wasn't something you had to think up for yourself, like how do I put a lag in my life before I communicate with a million people or five million people? And so you're, you're basically building these inhibitory structures out of whole cloth. And, and now you, you pulled out of Twitter along quite a while ago now. It's a couple of years ago.

Sam Harris: Yeah. Right. Okay. So two and a half years, something like that. Yeah. Well, it was, it was right when Elon took it over, but it wasn't because he took it over. I mean, the timing there was, was fairly accidental. I was, I was getting ready to pull the plug. And then I just saw how much chaos, it was, it was being introduced into his life around it. And I just thought, right, this is, this is a sign. And so I, I'm, I yanked it. And, I mean, one of the, the benefits, apart from just this, introducing this different time course into my life, by which I, I interact with information. I just don't, like, you know, there's this, there's this phrase, you know, the Twitter isn't real life. And then it's a certain point. Many of us realize, okay, that's, that's two sanguine of thought, because you were noticing people losing their reputation. So fully that, you know, they get on an airplane, like the, I think it was the Justine Sacco incident where she got on an airplane. And then half the world was tweeting about her. And she, she arrived at her destination only to find that she had been properly canceled and lost her job, et cetera, et cetera. So, so obviously Twitter can, you know, whether you're honored or not, it can, it can, under the right circumstances, or the wrong ones become real life. But the truth is, given the platform I've built, given the, I mean, just frankly, how lucky I've been to find an audience and to build a, you know, a readership and a podcast, listenership, Twitter really isn't real life for me. Like I, like I'm still, Elon still attacks me on Twitter by name. And I find out I'm trending on Twitter, you know, years after I've left. And it matters not at all for my life. It matters not at all for my business. Nothing happens, right? And yet, if I were on Twitter, there would be this illusion of emergency, right? If I was on there looking at it and looking at the, you know, looking at the biggest, literally the biggest bully on Twitter has just punched me in the face. And I'm seeing the aftermath of it, the temptation to respond to that and to make it, and to, and to feel that not only do I have to respond there, but I have to respond to my podcast. And, and then now this is how I'm spending my week because this thing just happened on Twitter. It would be almost impossible not to be taken in by that and not to not to be just convinced of the necessity of it because all of this is really important. I mean, we're talking about millions of people, like, I mean, like, literally there are, there are videos denigrating me for things I've never said or believed that Elon has amplified. And these videos have 50 million views, right? And I just happened to be lucky enough to have built a life in a career where that matters not at all, right? But for somebody else finding themselves in that situation, I can, I can well imagine, all right, this is just, this is the destruction of my reputation in a way that matters.

Jordan Peterson: Well, that's what it looks like. Sure. And like you said, it's virtually impossible to resist that temptation. I mean, who are you to deny the impact of the opinion of 50 million people? You know what I mean? I mean, that that looks like an insane pride in a way to ignore that. But the point that you're making is that it's very difficult to to

Sam Harris: Well, it's very easy to ignore it when it actually isn't making contact with my views, right?

Jordan Peterson: It's like, if I say something, it's hard to see that it isn't like because it's so it appears so powerful. You know, we've found as a social media platform that Twitter is the worst of all social media platforms for sales conversion.

Sam Harris: Yeah, I can imagine. In our experience, it's because you're next to somebody getting beaten to death in a liquor store. I mean, like when I go on Twitter, since I don't have an account, so I have a naive account. It's not following anyone. And I almost never click anything. So I really see this pure algorithm when you just kind of just look at the home page scroll. And or as pure as it gets. I mean, maybe it's got some information on me based on my IP address or something. But if I ask myself, what is this algorithm, algorithm trying to get me to be or to believe? Honestly, I can tell you that it is trying to get me to be a racist asshole, right? And any fan of Elon's, right? So it's given me a lot of Elon and then it's giving me a lot of black teenagers beating up white, you know, a single white teenager or people of color robbing stores and getting shot in the face. I mean, it's just off like 4chan level awfulness. And then the, and then the occasional, you know, unlucky brand advertising to me in that context. I mean, it's just, it's a, it's a monstrosity of a platform from which to actually try to sell things. So it's a. But yes, if I were on Twitter following 2000 smart people as you are and feeling that they are curating for me, you know, that they're best, the best of their information diet. I would have a, I know what that experience is like because that's what I was doing. That's why I was on it for whatever 12 years and couldn't convince myself to get off it. It seemed, it seemed like a professional necessity. It seems, it seemed so good in the sense the incoming stuff was so good because again, I had chosen who to follow and all these people were reading great articles and forwarding them and having great short takes on them. And it was, all that stuff was great, but I have managed to to get a surrogate of that in the way I find information otherwise. And, and what I don't have is, is the emergency like I mean the ruined vacation where somebody, you know, like somebody, some genius over the New York Times has called me a racist. And now I have to, you know, spend the rest of my vacation with my family trying to figure out how to respond to this. I've tweeted back at them and blah, blah, blah, blah. It's escalated and now we've just nuked each other and it looks real. Yeah, it looks real and it, but it feels real and it is real if you spend your time that way. And that's the thing. If you spend your time that way, which I did for years, it is real. It is the, it is the substance of your life. It is the, the manner in which you, it's the thing you bring back to the conversation with your wife, you know, five minutes later, or five hours later more likely. And it's in your head. And it just, it was, it was a ghastly use of attention. That's, that's what I finally realized.

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Jordan Peterson: Well, you made an illusion when you were talking about what you regard as the unfortunate effective X on Elon and maybe on other users. So let's assume that that you were afraid that this sort of things that you were seeing happening to others more than merely Elon, let's say in your estimation, we're also happening to you. So what do you think in retrospect, what do you think it was doing to you? You just talked about the effects on your family and vacations. I've experienced a fair bit of that. I understand exactly what you're saying. And it does seem like the world's burning and you better do something about it right now. And it's no wonder it seems that way because it's lots of people and generally in our normative ecosystems, if lots of people appear to be upset with you or around you, you should pay attention. But Twitter isn't the real world. We don't know what the hell it is. It looks more and more like a world of demonic thoughts. And God only knows what that world is. But what did you see, especially now that you've been away for a while, what elements of your character? Do you think we're pathologized and that we're brought to the forefront that.

Sam Harris: Because of this, I considered myself a fairly careful user of it. I mean, I was not at all like Elon, I was not addicted to it in that way. I was not tweeting hundreds of times a day. I think I averaged something like three tweets a day over the course of my use of it. That would come in spurts. And so there would be I would not tweet for three days and then send out a dozen tweets, you know, because there was some hot topic. I was always fairly careful so that I honestly don't think I ever said anything on the platform that I regretted, right? I mean, if I ever made a mistake, I apologize for it. But I was I never, you know, I treated it like writing. I treat I was aware I was publishing in that channel. However, quickly and impulsively, I was, you know, I'm a much I'm enough of a writer and an academic to feel like, OK, this is yet another occasion where embarrassment is possible and you don't want that. So I never I don't remember ever really screwing up on the platform. And yet what happened there was. I mean, I can honestly say that for a decade, the worst things in my life and in some sense, the only bad things in my life came from Twitter came from my interaction with Twitter. I mean, apart from like a family, you know, family illnesses, you know, that that's leaving something leaving that aside. My life was so good. And yet I had this, you know, digital serpents in my pocket that I would consult a dozen times a day, 20 times a day, maybe a hundred times a day. So again, I might have only posted once or twice, but if something was really, you know, if the news cycle was really churning, I might be looking at this, this, my consulting of this, this newsfeed effectively was interrupting my day, you know, not just every hour, but maybe every five minutes of many hours. Right. Or for 10 minutes of that hour and and so it was segmenting my day, however good that or productive that day was or should have been, I was constantly chopping it up by how I was engaging with this scroll. Again, mostly consuming, but you know, often in response to the one or two things I put out. Yes, there was a dopaminergic component to that, obviously, you know, I said something that I thought was clever that was perceived as clever by my fans, you know, and perhaps to the detriment of my enemies and all that seemed, you know, exactly what I wanted in the moment. But even when it was at its best, right, even when there was just good information coming to me and I was responding happily with good information back, even the even the non toxic version of it was a style of of was was intrinsically fragmenting of my life, you know, it's like I like I don't pick up I don't read a book that way. I don't I don't have a book that I pick up for two and a half minutes and then I put down and then try to have a conversation with my kid and then say, okay, hold on one second and pick up the book again. It's like that's not how you that's not how anyone reads a book, right. And yet Twitter

Jordan Peterson: far too often became that sort of thing in my life, right, right. And it's like a parasite. It's like it parasitizes the exploratory instinct. It's something like that, right, because and maybe look, you know, for a long time, I didn't have a cell phone. I was a late adopter of cell phones and I didn't watch the news probably really from like 1985 till about 2005. I had cut myself off from news sources. I didn't read newspapers. And the reason that I didn't do that was because a few things happened in there that you catch 9-11. Well, the, you know, I used to read, for example, I would read some credible magazines like the economist when I still was credible because I don't really think it is

Sam Harris: anymore, but was not amazing. Isn't it amazing to consider that magazines like time and news week and they could wait a week. I could expect that their audience would wait a week to be informed about the news of that week. That just seems extraordinary to me now.

Jordan Peterson: Well, well, well, my conclusion about that was that if it isn't important in a week, it's not important. Right. Yeah. Right. And so and so I substituted these longer lag time news aggregators for TV in particular or radios like if it's today's news, it's not news. Maybe if it's not important in a month, it's not news. Right. And that's part of that, that, that intelligent filtering. And I guess part of the reason that X is dangerous and social media is dangerous. X in particular is that, you know, that proclivity to forage for information is is in general an extremely useful instinct. Right. It's the instinct to learn. But what what we're learning, you might say that the shorter the period of time over which the information is relevant, the more like pseudo information it is. And so then any system that optimizes for the grip of short term attention is going to parasitize your learning instinct with pseudo information.

Sam Harris: Yeah. So it's also the algorithms are going to maximize that the half life is one thing, but also the culture that that is informing these algorithms, the actual human behavior that the algorithms are, you know, skimming and and boosting is increasingly a bad faith style of conversation. I mean, it's just people are so many people, especially the anonymous people are in the misinformation business. I mean, they will just cut together a clip that is designed to mislead. And that is the clip that will get spread to the ends of the earth.

Jordan Peterson: Well, it's to maybe is it designed to mislead or is it designed to optimize their particular grip on short term attention for their own grad for their own aggrandizement like that like that the psychopathic move and let's say that it's facilitated by these short term attention aggregators that are that are driven by bots that are learning how to do this. The like the psychopathic proclivity, the narcissistic proclivity is going to say whatever puts you at the center of attention, whatever it is. Now, if you're governed by some kind of ethos that is outside of attention seeking, then that's a different story. But the game if the game is that the machine optimizes for short term attention, then it's going to reward all the players that are doing whatever it takes to grip short term attention.

Sam Harris: Yeah, but the thing is that people clear whatever it takes though is to get somebody seeming to say something totally outrageous. And in context, it might have made perfect sense. But or at least be it be a very different point than the one that's being advertised by the clip, but the clip, short of context is just is calculated to to mislead in that. The person who is edited that clip knows that the naive viewer is can only draw one conclusion from the from the utterance as presented. Right. And and and they're not and that not even if they're well intentioned and fairly alert alert to this problem, almost no one is going to go back to the original podcast and look at the comment in context. I mean, this just happened to to Rogan, I believe, I think he had, you know, the, you know, the singer for you to you to on his podcast and. Uh, Bono said something critical of Elon, I believe, and this got chopped up in a clip that was just it made it look like Joe really disagreed with Bono and was and was critical of him. And and so the and the clip just got exported like look at, you know, look at Bono getting owned by Joe Rogan or whatever, but that's not what that's not what the conversation was at all, right. Like like Joe conceded, you know, have most most most of the point that that Bono was making. Um, it was just it was false. It was it was the false picture of what happened there. And the person who makes that clip just knows that. That if they, if they frame it as a, as a smack down, people are going to love to see that and it doesn't matter that they're lying about what happened and damaging people's reputations in the process.

Jordan Peterson: Yeah. Well, and that's especially true if they're anonymous and their reputation bears no consequence of their lies. You know, well, the other thing that's happening, I don't know how much this is happening to you, but. And this is another example of the parasite problem. So increasingly, my voice and my image are being used, not exactly in the way that you're describing, although that's happening a lot. I'm selling, I'm selling cognitive enhancers somewhere as an AI version of myself. Okay. Okay. Well, that that's happening a fair bit too. And sometimes worse than cognitive enhancers, but it's the worst thing that's happening now is that these sites that are operating under my name using my image and my voice are providing pseudo philosophical content. And pseudo psychological insight as if it's me. And so it's, it's, it's, it's, it's like what I've said has been put through a filter of stupidity and reorganized in my voice. And this is happening constantly like YouTube has already taken 65 channels down that are doing this. And so this is another example of that parasite problem, right? You store up a reputation. And then the parasites swoop in and pull off the attention that the reputation has garnered and monetize it. And they can escape into the ether because they do it anonymously. And so yeah, I think it's going to become a stunning problem.

Sam Harris: I think it's, it's a big problem. I can see that it, you know, the, the perfect version of it is, is at most a year away. I mean, it might only be a couple of months away. Yeah, yeah, we've experimented with this on our side too. Just, like for instance, in my meditation app, waking up, we're now experimenting with translation to other languages. And, you know, they've got AI's got me speaking 22 languages perfectly in my voice. And it really sounds like me speaking those words. And the translation from what we can tell so far is fairly impeccable. So we're going to roll out a Spanish version of the app in the not too distant future, just to see what happens. But it's like, it's, it's, it's getting, it's getting too good. So I think what the lesson that, that consumers of information who care to have real information are going to have to learn is that you can't trust if you're, if you're looking at Jordan Peterson. On YouTube, you simply cannot trust that it really is Jordan Peterson, unless it's coming through one, one channel that you know you can trust, which is so, and we're back to the age of gay, ironically, we're back to the age of gatekeepers, right? It's not on your channel or Joe Rogan's channel or, you know, Chris Williamson's channel, if it just purports to be them, but on somebody else's YouTube account, you can't.

Jordan Peterson: You can't trust it. Yeah, well, it might also be saying that the, the real solution to that is payment. Like if it's the rule is going to be, maybe this is the real rule is going to be, if it's free, right? If it's free, it's a lie. Right. Yeah.

Sam Harris: That's the world we're rapidly moving into. And, and, or if it's, except someone, someone's going to be able to create, I mean, until you find them and stop them, someone will create the fake Jordan Peterson Academy that has a paywall. Right. That looks like you sounds like you and, you know, it's only, it's only $5 a month.

Jordan Peterson: And so they'll monetize that way and that'll, that'll still be the problem. Has that been happening with your, with your meditation app, with your, with your enterprise yet?

Sam Harris: Not, not that I'm aware of. That's no. I mean, I just think I'm just aware of seeing short clips of me seeming to, to Hawk, you know, psychotropics that that I've never heard of. And it's just like an AI version of my voice. It's real footage of me stolen from somebody's podcast and then an AI work over of that, you know, that turns into an Instagram ad.

Jordan Peterson: Yeah. Well, I talked to some lawmakers in DC about a year and a half ago about the fact that this was going to happen, hoping that they would, well, it takes a long time to take notice and, and takes action. You know, it's essentially the digital, it's the digital equivalent of kidnapping. Like I think people should, people should be put in prison for a long time for stealing your digital identity and monetizing it. Like it is very much akin to kidnapping because what they're doing is they're draining the value out of your reputation. That's essentially the game, you know, and so, so what, what's happened to your life? If you, you, you, you, there's a couple of, there's a couple of things I'd like to investigate here. First, you know, the first I'd like to return to something that you and I talked about that we beat that we wandered around a fair bit in our previous conversations, you know, you had partly because you were concerned about the distinction between good and evil and let me put words into your mouth. You were hoping to find a objective basis for morality, a way of grounding morality in the objective world. And I have a thought about that that's relevant to our current conversation. You know, so tell me if you accept this proposition. Part of the pathology of Twitter is that it operates by game rules that not only don't apply in the real world, but that when exported to the real world pathologize it. Yeah, fair. Yeah. Okay. So, so, okay. Okay. Right. Okay. So, so here's a way of, of I think bridging the gap between the way you've been thinking about the world from the moral perspective and the way I've been thinking about it. So, you know, I've always been, I've understood that you had a very deep concern about moral judgment and that your attempt to provide a scaffolding of objectivity for morality was grounded in that even deeper concern. And I thought that I could understand why you did that. And I didn't agree with the conclusions that you draw, but I agreed with the overall enterprise and it struck me recently. And I think we've already obliquely made reference to it in our conversation that there's another way of conceptualizing this relationship between morality and objective fact. And it might be, it might be more fruitful to look into the realm of something like, well, it's like theory of iterability. It's, and generalizability. It's, it's maybe a variant of something like game theory. Like imagine that. So, let me give you an example, Sam. And it's a pretty famous example. You know those trading games where behavioral economists sit people down and say, two people, they say, I'll give you $100, you have to make an offer to the, okay. So, the finding across culturally is that people generally approximate a 50%, 50, 50 split, right?

Sam Harris: Yeah. And they're highly, they're not game theoretic with respect to unfair trades. Like they don't want to accept unfair trades even when it would just narrowly be to their advantage to accept them.

Jordan Peterson: Exactly. Exactly. Okay. Okay. And that's true, even if they're poor. So, if you put a poor person in a situation where they have to accept an unfair trade, that would be to their immediate economic benefit, they seem even less likely to accept it. Now, I think the right way to construe that is that if you and I engage in an economic trade, we're doing two things at the same time. The first is what the classical economists would say is we're trying to maximize our, our gain, let's say. But the problem with that notion is that we aren't playing one game or while we're playing one game, we're also setting ourselves up to play a very large and unpredictable sequence of games. Those are happening at the same time. And so, we don't want to just optimize for gain in the single game. We want to optimize our status as players in a large series of unpredictable games, games. And so, we want to put ourselves forward as fair players so that people line up to play other games with us. Okay. So then imagine that the hallmark of morality is something like generalizable iterability across contexts. Right? Because this would allow for, and so you could think about a truly moral system is the most playable game. And an immoral system augers in. And we're talking about this to some degree with regard to X because our proposition is that fundamentally because it's optimizing for short term attention grip. And it benefits the psychopaths and the short term gain accruers, the parasites, and perhaps the predators, that it's fundamentally a non-playable game. And that if its consequences generalize outside the world of X that it pathologizes the environment. And the reason for that is it's not optimally iterable. And so the pattern of object, the pattern of morality that would be grounded in the objective world isn't in the world of objective fact. It's in the world of optimized iterability across people and contexts.

Sam Harris: Well, I would just say that there are some set of objective facts that subsumes that picture. The world is the way it is. The social world of social primates such as ourselves is the way it is. It admits of certain possibilities and certain other things are impossible given the kinds of minds we have. Our minds could change in all kinds of ways. They could change by being integrated with technology. They could change by genetically being manipulated at some point in the future. There's this landscape of possible experience that the right sort of minds could navigate. And we're some place on that landscape and we're trying to find our way. And so I view morality as a at bottom a navigation problem. It's got this iterative quality that you describe. It's the question is it's always where can we go from here? Where should we go from here? Where should we go from here given all the possible places we might go from here both individually and collectively?

Jordan Peterson: Okay. Well, you know, the reason that I got obsessed with stories to begin with Sam was because I realized 30 years ago that a story was the description of a navigation strategy. That's what a story is. And so then the question is, okay, let's see if we can formalize this a bit more. The story has to, let's say an optimized story has to iterate and improve. So for example, if you construe your marriage properly, it exists stably, but that's not as good as it could get. It could exist stably and improve as it iterates. And then you can imagine that there's a small world of games that are playable in the actual natural and social world that improve as they iterate. And those are those games pointers to that, those games are moral pointers. And I think that that's what the core of the religious enterprise dives into and elaborates upon. I think that's what makes it the religious enterprise is that it deeply assesses. So, I mean, if you imagine this, imagine that your proposition, the proposition you laid out is accurate, is that the fundamental concern is navigation. How do we get from point A to point B? Well, a story, you can think about this and tell me what you think, but I believe that a story is a description of a navigation strategy. If you go see a movie, you infer the aim of the protagonist and you adopt his perceptual frame and his emotional perspective. That's how perception works. And then you can imagine that there are depths of games, summer, shallow, and short-term games that maximize for short-term gain and to hell with everything else are shallow. And games that are sophisticated can be played in many situations with many players. They take the future into account and they improve as you play them. And there's a hierarchy of value and consequence of that that is obliquely associated with the world of fact, because it has to operate in the world of fact. But that isn't fundamentally derived from data that's directly associated with the facts.

Sam Harris: Well, not operationally, but potentially so, just not in fact. That's just not... I'm never claiming when I say that there are objective truths to all of these questions that those objective truths will be delivered by some guy holding a clipboard wearing a white lab coat. But there are things we just know to be true and it would take a lot of explaining to get to the bottom of how we know them to be true. But I mean, just very simple claims. We know that life in the best and most refined and most ethically positive, some developed world context. You and me and our most conscientious friends at the nicest resort after having done a great day's work. We're enjoying a great meal and talking creatively and positively about how to improve the world. We know that's a better game than trying to find some child soldiers to torture the neighbors in some malarial hellhole in the sub-Saharan Africa. And so that we can extract some heavy metals, the extraction of which is polluting the environment and causing the life expectation to be 30 years lower than it is where we live. There are fundamentally discordant human projects that are available to some very lucky people and unavailable to others. And luck is by no means evenly distributed in this world. So there are better and worse games, right? By any measure of better, you want to ethically better, artistically better, entrepreneurially better, economically better. It's just better with respect to the health outcomes, etc. So we're all trying to play the best game we can be a part of. Some people, I take that back, many of us are, we're all trying to play the best game we can think of as best. But one of the consequences of my argument is that it's possible to be wrong. It's possible to actually have false beliefs about what is in fact better or worse.

Jordan Peterson: Well, I also think you're insufficient, you're insufficiently pessimistic too, Sam, I think, because I don't think everyone is trying to play the best possible game.

Sam Harris: I think that there are truly negative games where I think there are people are being rewarded in some way. The sadist whose favorite game is to just see, to cause suffering and others and enjoy that suffering, the fact that he enjoys their suffering, right? That's a problem with him, right? He's a neurological monster of a sort. And he's confined to being the sort of mind that finds that very low level game, more rewarding than the game I just advertised at the resort with us being creative and productive and positive.

Jordan Peterson: Yeah, well, that's the man who wants to rule over hell, Sam. Right, right. Because he thinks, yeah, okay, fine, fine, fine, fine, fine.

Sam Harris: But my point is that there's obviously living in a realm where there are better and worse outcomes by any definition of better and worse that makes sense.

Jordan Peterson: Even from within the confines of the games that you're describing. Yeah, right. Because one of the ways of deciding that a game is counterproductive is that if you play it, it doesn't produce the result that it intends, right? So that's another kind of universal hallmark of moral judgment. Like if you're aiming at something and your strategy doesn't get you there, either your strategy is wrong or your aim is off by your own definition, right? There's no relativizing your way out of that. And then we can say, well, there's a hierarchy of games that expand and improve as you play them. And there's a hierarchy of games that degenerate as you play them even by your own standards of degeneration.

Sam Harris: Yeah. And the games, the more refined games actually refine you as a player. You get changed by the game you play to your advantage or to your disadvantage. And it makes you more or less capable of playing any specific game. So this is what learning, this is what education is, this is what skill learning is, this is what interpersonal skill learning amounts to. This is what the difference between having good relationships versus bad relationships, being in a good culture where it's institutions incentivize you to be effortlessly be the best possible version of yourself as opposed to, you know, you having to be some kind of moral hero just to be just not a psychopath. I mean, this is what's so important about incentives and about contacts like like Twitter that incentivize the wrong things. But what we want, I mean, we don't want to have to take on the burden of rebooting civilization ourselves based on our own native moral intuitions every single hour of every single day. That's for sure. That's for sure. We need systems that make it easy for strangers to collaborate effortlessly in high trust environments. Right. I mean, this is like that. We need to offload all of our moral wisdom into institutions and to systems of incentives such that you would have to be a very bad person indeed, not to see the wisdom of being a peaceful honest collaborator with the next person you meet, right? In this given the nature of the system, you know, whereas I mean, just to sharpen this up because I can sound very abstract. If you take an actually normal decent person who just wants to be good and have positive some relationships with everyone he meets, you put that person in a maximum security prison in the United States. That person will be highly incentivized to join a gang that has, you know, has the requisite color of his skin, right, and be essentially a monster because that's the only way to survive in that context, right? To not join a gang to not join a racist gang is to be the victim of everyone, right? So what you have in a maximum security prison is a system of terrible incentives that where you have to be some kind of self-sacrificing saint to opt out of ramifying this awful system of incentives further. We want the opposite of that in situations that we control and in institutions that we build. And, you know, what the thing that's so disturbing to me about this contrary and moment is that so many people have gotten the message, you know, this is a really most explicit since COVID, they've gotten the message that we don't need institutions, we don't want institutions, we just need to burn it all down. And we're just going to navigate by sub-stack newsletter and podcast and that's just not going to work, right? We're just, we can't be all contrary and all the time, we need institutional knowledge. Intermediary institutions. Yeah, that work. Yeah, so whether we have to build new ones or perform exorcisms on our old ones, that might, you know, that may be a different answer depending on the case. But there's no question we need institutions that are better than most individuals and that make most individuals live up to norms that they themselves didn't invent. And would, you know, under another system of incentives would struggle to emulate.

Jordan Peterson: All right, I'm going to bring it in to Land Sam. I think what we're going to do on the daily wire side, I want to talk to you, I think, for half an hour about the anti-Semitic landscape on the left and the right. And I want to go down those rabbit holes and explore them with you. So that's for everybody watching and listening. I think that's what we're going to do on the daily wire side. And because you made some comments earlier about your concerns about the right wing parties in Europe, for example, and the Nazis that are hiding there. And I've seen no shortage of right wing anti-Semitism where it's ugly head, let's say, in on acts, for example. But I also want to talk to you about the same pathology emerging on the left because there's no shortage of unbelievable anti-Semitism on the left. And we should sort that out a little bit. And so that's what we'll do on the daily wire side. Sam, every time we talk, I think we get a little bit, well, we understand each other a little bit better. Yeah. I think there's something very fruitful for us to continue discussing in relationship. Well, to a number of the things you discussed today about the necessity for intermediary institutions. That's the principle of subsidiarity. It's an ancient principle of Catholic social. What would you say, social philosophy? You have to have intermediary institutions. They're the alternative to tyranny and slavery. The idea that there's a harmony between individual development and proper institutions that has to be established. You know, you can't be a, it's very difficult to be a good person in an entirely pathological social situation. And then this idea that there's a hierarchy of games because part of what interest got me interested to begin with in the religious world, let's say, was because I started to understand what constituted the religious as the structure of the depth of games that's by definition. I'm not talking about what people think about as superstitious belief. That's not the issue. The issue is that there's a hierarchy of game from shallow to deep, from counterproductive to productive, from unplayable to iterative. But that's a real world. And there's a reason for that that I think is allied with your desire, lifelong desire to investigate the objective grounds of the moral world.

Sam Harris: Yeah. I mean, the one thing I would add to that is that also by definition on my account, whatever's true there, whatever's truly sacred, you know, the true spiritual possibility has to be deeper. Then culture, and it certainly has to be deeper than the accidents of ancient cultures being separated from one another based on linguistic and geographical barriers.

Jordan Peterson: So it can't be no dispute about that.

Sam Harris: It can't be that Eastern Orthodox Christianity is the real answer versus Hinduism being the real answer. Because I mean, one, they're incompatible answers at the surface level, whatever deep truth they may be in touch with, that is something we have to understand in a 21st century context that is deeper than provincialism. That's my argument against religious sectarianism of any kind.

Jordan Peterson: We definitely have a, we definitely have much to discuss the next time we talk. All right. So for everybody watching and listening, join us on the daily wire side because we'll go down the anti-Semitic rabbit hole. And that'll give Sam and I a little bit, a little bit of time as well to discuss the political, which we haven't, you know, which we've conveniently circumvented in a sense. But we had other things to talk about. So join us there. Thank you to the film crew here today in Scottsdale. Thanks, Sam. It's always a pleasure to talk to you. Yeah. I'm glad you're doing well. It's real good to see you, man. Yep.

Transcript

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Sam Harris [00:00] I'm increasingly worried that we have effectively rendered ourselves ungovernable based on the way we have shattered the information landscape.

Jordan Peterson [00:09] This is a consequence of hyper-connectivity and stunning ease of communication.

Sam Harris [00:16] You can just go down a rabbit hole and find endless confirmation that's fairly anonymized.

Jordan Peterson [00:22] We have to ground our perceptions in an axiomatic framework.

Sam Harris [00:27] The old norms that the gatekeepers, for all their faults, had standards.

Jordan Peterson [00:32] I don't trust anything the New York Times prints at all. The gatekeeping institutions have also revealed themselves as catastrophically flawed.

Sam Harris [00:42] The antidote to that, to the failures of institutions, is not new standards. It's really to apply the old standards.

Jordan Peterson [00:57] I've spent a lot of time over the years speaking with Sam Harris. We've spoken publicly half a dozen times and privately far more than that. We're coming at the same problems, I would say, from quite different perspectives and establishing some concordance over time. Today, we went down the rabbit hole of rabbit holes, I suppose, discussing the fragmentation of the narrative landscape on the social media front and what that means for cultural incoherence, weakness, demoralization, deceit, self-deception, and inability to understand one another. So, join us as we attempt to clarify the catastrophe of infinite plurality. Well, Mr. Harris, it looks like it's time for our approximately annual conversation.

Sam Harris [01:58] Yeah, nice. You're the clock that ticks once a year.

Jordan Peterson [02:02] Yeah, well, I suspect that's more than enough. So, tell me what you're thinking about lately, Sam, on the intellectual side and what you're doing.

Sam Harris [02:13] Well, it is actually relevant to the chaos in our politics at the moment. I'm increasingly worried that we have effectively rendered ourselves ungovernable based on the way we have shattered the information landscape. I think independent media of the sort that we're indulging now is part of that problem. I don't know if you're aware of it or not, but I've been fairly vociferous in criticizing some of our mutual friends. In my case, some may be former friends, but fellow podcasters and people in independent media. I just think they've been part of this shattering, and it's been fairly obvious. The cases are different, but many people have been quite irresponsible in the way that they have transformed people uncritically and let them spread. You're truly divisive and dangerous misinformation. I'm thinking especially in the aftermath of October 7th and the global explosion of anti-Semitism. We've had some very big podcasts like Tucker's and Joe's platform Holocaust deniers and revisionists. It's been quite insane out there, and that's just one piece of it. You can talk about COVID or Trump or Ukraine or any pick your ugly object out there. There's just a radical divergence of opinion into these echo chambers we build for ourselves. It seems to be very difficult to cross political lines. It's somehow deeper than politics, actually. I'm just increasingly worried about that, and I'm trying to hold up my side of the conversation in ways so as to cross those lines, but I'm just noticing that it's in many cases it's proving impossible.

Jordan Peterson [04:18] I am aware of that. It's actually part of the reason I thought it would be useful for us to talk today. I want to think about how to respond to that to begin with. Well, I think the first thing that we should probably note is that this is a consequence of hyperconnectivity and stunning ease of communication. It's obviously the case that the landscapes of communication that once held us together for better or worse are now so multiplicitous that they're numerous. What does that mean? I think what it means in part, and this is where I think our conversation might get particularly interesting, is that we don't have a shared story anymore. I think a culture is literally a shared story, and a story is a structure. It's been part of our ongoing discussion for a very long period of time. The relationship between the perceptual framing that is constituted by a story and let's say the domain of objective facts. This is a very thorny problem, but it seems to me that you have a culture when people share the same story or the same stories. They have the same shared reference points, and with an infinite landscape of communication, that fragments indefinitely. And then no one, see Sam, let me tell you, I might as well, just to annoy you, just to get the ball rolling. I spend a lot of time thinking about the story of the Tower of Babel. There's two stories in Genesis that describe how things go wrong. And one story is the flood, and that's the consequence of absolute chaos bursting forth, essentially. But the Tower of Babel is a story about both totalitarianism and fragmentation. So what happens is the engineers get together because that's who it is. It's the city builders, the tool makers, those who create weapons of war, the city builders, the engineers. They get to bet together and they build these towers for the aggrandizement of the local potentates. So there was competition in the Middle East of that time to build the highest tower for the glory of the local ruler. That presumption, so you can think about that, is misaligned aim on the sociological front. The consequence of this misaligned aim is a kind of what? Because the aim of the culture is wrong, words themselves lose their meaning. That's what happens in the story, right? Everybody ends up speaking a different language, and then the towers fall apart. So it's because the story that's being told is one of human self-aggrandizement, that's part of it. And the culture pathologizes and then disintegrates. And so I see that happening in our culture. There's a technological element of it, obviously, that technological utopians are driving this. The transhumanists are driving this. And we're aiming at the wrong goal, and the consequence of that is that our language is falling apart, and we don't share the same reference points. That's part of what's happening. So I'm curious about what you think about that, you know, how that fits in with your concern, your emergent concern. Like, when you say fragmentation, Sam, what is it that you think is fragmenting? Because it's not the objective view of the world precisely, although the scientific enterprise even seems to be shaky and corrupt and falling apart in many ways.

Sam Harris [08:38] Well, so I agree with that. I think the analogy to Babel is quite apt. I don't think bringing Doge into Babel would have helped much. I think it is technological. I mean, it's just the fact that there is because of the, I think, a large story of social media, but it's really the internet generally. Because of the information technology we have built, people can find endless confirmation of whatever their cherished opinion is. And it's no longer... There's some cultural immune system that has been lost, right? If you had to go to the physical conference out in the real world to meet the other people who were sure they had been abducted by UFOs, well, then you would be meeting these people. You would see the obvious signs of dysfunction in their lives. And there would be more friction to the maintenance of this new conviction, just based on the collision with other ancillary facts that have social relevance to you. But online, again, this even precedes social media. This is true of the internet back in the late 90s. You can just go down a rabbit hole and find endless confirmation that's fairly anonymized, right? The 20-minute documentary that blew your mind and convinced you that the World Trade Center towers were brought down by the Bush administration. You didn't know that they was made by some 18-year-old and his mother's basement. And you didn't have to know that. You were just looking at the product online. But if you had had to meet this person, all of a sudden you'd realize that this is the maintenance of this fiction becomes quite a bit harder. So we're living now, I think, in the second generation of that moment where it really is bottomless. I mean, the ocean of misinformation and half truth and misunderstanding is bottomless. And the tools we have built to rectify misunderstandings and to spot lies and to be better truth seekers are there, but they have been, in some sense, this is asymmetric warfare. They're no match for the information waste product that can be produced more quickly. I mean, this is just the old problem.

Jordan Peterson [11:31] It's easier to produce noise than signal, obviously, or pseudo-signal.

Sam Harris [11:36] I mean, there's so much that purports to be signal, right? And again, this is probably socially more inconvenient for you than it is for me. But I mean, many of your bedfellows or former bedfellows are the principal parts of this problem. And the gods and goddesses on this landscape, I'm thinking of someone like Candace Owens, who's, you know, quite literally trafficking in blood libels now on her incredibly popular podcast. I mean, she's just gone berserk as far as I can tell. And yet, what is the style of conversation that would disconfirm all of that for her audience? I don't know, because I think what was happened is we've trained up a culture of people or cultures of people that simply don't care about facts, really. They want a story that aligns with their, in some sense, their confirmation bias. I mean, they have certain things they want to believe. There's certain ideas they like the taste of. And then they just want people catering to that appetite. And there's a good business in that.

Jordan Peterson [12:55] I know as a clinical psychologist that any given teenager is going to fall prey to pure pressure from time to time. If you listen hard enough, people are likely to tell you everything.

AD [13:08] Our son, who's in seventh grade, he's starting to fall in with a, with a bad friend group.

Jordan Peterson [13:14] Rangers are desperate to fit in and obviously desperate to have friends. And not to be the isolated target of exclusion and bullying.

AD [13:22] How do we as parents get involved and engaged?

Jordan Peterson [13:25] The reason people don't have these sorts of conversations is because they don't want the emotion. And the longer you let it go on, the more mess you're going to have to clean up.

AD [13:34] Our daughter was bullied at her school. How do we protect our kids when this is happening?

Jordan Peterson [13:41] Don't let your kids drift away when they're teenagers. They don't want to. But they will if you don't pay attention. Well, part of that, I think, is the consequence of the fact that we have to ground our perceptions in an axiomatic framework. And that, I mean, this has been my concern with the primacy of the story right from the beginning. And I think the deeper question is, A deeper question is, you know, is there some, is there some necessary structure to that fundamental axiomatic framework? You know, the postmodernist claim was that the postmodernist claim, the fundamental postmodernist claim is that there is no uniting meta-narrative, right? We live in the postmodern world now. The postmodern world is a place of local truths. And the French intellectuals, they not only decided that that was necessary and an improvement. And now we see the consequences of that. We're in a landscape of infinite narratives. And the question is, how do you define a rank order of narratives such that some are valid? And some are invalid. You know, the idea of misinformation is obviously predicated on the notion that certain narratives are invalid. And that seems self-evident to me. I wouldn't exactly call myself a fan of the direction that Candace Owens has decided to walk down. But I'm not going to say anything more about her. And so, you know, what I've been trying to struggle with is, and this has been the basis of many of our discussions in the final analysis, is what is the proper grounding for a narrative framework? And I mean, my understanding of your position is that that's why you've turned right from the beginning to the world of objective fact, so to speak. The problem is, is that there's a lot of facts and which ones to prioritize and which ones to ignore is a very thorny question. And, you know, one of the things you referred to obliquely was that, well, when you and I were young, because we're about to say, mage, I think you're four years younger than me, we had narratives that united us as a culture. There was a certain, well, there were fewer people. There was more ethnic homogeneity, at least in the local environments in the world. There was, there were information brokers that were extraordinarily powerful. The universities, the newspapers, the TV stations, the radio stations, and they weren't very easy to get access to, and they had gatekeepers, and at least some of the time those gatekeepers seemed meritorious as well as arbitrary. And, you know, it could easily be that the fragmentation of the landscape is a consequence of technological revolution, and also perhaps of the, well, you had pointed to the irresponsibility of the participants in that landscape. I mean, I think it's also, or even more primarily that they're, they're flooded with information and very finding it very difficult to keep up.

Sam Harris [17:24] Well, they're also just not disposed to function by the old norms that the gatekeepers, I mean, for, for all their faults, they had standards, right?

Jordan Peterson [17:34] I know, but, but, but, Sam, those, those, I agree with you, and, but I also would say that those institutions, the gatekeeping institutions have also revealed themselves as catastrophically flawed in the last five to ten years. I mean, I'm interested in your take on this, like you brought up October 7th, and the rise of anti-Semitism, and I've been tracking that with a couple of friends of mine, and we've been spending a lot of time fighting it off in all sorts of ways, some of which are public, and some of which art. And I'm appalled by it. What's happened in Canada on the anti-Semitic front since October 7th is something I never thought I'd see in my lifetime. It, it embarrasses me to the core. My, my Goddamn government came out the other day. Those bloody liberals, and they talked in the aftermath of October 7th about combating Islamophobia, as if that's Canada's problem, which it isn't. And so, but, and then, you know, you saw what happened across the, the, the United States and Canada with regard to the universities, Columbia University in particular, and their absolute silence and complicitness. Well, these terrible demonstrations were going on, not that I think that the demonstrations themselves should have been, well, we can talk about that. Letting terrorist radicals take over the universities doesn't strike me as a very good solution. So, so I'm curious about what you think about that, because, well, so, so like I think the gatekeepers have abandoned the gates, like I don't trust the new, I don't trust anything the New York Times prints at all. I think they're reprehensible. The universities, I think, are beyond salvaging. I can't see how they can be fixed. Anyways, man, lay it out. Tell me what you think.

Sam Harris [19:36] I think those, all the way up until those last two statements, I can sign on the dotted line. I think the, the, all of these institutions have embarrassed themselves in recent years and for, for the reasons that I think you and I would fully agree about. You know, this became most obvious during COVID, but it's, you know, the October 7th is more of the same, but I would just point out that the antidote to that, to the failures of institutions is not new standards. It's really to apply the old standards. I mean, we need the institutions. Spoken like a true conservative. Yeah, yeah, yeah, fine. Well, I mean, so it's no, no, but yeah, but the antidote, the antidote to fails or failures of science, say, you know, or scientific fraud is, is not something other than science. It's just more science, real science, good science, scientific, scientific integrity. And so it is with journalism or any academic discipline or anything that purports to be truth seeking, we have standards. And they, and then we, there's nothing wrong with our standards. What's, what's dangerous about the current information landscape, where we have just this, this contrarian universe, where anything that is outside the institutions is considered to have some kind of primacy, right, where everyone is kind of a citizen journalist, a citizen scientist, where you just kind of flip the mics on and talk for four hours and that's good enough. What's, what that's selecting for are the people who have no standards to even violate, right? I mean, these are, these people are incapable of hypocrisy. I mean, there was one thing is good about the New York Times and Harvard and any other institution you would point to that has, has, you know, obvious egg on his face at the moment is that at a minimum, they're capable of being shamed by their own hypocrisy. And the people who aren't in the, I would agree with you that there's been some institutional capture, where we have people in those institutions who just shouldn't be there, right, but there, but we would make that judgment again by reference to these old standards of academic or journalistic integrity. But can't his own just doesn't have that, right? And I, you know, I'd be sorry to beat up on her exclusively. I can, I can move to other names if you want, but I mean, she's, she's not, it's not, it's not the reason that I don't, the reason that I'm not inclined to,

Jordan Peterson [22:02] but I'm not inclined to discuss her isn't because I agree with what she's doing. It's because I think the best way to deal with what she's doing is not to discuss notice her. Okay.

Sam Harris [22:11] But I was, I could say the same thing about Tucker Carlson, right? And, and you might, whether you agree with me or not, this is my view of him that he's not in the truth seeking journalistic integrity business. He's in the, he's, he's got some other political project that entails spreading a fair amount of misinformation quite cynically and, and consciously and smearing lots of people. And in the case of, you know, I don't know how deep his anti-Semitism runs, but in the case of that particular topic, midwife in a very misleading conversation with an amateur historian, who he considers that the greatest historian working in America today, Darryl Cooper, the podcaster. And, you know, the opinion expressed, again, this is like, this is at the highest possible level in our information ecosystem to the largest audience, you know, few historians in human history have ever had a bigger audience than Darryl Cooper had on Tucker's podcast and then quickly followed by his appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast, right? And on that podcast, he spread the lie, the, you know, the, the recycled, you know, David Irving point that, you know, the Holocaust is not at all what it seemed and, you know, and you wouldn't believe it, but the Nazi is really never intended to kill the Jews. They just, they just rounded up so many prisoners in their concentration camps and found that, that they just didn't have enough food during winter to feed them. And they just were putting this just impossible situation. And might might not seem more compassionate to euthanize these starving prisoners in the end, right? I mean, that's how they, they accidentally stumbled into the final solution, right? That's, that's what he spread again to the largest possible audience. And in Tucker's case, you had a very, I would say, you know, sinister midwife in of that conversation. In Joe's case, he just doesn't know when he's in the presence of recycled David Irving and is, and is just happy to have a conversation with a podcaster of whom he's a great fan. And, but yet he's still culpable for not having done enough homework to adequately push back about what's being said to his, again, to his audience, which is the largest podcast audience on earth. So it's, it's journalistically, and I know Joe doesn't consider himself a journalist. He's considered himself a comedian who's just having fun conversations. Great. But what that is tantamount to at this moment, especially in the context of the worst eruption of antisemitism we've ever seen in our lifetimes globally, that's tantamount to taking absolutely no, no responsibility for the kind of information that is flowing unrebutted into the ears of your audience, right? That's why I got angry at Joe, right? I love Joe. Joe is a great person. He's completely in over his head on topics of that sort, and it has a consequence. It has an effect.

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Jordan Peterson [26:28] Well, you know, one of the one of the problems I suppose in some ways. Sam is that in this new information landscape. We're all in over our heads.

Sam Harris [26:41] Yeah, but some of us are alert to that possibility and worried about it and taking steps to course correct and notice our errors.

Jordan Peterson [26:48] Well, let's let's also let's also try to make a distinction here, you know, I mean, there is a distinction that's important to make between accidentally wandering into pathological territory, you know, and and causing disruption because of the magnification of your voice and there's a big difference between that and exploiting. The fringe for your own self aggrandizement and there's plenty of the ladder online and I'm I've been concerned for some substantial amount of time that online anonymity also drives that mean you talked about the utility of embodied interaction in separating the wheat from the chaff right so one of the things you see online is as you pointed out. If you have a crazy idea, you can find 300 other people who have even a crazier idea of the same sort and you can get together with them, which you couldn't have done 20 years ago, because there's only one of them per 100,000 scattered all around the world, but they can aggregate together quite quickly online. The the places that females gather online, for example, are right with that kind of pathology and all sorts of psychogenic epidemic spread without any barrier whatsoever in consequence, because young women in particular are since are susceptible to psychogenic epidemics and so that's a huge problem. It's also the case that in real world conversation, if I'm talking to you, you know it's me and I have to live with the consequences of what I've said to you, assuming we ever meet again, and I have to live with the fact that other people hear about it as well, but if I'm if I'm anonymous. Then I can say whatever the hell I want, I can gather the fruits of that and I can dispense with any of the responsibility and so my sense is that online connectivity magnifies our voice to a degree that it's virtually impossible to be responsible enough to conduct ourselves appropriately, because the reach is just so great. And anonymity, anonymity literally gives the edge to the psychopaths, predators, and the parasites, and this is a huge problem. You know, as a biologic, we can think about it as biologists for a moment, Sam, I mean, I would say two things, when the cost of communication is zero, the parasites swarm the system. Right, because communication is a resource and abandoned resources attract parasites, and what is it now? 50% of internet communication is bought, and the huge part of the reason for that is that communication is free, but it's not free, right, because you have to attend to it. It actually has a cost, so the price of free is the wrong price. You know, let me give you an example of this, just tell me what you think about this, you know, one of the things I've done recently with my daughter and her husband, mostly, and a bunch of professors is start this Peterson Academy, and we have an online social media element to that, which tracks about 15,000 regular users. And we keep a pretty close eye on it, and we refunded the money of 10 of our students, because they were causing trouble on the social media platform. 10 out of 15,000, that's all, and it markedly improved in their absence. And so, you know, there's an interesting dynamic there, you know, we don't know what online anonymity does, we don't know what free communication does when the actual price isn't zero. It certainly serves the parasites extraordinarily well, and we are learning that bad information is easier to generate and spread than good information. Right? None of this is personal, right? And none of this really, I know we've already talked about the fact that all of this, all of this, what would you say, edgy conversation can be monetized and used to attract attention towards bad actors. Let's leave that aside. I agree with that completely. I think it's appalling, but there are structural problems here that are even deeper, you know, and I think, well, anonymity is a huge problem. But then also I think, well, what the hell are we going, what kind of world would we define and live in rapidly if every bloody thing that you had to say online was verified with a digital identity? I mean, they've taken a lot of steps in that direction in China. That doesn't look very good to me.

Sam Harris [32:00] Well, I think the structural problems run even deeper because I agree with everything you said about the effect of free and the effect of anonymity, and I draw two lessons from your experience with your online forum. One is that having it behind a paywall made it made it much cleaner than it otherwise would have been. You only found 10 people you had to kick out to clean the whole thing up. But the other point is that those 10 people can really have an outsized toxic influence on a larger culture. So I think we want social media platforms that draw that kind of lesson, but it's not just anonymity and it's not just people who are grifting or otherwise incentivized to be liars or spreaders and misinformation. There are people who, with reputations, you would think they would want to protect. I mean, people with the biggest possible reputations and the biggest possible careers who in the presence of social media have gone properly nuts. And I would put as patient zero for this contagion Elon Musk. I have witnessed a complete unraveling of the person I knew, and I believe I knew him fairly well, under the pressure of extraordinary fame and wealth, but really well kind of weaponized by his addictive entanglement with Twitter. I mean, he was so addicted to Twitter that he needed to buy it so that he could just live there. Right. I mean, that was Twitter was his whole life before anyone heard about his impulse to buy it or anyone heard about his concern about the the woke mind virus. I mean, before COVID, he had gone off the deep end into into Twitter being everything. How do you, how do you know this? Like, I know, I know, I know this, I know this because I was his friend at the time and I, I was there, you know, in his, very close social circle when, you know, Twitter was causing obvious problems for his life and his businesses when he would tweet, you know, for 20, you know, funding secured, you know, and the SEC. He, you know, raised his, it raised the offices of Tesla and sees as everyone's computer. Right. I mean, that was, he was, he was, he was screwing up his life through Twitter. And yet it was unthinkable that he would get off of it. So, so potent a drug was it for him.

Jordan Peterson [34:49] Let me ask you about that. Let's speak to think about this biologically again. One of the ways you could define addiction is as the pursuit of positive emotion. That's bound to us a very short time frame. So you get addicted when you optimize positive emotion over a very short time frame. So, so for example, the addictive propensity of cocaine is dependent on the dose, but also the rate of administration. So the reason that snorted cocaine or injected cocaine is more potent than the same dose of like swallowed cocaine is because it crosses the blood brain barrier faster and raises the dopaminergic pitch quicker.

Sam Harris [35:36] So there's rate and also the reward component appears to correlate subjectively not with the peak in actual pleasure of the the result in stimulus, but in the peak of the expectation that the pleasure is about to arrive.

Jordan Peterson [35:58] Yeah, yeah. Well, the dopaminergic system is an expectation system and cocaine. Okay. So now, so here's what we have with social media with with the bots with the with the AI algorithm optimizers, right? So this is what's happening. You can see it happening to YouTube too is that the systems are optimized to grip attention. But the battle is for the for shorter and shorter. What would you say for shorter and shorter durations of attention focus. So the battle is not only for attention, but for the shortest possible amount of information that will grip the maximum amount of attention. Now, the AI systems are using reinforcement learning to determine how to optimize that and that's driving that fragmentation like you can see it on YouTube because YouTube is tilted more and more towards shorts like tick talk, right? These fragmentary bursts of maximally attractive information and they could capitalize on rage because rage has a positive emotion element. Now, I want to put this into the context of what you said about Twitter and you and I could have a conversation about X and Twitter that's personal as well. So you said, you know, Elon got hooked on X and and enough to buy it. And so let's let's assess that situationally and biologically. Now, I've spent quite a bit of time on X. In fact, it's the social media platform that I've used personally the most. It's the one I'm most familiar with. And I would say it's been a very it's very complex platform for me.

Sam Harris [37:39] Yeah, hasn't it at various points convinced you that you should no longer use it? Didn't haven't you gotten on and on multiple times, multiple times, multiple times. I learned that lesson exactly once, but it really did stick. I have not looked at.

Jordan Peterson [37:53] Yeah, well, that's partly what I want to talk to you about. I mean, so part of it is, you know, I get a lot of my podcast guests and my ideas for podcast guests from X from because I follow about 2,000 people. But I'm very extroverted. And there's an element of impulsivity that goes along with extroversion. I'm very verbally fluent. And so I can think up new ideas in no time flat. And I'm likely to say them. And so it's very easy for me, if I'm on X to react to a lot of things. And so for me and mouth. Well, that, but it's weird. It's a weird thing because some of the things that some of my impulsive moves, so to speak, which have got me in quite a lot of trouble, I'm not the least bit unhappy about, you know, I got, you cannot believe how much flack I got for tweeting out something arguably careless on October 8th.

Sam Harris [38:58] What was that? I've not been on Twitter. I never saw that. What was the, what was it?

Jordan Peterson [39:04] I said, give him hell, Netanyahu. Yeah, yeah, right. So that took like eight months of cleanup work to deal with. Seriously, it was, no, it was.

Sam Harris [39:17] But, but, but, and while I got kicked off X, yeah, you're not going to get any dispute from me about that. I mean, Netanyahu, just to, just to close the loop on that Netanyahu is, is obviously very polarizing figure and probably a fairly corrupt figure. He's got lots of problems that have implications for Israeli politics, but I'm not convinced that even the perfect prime minister, who has no optical problems, you judge from our side, would have waged this war any differently. I mean, I just don't, I don't know what, what they should have done differently. At every stage along the way, and I don't know that any other prime minister would have taken a different path.

Jordan Peterson [39:56] Well, the situation to me looks like, and you tell me what you think about this, and then we'll go back to the, to the, to the problem of AI optimization of grip of short term attention and the manner in which X in particular falls into that category. So my sense with, with the situation Israel was, has been right from the beginning that Iran in particular would and has set up the situation. So if every single Palestinian was sacrificed in the most torturous possible manner to irritate, annoy and destroy Israel and agitate the Americans, that would be 100% all right with Iran.

Sam Harris [40:38] I think someone said that the Mullahs in Iran will fight Israel to the last Arab. I think that's the line that I capture.

Jordan Peterson [40:47] Yeah, well, that's exactly how it looks to me. And so I look at that situation and I say, well, I think, well, like, what do you do in a situation like that that's moral if you're Israel? Anyway, so I don't want to go down that rabbit to deeply, but that's, yeah, yeah. Well, but that, but okay, but so I've had this like complex relationship with X and some of it's been real useful because I follow a lot of people there and I keep an eye on the mainstreams of the culture and I extract out my podcast guests. And I can see where the real pathology is emerging and I can keep an eye on it. And the price of that is that, you know, now and then I stick my foot in it in a major way. And sometimes that's good and sometimes it's not. And now I've sort of built a variety of fences around me that are part of my organization that, you know, they're in there. And they're, they're kind of these intermediary structures that we've been talking about that put a lag in between what I read and how it's going to work. Well, that, that's one, well, you know, and this is part, it's the destruction of those things that we're starting to, you and I are starting to talk about here. Because, you know, it's, there's never been a time in human history where you could publish your first past opinion about anything to 20 million people in one second. Right? No one could ever do that. And, and we're not, we're not, we're not neurologically constructed to live in a world where you can yell at 10 million people whenever you want about anything.

Sam Harris [42:32] Yeah, the problem for me is that what's happening now going back to this, this core topic of what, what in particular is wrong with X and the time course at which people are reacting to information and producing information in turn. There's a lot wrong with that and it's what it's done to our culture and it was what it's done to specific people. I mean, again, Elon for me is the enormous, the 800 pound canary in the coal mine is that it is, you know, it's effectively made them behave like psychopaths. I'm not saying, I mean, if you look, if you just look at X and this is what, what convinced me to get off of it, you, you would think there were many more psychopaths in the world than there are in fact. I was seeing people who I knew in every other context would be psychologically normal or at least normal enough behave like a psychopaths to me toward me in front of me. And in some cases, these are people I actually knew there's some people I, in some case, the people I had dinner with and I knew what I was seeing on X was, what would have been impossible across the table from me at dinner.

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Sam Harris [45:04] Right, right.

Jordan Peterson [45:06] Well, that's an interesting definition of a pathological sub-environment, isn't it? Like, you can tell a family is pathological when the rules that apply in the family don't generalize to the outside world. And you're making your pointing out that the game dynamics of Twitter have that aspect is that the game that's being played in Twitter doesn't suit the world well. It's not an iterable game in the world. And it could easily be the fact that it maximizes for short-term emotional reactivity is exactly what gives it that psychopathic edge. Because the definition of a psychopath in many ways is the person who will sacrifice the future and you for immediate gratification. Right. That's the pathology of psychopathy as a form of extended immaturity.

Sam Harris [46:06] Yeah. Well, there's a lot of aggressive immaturity on display on X. And again, Elon is one of the primary offenders. So one instance for me that made this especially clear and the role played by X especially clear was when he jumped up on stage during one of these these campaign events or I forget if it was campaign or I guess the election already been won. Some event with Trump and Elon, you know, quite famously quite infamously did what appeared to be a Nazi salute twice to the crowd and got a reaction from much of the world of horror and insult. And now, honestly, you know, as his former friend and his somebody who just imagines he his worldview has not, you know, fully disintegrated into a tissue of weird internet memes. It was impossible for me to believe that he was sincerely announcing his solidarity to the project of Nazism by by making those salutes, right. So I didn't view those as Nazi salutes, even though just ergonomically they were in fact, Nazi salutes. I just thought, okay, I don't know what he's doing, but the idea that he's picking this moment to say I'm a Nazi seems frankly impossible. So I was I was interested to see what he was going to do in response to the controversy. What he did in response and again, this controversy is coming in a context that doesn't look at all good for my very charitable interpretation of his behavior because it's in a context where he's funding the far right party in Germany assuring us that there's absolutely nothing wrong with that party. Whereas the party does in fact contain whatever Nazis there are to be contained in Germany, not that it's only a Nazi party, but it isn't in addition to everything else. It's got the Nazis. He's playing footsie with lots of fairly aggressive anti-Semites on his own platform. He's a great fanfare. He had brought back Nick Fuentes and Kanye and these people are anti-Semites, if not actual Nazis. He is facilitating a very unhappy recruedessence of anti-Semitism on the platform he owns and now he's doing Nazi salutes in public. What is a genuinely not anti-Semitic well intentioned person who cares about his reputation and is still capable of embarrassment due in the aftermath of this? Well, it would have been just trivially easy for him to have said something totally sensible and apologetic that would have been honest and would have taken this thing out of the moment perfectly. He could have said, listen, I know how that looked. I don't know what I was doing up there. I was just captured by the energy of the moment. Obviously, I was not doing a Hitler salute. I'm not a Nazi. I've got no interest in amplifying their message on X or anywhere else. If you're a Nazi, please don't follow me. I hate your whole project. You're completely wrong about everything. End of tweet, right? He did nothing like that. All he did was troll his audience, making Nazi jokes and puns on X. So you can fault his character for that. But what I also think we should fault is the medium itself, right? This is the way his brain is performing to the technology.

Jordan Peterson [50:13] Well, look, you know, you know the fundamental attribution error. This is what the one thing social psychologists have discovered that's actually valid. That's a bit of an exaggeration. But the fundamental attribution, yes, it does and things. The fundamental attribution or error is the proclivity to attribute to character what's actually a consequence of situation. You know, in these, we should be very careful. And I think we are at the moment. Be very careful to assure that our first presumption is that it's the pathology of the technology. That's the fundamental driver. And the people are to be clear that that's the long in it.

Sam Harris [50:50] That's my account of what has happened to Elon almost in his entirety. I think Twitter has, you know, he is the greatest living casualty of what Twitter does. What Twitter does to someone who becomes properly engorged by it. And that's, yeah, yeah. So, but what, and one of the reasons why I got off, frankly, was apart from my own misadventures on the platform, which were nothing like Elon's. I looked in the kind of the fun house mirror of what was happening to him in his life. And I thought, you know, here's a very smart guy who's got much better things to do than fuck up his life in this way. And yet he can't seem to stop how much, how much am I like him, how much is there this component of addiction and dysregulation and failures of impulse control and a need to just, you know, get, get my thoughts out on a time course of seconds rather than more carefully, you know, over the course of days. And so then I yanked it for that reason. And the one thing I found is that when you don't have it as an outlet, right, when you literally can't publish that quickly, then things have to survive a much larger informational half life. So then there's this thing online that happened that I'm tempted to react to. It has to survive until I do my next podcast, which might not be for three or four days. Right. And so, and, and, you know, obviously 90% of the things I thought I had to react to don't survive that, that time course.

Jordan Peterson [52:31] Yeah, you know, I made a deal with my wife that was like that because, you know, I can see things going sideways. I think with their degree of accuracy and that disrupts me emotionally now and then. And I made a deal with my wife several years ago that I can't complain about anything I won't write about. Right. Well, it's the same thing and it bears on the same issue that you're describing is that if it's not important enough to write about, then you should ignore it. Right. You're not actually, it's not significant enough. It's not significant enough to sacrifice some genuine time and thought. You, you shouldn't be commenting on it. And that, that's, that's, that's kind of a maturity, but it's also, it's a, it's a weird thing because it's not exactly like. It isn't something that people had to contend with previously because you couldn't publish immediately. There was, there were barriers of cost and difficulty and gatekeepers and, and distribution. And so that wasn't something you had to think up for yourself, like how do I put a lag in my life before I communicate with a million people or five million people? And so you're, you're basically building these inhibitory structures out of whole cloth. And, and now you, you pulled out of Twitter along quite a while ago now. It's a couple of years ago.

Sam Harris [54:14] Yeah. Right. Okay. So two and a half years, something like that. Yeah. Well, it was, it was right when Elon took it over, but it wasn't because he took it over. I mean, the timing there was, was fairly accidental. I was, I was getting ready to pull the plug. And then I just saw how much chaos, it was, it was being introduced into his life around it. And I just thought, right, this is, this is a sign. And so I, I'm, I yanked it. And, I mean, one of the, the benefits, apart from just this, introducing this different time course into my life, by which I, I interact with information. I just don't, like, you know, there's this, there's this phrase, you know, the Twitter isn't real life. And then it's a certain point. Many of us realize, okay, that's, that's two sanguine of thought, because you were noticing people losing their reputation. So fully that, you know, they get on an airplane, like the, I think it was the Justine Sacco incident where she got on an airplane. And then half the world was tweeting about her. And she, she arrived at her destination only to find that she had been properly canceled and lost her job, et cetera, et cetera. So, so obviously Twitter can, you know, whether you're honored or not, it can, it can, under the right circumstances, or the wrong ones become real life. But the truth is, given the platform I've built, given the, I mean, just frankly, how lucky I've been to find an audience and to build a, you know, a readership and a podcast, listenership, Twitter really isn't real life for me. Like I, like I'm still, Elon still attacks me on Twitter by name. And I find out I'm trending on Twitter, you know, years after I've left. And it matters not at all for my life. It matters not at all for my business. Nothing happens, right? And yet, if I were on Twitter, there would be this illusion of emergency, right? If I was on there looking at it and looking at the, you know, looking at the biggest, literally the biggest bully on Twitter has just punched me in the face. And I'm seeing the aftermath of it, the temptation to respond to that and to make it, and to, and to feel that not only do I have to respond there, but I have to respond to my podcast. And, and then now this is how I'm spending my week because this thing just happened on Twitter. It would be almost impossible not to be taken in by that and not to not to be just convinced of the necessity of it because all of this is really important. I mean, we're talking about millions of people, like, I mean, like, literally there are, there are videos denigrating me for things I've never said or believed that Elon has amplified. And these videos have 50 million views, right? And I just happened to be lucky enough to have built a life in a career where that matters not at all, right? But for somebody else finding themselves in that situation, I can, I can well imagine, all right, this is just, this is the destruction of my reputation in a way that matters.

Jordan Peterson [57:09] Well, that's what it looks like. Sure. And like you said, it's virtually impossible to resist that temptation. I mean, who are you to deny the impact of the opinion of 50 million people? You know what I mean? I mean, that that looks like an insane pride in a way to ignore that. But the point that you're making is that it's very difficult to to

Sam Harris [57:35] Well, it's very easy to ignore it when it actually isn't making contact with my views, right?

Jordan Peterson [57:42] It's like, if I say something, it's hard to see that it isn't like because it's so it appears so powerful. You know, we've found as a social media platform that Twitter is the worst of all social media platforms for sales conversion.

Sam Harris [57:57] Yeah, I can imagine. In our experience, it's because you're next to somebody getting beaten to death in a liquor store. I mean, like when I go on Twitter, since I don't have an account, so I have a naive account. It's not following anyone. And I almost never click anything. So I really see this pure algorithm when you just kind of just look at the home page scroll. And or as pure as it gets. I mean, maybe it's got some information on me based on my IP address or something. But if I ask myself, what is this algorithm, algorithm trying to get me to be or to believe? Honestly, I can tell you that it is trying to get me to be a racist asshole, right? And any fan of Elon's, right? So it's given me a lot of Elon and then it's giving me a lot of black teenagers beating up white, you know, a single white teenager or people of color robbing stores and getting shot in the face. I mean, it's just off like 4chan level awfulness. And then the, and then the occasional, you know, unlucky brand advertising to me in that context. I mean, it's just, it's a, it's a monstrosity of a platform from which to actually try to sell things. So it's a. But yes, if I were on Twitter following 2000 smart people as you are and feeling that they are curating for me, you know, that they're best, the best of their information diet. I would have a, I know what that experience is like because that's what I was doing. That's why I was on it for whatever 12 years and couldn't convince myself to get off it. It seemed, it seemed like a professional necessity. It seems, it seemed so good in the sense the incoming stuff was so good because again, I had chosen who to follow and all these people were reading great articles and forwarding them and having great short takes on them. And it was, all that stuff was great, but I have managed to to get a surrogate of that in the way I find information otherwise. And, and what I don't have is, is the emergency like I mean the ruined vacation where somebody, you know, like somebody, some genius over the New York Times has called me a racist. And now I have to, you know, spend the rest of my vacation with my family trying to figure out how to respond to this. I've tweeted back at them and blah, blah, blah, blah. It's escalated and now we've just nuked each other and it looks real. Yeah, it looks real and it, but it feels real and it is real if you spend your time that way. And that's the thing. If you spend your time that way, which I did for years, it is real. It is the, it is the substance of your life. It is the, the manner in which you, it's the thing you bring back to the conversation with your wife, you know, five minutes later, or five hours later more likely. And it's in your head. And it just, it was, it was a ghastly use of attention. That's, that's what I finally realized.

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Jordan Peterson [62:15] Well, you made an illusion when you were talking about what you regard as the unfortunate effective X on Elon and maybe on other users. So let's assume that that you were afraid that this sort of things that you were seeing happening to others more than merely Elon, let's say in your estimation, we're also happening to you. So what do you think in retrospect, what do you think it was doing to you? You just talked about the effects on your family and vacations. I've experienced a fair bit of that. I understand exactly what you're saying. And it does seem like the world's burning and you better do something about it right now. And it's no wonder it seems that way because it's lots of people and generally in our normative ecosystems, if lots of people appear to be upset with you or around you, you should pay attention. But Twitter isn't the real world. We don't know what the hell it is. It looks more and more like a world of demonic thoughts. And God only knows what that world is. But what did you see, especially now that you've been away for a while, what elements of your character? Do you think we're pathologized and that we're brought to the forefront that.

Sam Harris [63:36] Because of this, I considered myself a fairly careful user of it. I mean, I was not at all like Elon, I was not addicted to it in that way. I was not tweeting hundreds of times a day. I think I averaged something like three tweets a day over the course of my use of it. That would come in spurts. And so there would be I would not tweet for three days and then send out a dozen tweets, you know, because there was some hot topic. I was always fairly careful so that I honestly don't think I ever said anything on the platform that I regretted, right? I mean, if I ever made a mistake, I apologize for it. But I was I never, you know, I treated it like writing. I treat I was aware I was publishing in that channel. However, quickly and impulsively, I was, you know, I'm a much I'm enough of a writer and an academic to feel like, OK, this is yet another occasion where embarrassment is possible and you don't want that. So I never I don't remember ever really screwing up on the platform. And yet what happened there was. I mean, I can honestly say that for a decade, the worst things in my life and in some sense, the only bad things in my life came from Twitter came from my interaction with Twitter. I mean, apart from like a family, you know, family illnesses, you know, that that's leaving something leaving that aside. My life was so good. And yet I had this, you know, digital serpents in my pocket that I would consult a dozen times a day, 20 times a day, maybe a hundred times a day. So again, I might have only posted once or twice, but if something was really, you know, if the news cycle was really churning, I might be looking at this, this, my consulting of this, this newsfeed effectively was interrupting my day, you know, not just every hour, but maybe every five minutes of many hours. Right. Or for 10 minutes of that hour and and so it was segmenting my day, however good that or productive that day was or should have been, I was constantly chopping it up by how I was engaging with this scroll. Again, mostly consuming, but you know, often in response to the one or two things I put out. Yes, there was a dopaminergic component to that, obviously, you know, I said something that I thought was clever that was perceived as clever by my fans, you know, and perhaps to the detriment of my enemies and all that seemed, you know, exactly what I wanted in the moment. But even when it was at its best, right, even when there was just good information coming to me and I was responding happily with good information back, even the even the non toxic version of it was a style of of was was intrinsically fragmenting of my life, you know, it's like I like I don't pick up I don't read a book that way. I don't I don't have a book that I pick up for two and a half minutes and then I put down and then try to have a conversation with my kid and then say, okay, hold on one second and pick up the book again. It's like that's not how you that's not how anyone reads a book, right. And yet Twitter

Jordan Peterson [67:06] far too often became that sort of thing in my life, right, right. And it's like a parasite. It's like it parasitizes the exploratory instinct. It's something like that, right, because and maybe look, you know, for a long time, I didn't have a cell phone. I was a late adopter of cell phones and I didn't watch the news probably really from like 1985 till about 2005. I had cut myself off from news sources. I didn't read newspapers. And the reason that I didn't do that was because a few things happened in there that you catch 9-11. Well, the, you know, I used to read, for example, I would read some credible magazines like the economist when I still was credible because I don't really think it is

Sam Harris [67:55] anymore, but was not amazing. Isn't it amazing to consider that magazines like time and news week and they could wait a week. I could expect that their audience would wait a week to be informed about the news of that week. That just seems extraordinary to me now.

Jordan Peterson [68:11] Well, well, well, my conclusion about that was that if it isn't important in a week, it's not important. Right. Yeah. Right. And so and so I substituted these longer lag time news aggregators for TV in particular or radios like if it's today's news, it's not news. Maybe if it's not important in a month, it's not news. Right. And that's part of that, that, that intelligent filtering. And I guess part of the reason that X is dangerous and social media is dangerous. X in particular is that, you know, that proclivity to forage for information is is in general an extremely useful instinct. Right. It's the instinct to learn. But what what we're learning, you might say that the shorter the period of time over which the information is relevant, the more like pseudo information it is. And so then any system that optimizes for the grip of short term attention is going to parasitize your learning instinct with pseudo information.

Sam Harris [69:25] Yeah. So it's also the algorithms are going to maximize that the half life is one thing, but also the culture that that is informing these algorithms, the actual human behavior that the algorithms are, you know, skimming and and boosting is increasingly a bad faith style of conversation. I mean, it's just people are so many people, especially the anonymous people are in the misinformation business. I mean, they will just cut together a clip that is designed to mislead. And that is the clip that will get spread to the ends of the earth.

Jordan Peterson [70:06] Well, it's to maybe is it designed to mislead or is it designed to optimize their particular grip on short term attention for their own grad for their own aggrandizement like that like that the psychopathic move and let's say that it's facilitated by these short term attention aggregators that are that are driven by bots that are learning how to do this. The like the psychopathic proclivity, the narcissistic proclivity is going to say whatever puts you at the center of attention, whatever it is. Now, if you're governed by some kind of ethos that is outside of attention seeking, then that's a different story. But the game if the game is that the machine optimizes for short term attention, then it's going to reward all the players that are doing whatever it takes to grip short term attention.

Sam Harris [71:06] Yeah, but the thing is that people clear whatever it takes though is to get somebody seeming to say something totally outrageous. And in context, it might have made perfect sense. But or at least be it be a very different point than the one that's being advertised by the clip, but the clip, short of context is just is calculated to to mislead in that. The person who is edited that clip knows that the naive viewer is can only draw one conclusion from the from the utterance as presented. Right. And and and they're not and that not even if they're well intentioned and fairly alert alert to this problem, almost no one is going to go back to the original podcast and look at the comment in context. I mean, this just happened to to Rogan, I believe, I think he had, you know, the, you know, the singer for you to you to on his podcast and. Uh, Bono said something critical of Elon, I believe, and this got chopped up in a clip that was just it made it look like Joe really disagreed with Bono and was and was critical of him. And and so the and the clip just got exported like look at, you know, look at Bono getting owned by Joe Rogan or whatever, but that's not what that's not what the conversation was at all, right. Like like Joe conceded, you know, have most most most of the point that that Bono was making. Um, it was just it was false. It was it was the false picture of what happened there. And the person who makes that clip just knows that. That if they, if they frame it as a, as a smack down, people are going to love to see that and it doesn't matter that they're lying about what happened and damaging people's reputations in the process.

Jordan Peterson [72:59] Yeah. Well, and that's especially true if they're anonymous and their reputation bears no consequence of their lies. You know, well, the other thing that's happening, I don't know how much this is happening to you, but. And this is another example of the parasite problem. So increasingly, my voice and my image are being used, not exactly in the way that you're describing, although that's happening a lot. I'm selling, I'm selling cognitive enhancers somewhere as an AI version of myself. Okay. Okay. Well, that that's happening a fair bit too. And sometimes worse than cognitive enhancers, but it's the worst thing that's happening now is that these sites that are operating under my name using my image and my voice are providing pseudo philosophical content. And pseudo psychological insight as if it's me. And so it's, it's, it's, it's, it's like what I've said has been put through a filter of stupidity and reorganized in my voice. And this is happening constantly like YouTube has already taken 65 channels down that are doing this. And so this is another example of that parasite problem, right? You store up a reputation. And then the parasites swoop in and pull off the attention that the reputation has garnered and monetize it. And they can escape into the ether because they do it anonymously. And so yeah, I think it's going to become a stunning problem.

Sam Harris [74:46] I think it's, it's a big problem. I can see that it, you know, the, the perfect version of it is, is at most a year away. I mean, it might only be a couple of months away. Yeah, yeah, we've experimented with this on our side too. Just, like for instance, in my meditation app, waking up, we're now experimenting with translation to other languages. And, you know, they've got AI's got me speaking 22 languages perfectly in my voice. And it really sounds like me speaking those words. And the translation from what we can tell so far is fairly impeccable. So we're going to roll out a Spanish version of the app in the not too distant future, just to see what happens. But it's like, it's, it's, it's getting, it's getting too good. So I think what the lesson that, that consumers of information who care to have real information are going to have to learn is that you can't trust if you're, if you're looking at Jordan Peterson. On YouTube, you simply cannot trust that it really is Jordan Peterson, unless it's coming through one, one channel that you know you can trust, which is so, and we're back to the age of gay, ironically, we're back to the age of gatekeepers, right? It's not on your channel or Joe Rogan's channel or, you know, Chris Williamson's channel, if it just purports to be them, but on somebody else's YouTube account, you can't.

Jordan Peterson [76:13] You can't trust it. Yeah, well, it might also be saying that the, the real solution to that is payment. Like if it's the rule is going to be, maybe this is the real rule is going to be, if it's free, right? If it's free, it's a lie. Right. Yeah.

Sam Harris [76:33] That's the world we're rapidly moving into. And, and, or if it's, except someone, someone's going to be able to create, I mean, until you find them and stop them, someone will create the fake Jordan Peterson Academy that has a paywall. Right. That looks like you sounds like you and, you know, it's only, it's only $5 a month.

Jordan Peterson [76:54] And so they'll monetize that way and that'll, that'll still be the problem. Has that been happening with your, with your meditation app, with your, with your enterprise yet?

Sam Harris [77:03] Not, not that I'm aware of. That's no. I mean, I just think I'm just aware of seeing short clips of me seeming to, to Hawk, you know, psychotropics that that I've never heard of. And it's just like an AI version of my voice. It's real footage of me stolen from somebody's podcast and then an AI work over of that, you know, that turns into an Instagram ad.

Jordan Peterson [77:32] Yeah. Well, I talked to some lawmakers in DC about a year and a half ago about the fact that this was going to happen, hoping that they would, well, it takes a long time to take notice and, and takes action. You know, it's essentially the digital, it's the digital equivalent of kidnapping. Like I think people should, people should be put in prison for a long time for stealing your digital identity and monetizing it. Like it is very much akin to kidnapping because what they're doing is they're draining the value out of your reputation. That's essentially the game, you know, and so, so what, what's happened to your life? If you, you, you, you, there's a couple of, there's a couple of things I'd like to investigate here. First, you know, the first I'd like to return to something that you and I talked about that we beat that we wandered around a fair bit in our previous conversations, you know, you had partly because you were concerned about the distinction between good and evil and let me put words into your mouth. You were hoping to find a objective basis for morality, a way of grounding morality in the objective world. And I have a thought about that that's relevant to our current conversation. You know, so tell me if you accept this proposition. Part of the pathology of Twitter is that it operates by game rules that not only don't apply in the real world, but that when exported to the real world pathologize it. Yeah, fair. Yeah. Okay. So, so, okay. Okay. Right. Okay. So, so here's a way of, of I think bridging the gap between the way you've been thinking about the world from the moral perspective and the way I've been thinking about it. So, you know, I've always been, I've understood that you had a very deep concern about moral judgment and that your attempt to provide a scaffolding of objectivity for morality was grounded in that even deeper concern. And I thought that I could understand why you did that. And I didn't agree with the conclusions that you draw, but I agreed with the overall enterprise and it struck me recently. And I think we've already obliquely made reference to it in our conversation that there's another way of conceptualizing this relationship between morality and objective fact. And it might be, it might be more fruitful to look into the realm of something like, well, it's like theory of iterability. It's, and generalizability. It's, it's maybe a variant of something like game theory. Like imagine that. So, let me give you an example, Sam. And it's a pretty famous example. You know those trading games where behavioral economists sit people down and say, two people, they say, I'll give you $100, you have to make an offer to the, okay. So, the finding across culturally is that people generally approximate a 50%, 50, 50 split, right?

Sam Harris [80:59] Yeah. And they're highly, they're not game theoretic with respect to unfair trades. Like they don't want to accept unfair trades even when it would just narrowly be to their advantage to accept them.

Jordan Peterson [81:14] Exactly. Exactly. Okay. Okay. And that's true, even if they're poor. So, if you put a poor person in a situation where they have to accept an unfair trade, that would be to their immediate economic benefit, they seem even less likely to accept it. Now, I think the right way to construe that is that if you and I engage in an economic trade, we're doing two things at the same time. The first is what the classical economists would say is we're trying to maximize our, our gain, let's say. But the problem with that notion is that we aren't playing one game or while we're playing one game, we're also setting ourselves up to play a very large and unpredictable sequence of games. Those are happening at the same time. And so, we don't want to just optimize for gain in the single game. We want to optimize our status as players in a large series of unpredictable games, games. And so, we want to put ourselves forward as fair players so that people line up to play other games with us. Okay. So then imagine that the hallmark of morality is something like generalizable iterability across contexts. Right? Because this would allow for, and so you could think about a truly moral system is the most playable game. And an immoral system augers in. And we're talking about this to some degree with regard to X because our proposition is that fundamentally because it's optimizing for short term attention grip. And it benefits the psychopaths and the short term gain accruers, the parasites, and perhaps the predators, that it's fundamentally a non-playable game. And that if its consequences generalize outside the world of X that it pathologizes the environment. And the reason for that is it's not optimally iterable. And so the pattern of object, the pattern of morality that would be grounded in the objective world isn't in the world of objective fact. It's in the world of optimized iterability across people and contexts.

Sam Harris [83:32] Well, I would just say that there are some set of objective facts that subsumes that picture. The world is the way it is. The social world of social primates such as ourselves is the way it is. It admits of certain possibilities and certain other things are impossible given the kinds of minds we have. Our minds could change in all kinds of ways. They could change by being integrated with technology. They could change by genetically being manipulated at some point in the future. There's this landscape of possible experience that the right sort of minds could navigate. And we're some place on that landscape and we're trying to find our way. And so I view morality as a at bottom a navigation problem. It's got this iterative quality that you describe. It's the question is it's always where can we go from here? Where should we go from here? Where should we go from here given all the possible places we might go from here both individually and collectively?

Jordan Peterson [84:39] Okay. Well, you know, the reason that I got obsessed with stories to begin with Sam was because I realized 30 years ago that a story was the description of a navigation strategy. That's what a story is. And so then the question is, okay, let's see if we can formalize this a bit more. The story has to, let's say an optimized story has to iterate and improve. So for example, if you construe your marriage properly, it exists stably, but that's not as good as it could get. It could exist stably and improve as it iterates. And then you can imagine that there's a small world of games that are playable in the actual natural and social world that improve as they iterate. And those are those games pointers to that, those games are moral pointers. And I think that that's what the core of the religious enterprise dives into and elaborates upon. I think that's what makes it the religious enterprise is that it deeply assesses. So, I mean, if you imagine this, imagine that your proposition, the proposition you laid out is accurate, is that the fundamental concern is navigation. How do we get from point A to point B? Well, a story, you can think about this and tell me what you think, but I believe that a story is a description of a navigation strategy. If you go see a movie, you infer the aim of the protagonist and you adopt his perceptual frame and his emotional perspective. That's how perception works. And then you can imagine that there are depths of games, summer, shallow, and short-term games that maximize for short-term gain and to hell with everything else are shallow. And games that are sophisticated can be played in many situations with many players. They take the future into account and they improve as you play them. And there's a hierarchy of value and consequence of that that is obliquely associated with the world of fact, because it has to operate in the world of fact. But that isn't fundamentally derived from data that's directly associated with the facts.

Sam Harris [87:19] Well, not operationally, but potentially so, just not in fact. That's just not... I'm never claiming when I say that there are objective truths to all of these questions that those objective truths will be delivered by some guy holding a clipboard wearing a white lab coat. But there are things we just know to be true and it would take a lot of explaining to get to the bottom of how we know them to be true. But I mean, just very simple claims. We know that life in the best and most refined and most ethically positive, some developed world context. You and me and our most conscientious friends at the nicest resort after having done a great day's work. We're enjoying a great meal and talking creatively and positively about how to improve the world. We know that's a better game than trying to find some child soldiers to torture the neighbors in some malarial hellhole in the sub-Saharan Africa. And so that we can extract some heavy metals, the extraction of which is polluting the environment and causing the life expectation to be 30 years lower than it is where we live. There are fundamentally discordant human projects that are available to some very lucky people and unavailable to others. And luck is by no means evenly distributed in this world. So there are better and worse games, right? By any measure of better, you want to ethically better, artistically better, entrepreneurially better, economically better. It's just better with respect to the health outcomes, etc. So we're all trying to play the best game we can be a part of. Some people, I take that back, many of us are, we're all trying to play the best game we can think of as best. But one of the consequences of my argument is that it's possible to be wrong. It's possible to actually have false beliefs about what is in fact better or worse.

Jordan Peterson [90:03] Well, I also think you're insufficient, you're insufficiently pessimistic too, Sam, I think, because I don't think everyone is trying to play the best possible game.

Sam Harris [90:13] I think that there are truly negative games where I think there are people are being rewarded in some way. The sadist whose favorite game is to just see, to cause suffering and others and enjoy that suffering, the fact that he enjoys their suffering, right? That's a problem with him, right? He's a neurological monster of a sort. And he's confined to being the sort of mind that finds that very low level game, more rewarding than the game I just advertised at the resort with us being creative and productive and positive.

Jordan Peterson [91:01] Yeah, well, that's the man who wants to rule over hell, Sam. Right, right. Because he thinks, yeah, okay, fine, fine, fine, fine, fine.

Sam Harris [91:11] But my point is that there's obviously living in a realm where there are better and worse outcomes by any definition of better and worse that makes sense.

Jordan Peterson [91:23] Even from within the confines of the games that you're describing. Yeah, right. Because one of the ways of deciding that a game is counterproductive is that if you play it, it doesn't produce the result that it intends, right? So that's another kind of universal hallmark of moral judgment. Like if you're aiming at something and your strategy doesn't get you there, either your strategy is wrong or your aim is off by your own definition, right? There's no relativizing your way out of that. And then we can say, well, there's a hierarchy of games that expand and improve as you play them. And there's a hierarchy of games that degenerate as you play them even by your own standards of degeneration.

Sam Harris [92:07] Yeah. And the games, the more refined games actually refine you as a player. You get changed by the game you play to your advantage or to your disadvantage. And it makes you more or less capable of playing any specific game. So this is what learning, this is what education is, this is what skill learning is, this is what interpersonal skill learning amounts to. This is what the difference between having good relationships versus bad relationships, being in a good culture where it's institutions incentivize you to be effortlessly be the best possible version of yourself as opposed to, you know, you having to be some kind of moral hero just to be just not a psychopath. I mean, this is what's so important about incentives and about contacts like like Twitter that incentivize the wrong things. But what we want, I mean, we don't want to have to take on the burden of rebooting civilization ourselves based on our own native moral intuitions every single hour of every single day. That's for sure. That's for sure. We need systems that make it easy for strangers to collaborate effortlessly in high trust environments. Right. I mean, this is like that. We need to offload all of our moral wisdom into institutions and to systems of incentives such that you would have to be a very bad person indeed, not to see the wisdom of being a peaceful honest collaborator with the next person you meet, right? In this given the nature of the system, you know, whereas I mean, just to sharpen this up because I can sound very abstract. If you take an actually normal decent person who just wants to be good and have positive some relationships with everyone he meets, you put that person in a maximum security prison in the United States. That person will be highly incentivized to join a gang that has, you know, has the requisite color of his skin, right, and be essentially a monster because that's the only way to survive in that context, right? To not join a gang to not join a racist gang is to be the victim of everyone, right? So what you have in a maximum security prison is a system of terrible incentives that where you have to be some kind of self-sacrificing saint to opt out of ramifying this awful system of incentives further. We want the opposite of that in situations that we control and in institutions that we build. And, you know, what the thing that's so disturbing to me about this contrary and moment is that so many people have gotten the message, you know, this is a really most explicit since COVID, they've gotten the message that we don't need institutions, we don't want institutions, we just need to burn it all down. And we're just going to navigate by sub-stack newsletter and podcast and that's just not going to work, right? We're just, we can't be all contrary and all the time, we need institutional knowledge. Intermediary institutions. Yeah, that work. Yeah, so whether we have to build new ones or perform exorcisms on our old ones, that might, you know, that may be a different answer depending on the case. But there's no question we need institutions that are better than most individuals and that make most individuals live up to norms that they themselves didn't invent. And would, you know, under another system of incentives would struggle to emulate.

Jordan Peterson [96:10] All right, I'm going to bring it in to Land Sam. I think what we're going to do on the daily wire side, I want to talk to you, I think, for half an hour about the anti-Semitic landscape on the left and the right. And I want to go down those rabbit holes and explore them with you. So that's for everybody watching and listening. I think that's what we're going to do on the daily wire side. And because you made some comments earlier about your concerns about the right wing parties in Europe, for example, and the Nazis that are hiding there. And I've seen no shortage of right wing anti-Semitism where it's ugly head, let's say, in on acts, for example. But I also want to talk to you about the same pathology emerging on the left because there's no shortage of unbelievable anti-Semitism on the left. And we should sort that out a little bit. And so that's what we'll do on the daily wire side. Sam, every time we talk, I think we get a little bit, well, we understand each other a little bit better. Yeah. I think there's something very fruitful for us to continue discussing in relationship. Well, to a number of the things you discussed today about the necessity for intermediary institutions. That's the principle of subsidiarity. It's an ancient principle of Catholic social. What would you say, social philosophy? You have to have intermediary institutions. They're the alternative to tyranny and slavery. The idea that there's a harmony between individual development and proper institutions that has to be established. You know, you can't be a, it's very difficult to be a good person in an entirely pathological social situation. And then this idea that there's a hierarchy of games because part of what interest got me interested to begin with in the religious world, let's say, was because I started to understand what constituted the religious as the structure of the depth of games that's by definition. I'm not talking about what people think about as superstitious belief. That's not the issue. The issue is that there's a hierarchy of game from shallow to deep, from counterproductive to productive, from unplayable to iterative. But that's a real world. And there's a reason for that that I think is allied with your desire, lifelong desire to investigate the objective grounds of the moral world.

Sam Harris [98:48] Yeah. I mean, the one thing I would add to that is that also by definition on my account, whatever's true there, whatever's truly sacred, you know, the true spiritual possibility has to be deeper. Then culture, and it certainly has to be deeper than the accidents of ancient cultures being separated from one another based on linguistic and geographical barriers.

Jordan Peterson [99:19] So it can't be no dispute about that.

Sam Harris [99:23] It can't be that Eastern Orthodox Christianity is the real answer versus Hinduism being the real answer. Because I mean, one, they're incompatible answers at the surface level, whatever deep truth they may be in touch with, that is something we have to understand in a 21st century context that is deeper than provincialism. That's my argument against religious sectarianism of any kind.

Jordan Peterson [99:50] We definitely have a, we definitely have much to discuss the next time we talk. All right. So for everybody watching and listening, join us on the daily wire side because we'll go down the anti-Semitic rabbit hole. And that'll give Sam and I a little bit, a little bit of time as well to discuss the political, which we haven't, you know, which we've conveniently circumvented in a sense. But we had other things to talk about. So join us there. Thank you to the film crew here today in Scottsdale. Thanks, Sam. It's always a pleasure to talk to you. Yeah. I'm glad you're doing well. It's real good to see you, man. Yep.

The Question at the Heart of the Debate

How can a society build forms of shared reality and moral orientation that remain trustworthy under conditions of algorithmic fragmentation, institutional distrust, and mass amplification?

What this analysis found

Harris argues the information crisis is a collapse of standards, verification, and institutional correction; Peterson argues it is a collapse of shared story, moral salience, and cultural orientation. The analysis found they were closer than they sounded: both were trying to protect a public world where correction can still land without becoming coercion. Harris saw the machinery of trust but understated the legitimacy crisis; Peterson saw the legitimacy crisis but under-specified the machinery. The missing piece was a trust architecture — institutions, platforms, and narratives that make truth both contestable and believable.

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Sam Harris

3.5Formal/Systemicreasoning

3.5Rationalworldview

What do these labels mean? →

Jordan Peterson

3.0Abstractreasoning

3.0Ideologicalworldview

What do these labels mean? →

Good-Faith Summary

He argues that the information environment has become ungovernable because standards of verification, correction, and accountability have weakened. He is defending institutions not as sacred authorities but as necessary containers for scalable truth-seeking.

Good-Faith Summary

He argues that the information crisis is fundamentally a collapse of shared story, shared salience, and shared moral orientation, not just a failure of fact-checking. He is trying to recover a framework that can rank narratives and keep social life playable over time.

3.5Humanist

Institutional gatekeeping

3.5Formal/Systemic

Objective fact

3.5Social Contract

Individual responsibility

3.5Rational

Shared meta-story

Decentralized discourse

3.0Ideological

Narrative meaning

3.0Ideological

Systemic causation

3.5Formal/Systemic

Shared meta-story

3.0Ideological

Epistemic Style

He reasons through evidence, incentives, reputational mechanisms, and institutional design. He is strongest when tracing how platforms, norms, and human bias interact to reward misinformation.

Epistemic Style

He reasons through myth, axioms, biological analogy, and repeat-game logic. He is strongest when showing that communication systems select for certain kinds of actors and moral worlds.

The Tell

He repeatedly returns to standards that can be corrected whenever the conversation drifts toward narrative or civilizational abstraction.

The Tell

He keeps translating concrete disputes into a hierarchy of playable games that explains why some forms of speech corrode culture.

Synthesis

He is protecting the need for shared procedures of correction, without which public truth collapses into appetite and noise.

Synthesis

He is protecting the need for meaningful moral orientation, without which standards feel arbitrary and culture loses the will to cohere.

Sam Harris

3.5Formal/Systemicreasoning

3.5Rationalworldview

What do these labels mean? →

Good-Faith Summary

Institutional gatekeeping

3.5Humanist

Objective fact

3.5Formal/Systemic

Individual responsibility

3.5Social Contract

Shared meta-story

3.5Rational

Epistemic Style

He reasons through evidence, incentives, reputational mechanisms, and institutional design. He is strongest when tracing how platforms, norms, and human bias interact to reward misinformation.

The Tell

He repeatedly returns to standards that can be corrected whenever the conversation drifts toward narrative or civilizational abstraction.

Synthesis

He is protecting the need for shared procedures of correction, without which public truth collapses into appetite and noise.

Jordan Peterson

3.0Abstractreasoning

3.0Ideologicalworldview

What do these labels mean? →

Good-Faith Summary

Decentralized discourse

3.0Ideological

Narrative meaning

3.0Ideological

Systemic causation

3.5Formal/Systemic

Shared meta-story

3.0Ideological

Epistemic Style

He reasons through myth, axioms, biological analogy, and repeat-game logic. He is strongest when showing that communication systems select for certain kinds of actors and moral worlds.

The Tell

He keeps translating concrete disputes into a hierarchy of playable games that explains why some forms of speech corrode culture.

Synthesis

He is protecting the need for meaningful moral orientation, without which standards feel arbitrary and culture loses the will to cohere.

Highlights

The moments that matter most

Highlight 01

The Missing Word Was Legitimacy

They debated standards and story, but not trust.

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Every debate has a surface argument and a deeper one. This section maps both — what each speaker is explicitly claiming, what they're actually trying to protect, and where their real disagreement lives. Start here to understand what's actually at stake before the analysis begins.

Sam Harris

Sam Harris’s core claim is that modern societies have become dangerously difficult to govern because the information environment has been shattered by the internet, social media, and the rise of independent media untethered from durable standards. His organizing concern is not merely that people disagree, but that the mechanisms by which disagreement used to be disciplined by evidence, editorial review, reputational accountability, and institutional norms have weakened. He treats truth-seeking as a civilizational achievement that depends on structures: journalism, science, universities, and other intermediary institutions that can absorb error without abandoning standards. When he says the answer to institutional failure is not “new standards” but “the old standards,” he is defending a worldview in which truth is difficult, fragile, and cumulative, and in which institutions matter because individuals are too biased, impulsive, and vulnerable to incentives to reliably self-correct on their own.

The emotional and motivational stakes for Harris are high. He is protecting the possibility of shared reality as a precondition for governance, trust, and moral seriousness. He fears a world in which everyone can find endless confirmation for whatever they already want to believe, and in which public discourse becomes a market for appetites rather than a process of inquiry. He also fears being accused of naïveté about institutional corruption or of elitist nostalgia for gatekeepers. He explicitly concedes that institutions like universities and major newspapers have “embarrassed themselves,” especially around COVID and October 7th, but he insists that their failures are legible as failures only because standards still exist. A recurring anxiety in his position is that the anti-institutional backlash has become self-undermining: people now treat mere outsider status as a mark of credibility, even when outsider media lacks the norms that make correction possible.

His dominant narrative metaphor is ecological and immunological: a “cultural immune system” has been lost, and society is drowning in a “bottomless ocean” of misinformation. He also uses addiction and pathology as central images, especially in his discussion of Twitter/X and Elon Musk. In his strongest form, Harris’s argument is that the internet has removed friction, context, and embodied accountability from belief formation, while algorithmic systems reward outrage, distortion, and decontextualized pseudo-signal. The result is not just more error but a selection pressure favoring people and platforms with “no standards to even violate.” A notable tension within his position is that while he criticizes independent media as a major source of fragmentation, he is himself a highly successful independent media figure. He partly resolves this by presenting his own practice as an attempt to preserve older truth-seeking norms outside legacy institutions, but the tension remains: he is defending institutional standards while operating in a medium he says is structurally corrosive.

Jordan Peterson

Jordan Peterson’s core claim is that the crisis of the information age is not only a breakdown of fact-checking or institutional authority but a deeper collapse of shared narrative, shared meaning, and shared moral orientation. He argues that hyperconnectivity and infinite communicative plurality have dissolved the common story that makes culture possible. For Peterson, a culture is “literally a shared story,” and when that story fragments indefinitely, language itself begins to lose coherence. His framework is explicitly axiomatic and narrative: perception must be grounded in an “axiomatic framework,” and the central problem of the postmodern condition is the denial of any unifying meta-narrative. He sees the current landscape as one in which “local truths” proliferate without any clear rank order, leaving societies unable to distinguish valid from invalid narratives in a stable way.

The motivational and emotional stakes for Peterson center on civilizational coherence, moral orientation, and protection against both chaos and tyranny. He is protecting the conditions under which words retain meaning, institutions mediate conduct, and individuals can inhabit a morally navigable world. He fears a society of “infinite plurality” in which fragmentation produces demoralization, deceit, self-deception, and mutual unintelligibility. He also fears the opposite danger: that attempts to solve fragmentation through centralized control, digital identity, or technocratic management will slide toward totalitarianism. This is why his Tower of Babel framing matters so much. In his telling, Babel is not simply a story of fragmentation; it is also a story of totalitarian ambition, technological hubris, and misaligned collective aim. He fears being accused either of defending corrupt gatekeepers or of enabling fringe actors, and he repeatedly tries to keep the analysis at the level of structural and civilizational dynamics rather than personal denunciation.

His dominant narrative metaphor is explicitly mythic and theological: Babel, flood, hierarchy of games, and the distinction between playable and unplayable worlds. He interprets stories as descriptions of navigation strategies and morality as something like optimized iterability across persons, contexts, and time. In the strongest version of his argument, facts never arrive unframed; human beings require narrative structures to prioritize facts, orient action, and sustain cooperation. Therefore the real crisis is not just misinformation but the collapse of the frameworks that tell us what counts as signal, what counts as valid speech, and what kind of social game is worth playing. His account of online life emphasizes anonymity, parasitism, psychopathy, and short-term attention optimization: when communication is effectively free and consequence-light, “parasites swarm the system.” A tension within his position is that while he sharply criticizes gatekeeping institutions and says he does not trust outlets like the New York Times “at all” and sees universities as perhaps beyond repair, he also affirms the necessity of intermediary institutions, barriers, lag, and subsidiarity. Likewise, he critiques X as structurally pathological while continuing to use it as a source of information, guests, and cultural monitoring. So his enacted position is not anti-institutional simpliciter; it is anti-corrupt-gatekeeper while still searching for legitimate forms of mediation and authority.

Good arguments can still contain weak evidence, logical slippage, or rhetorical moves that substitute for reasoning. This section examines each speaker's argumentative integrity — not to declare a winner, but to identify where the strongest and weakest links are in each case.

Sam Harris

Coherence strengths

Harris’s argument is internally coherent and unusually disciplined around a few core principles: truth-seeking requires standards, standards require institutions or institution-like practices, and the current media environment systematically rewards the erosion of those standards. He consistently distinguishes between institutional failure and the abandonment of institutional norms, arguing that the proper response to fraud in science or journalism is better science and better journalism, not epistemic populism. He also connects macro-level concerns about governance to micro-level features of online life: anonymity, decontextualization, addictive feedback loops, and the collapse of friction in belief formation. His use of Elon Musk as a case study is not just biographical gossip in his own framing; it functions as an example of how platform incentives can pathologize even highly capable individuals.

He is also relatively careful in making normative distinctions. He differentiates between accidental irresponsibility and deliberate bad faith, and he grants that legacy institutions have genuinely failed. His critique of independent media is not that outsider voices are inherently illegitimate, but that many actors in that space operate without the norms that make correction possible. He repeatedly returns to accountability, shame, and reputational exposure as mechanisms that constrain error. This gives his position a strong through-line: the problem is not merely false content but the weakening of systems that make truth-correction socially and professionally binding.

Weaknesses and logical issues

Harris sometimes overstates empirical claims without supplying evidence in the transcript. Examples include “we’ve trained up a culture of people... that simply don’t care about facts,” “the worst eruption of antisemitism we’ve ever seen in our lifetimes globally,” and the claim that X’s algorithm is effectively trying to make him “a racist asshole.” These are directionally plausible as rhetorical summaries of his experience, but they are epistemically loose. They function more as vivid diagnoses than as carefully bounded empirical claims. Similarly, his statement that few historians in human history have ever had a bigger audience than Darryl Cooper is likely hyperbolic unless narrowly specified.

He also engages in some motive attribution. Tucker Carlson is described as having “some other political project” that entails spreading misinformation “quite cynically and consciously.” That may be true, but in the transcript Harris does not provide evidence sufficient to establish conscious cynicism rather than reckless opportunism, ideological capture, or incompetence. His treatment of Musk’s psychology is partly grounded in personal acquaintance, which gives it some warrant, but it still risks overreach when generalized into a near-total explanation of Musk’s public behavior. There is also occasional domain-generalization: from salient cases of irresponsible podcasters and platform dynamics, he sometimes moves toward broad claims about “independent media” as such, even though independent media includes a wide range of practices, including his own.

Epistemic style

Harris’s dominant epistemic style is rationalist-evidential with strong institutionalist commitments. He treats objective fact, standards of inquiry, and procedural norms as the primary arbiters of legitimacy. He also uses moral-intuitive language when discussing harms like antisemitism, but he generally tries to tether those judgments to claims about evidence, accountability, and consequences. He mixes first-person experiential evidence, institutional reasoning, and public examples. This style is well-suited to his claims about journalism, science, and misinformation, though less well-suited when he makes broad sociological claims without data.

Jordan Peterson

Coherence strengths

Peterson’s argument is coherent at the level of deep framing. He consistently insists that the crisis is not reducible to false propositions but concerns the breakdown of shared narrative structure, axiomatic grounding, and moral orientation. His use of Babel, postmodernism, and “infinite plurality” all point to the same thesis: a society cannot function on fact-fragments alone because facts require prioritization within a story. He is also consistent in emphasizing structural incentives over individual blame. His analysis of anonymity, free communication, and short-term attention optimization fits his broader concern with psychopathy, parasitism, and non-iterable games. Even when discussing specific platforms, he keeps returning to the same question: what kind of communicative environment selects for what kind of person and what kind of social order?

He is strongest when he links morality to iterability and generalizability. His account of fair exchange, repeat games, and the distinction between shallow and deep games gives him a principled way to talk about moral order without relying solely on theological assertion. He also usefully highlights a real problem in Harris’s framework: facts do not prioritize themselves. That challenge is philosophically relevant and directly tied to the debate’s central question about preserving truth and coherence in a fragmented environment.

Weaknesses and logical issues

Peterson makes several sweeping empirical claims that are either unsourced, overstated, or too imprecise to evaluate as stated. Examples include “50% of internet communication is bots,” “the universities... are beyond salvaging,” “I don’t trust anything the New York Times prints at all,” and the suggestion that postmodern French intellectuals effectively produced the current landscape of infinite narratives. The bot claim is especially notable: it may be gesturing at a real concern, but as stated it is an unsourced quantitative assertion. His statements about institutions are better read as expressions of profound distrust than as defensible literal claims.

He also sometimes compresses complex causal histories into single explanatory arcs. The move from postmodernism to current fragmentation is a form of causal oversimplification; technological change, economic incentives, political polarization, declining trust, and platform design all likely matter, and he acknowledges some of these, but his framing still gives disproportionate explanatory weight to intellectual history. Likewise, his invocation of “transhumanists” and “technological utopians” as drivers of cultural disintegration is suggestive but under-argued in the transcript. His language about “parasites,” “psychopaths,” and “demonic thoughts” is rhetorically powerful but can blur analytic precision. It risks turning structural critique into quasi-anthropological typology without clear evidentiary thresholds.

There are also tensions between his stated principles and some enacted rhetoric. He warns against over-attributing pathology to character rather than situation, yet he uses highly condemnatory language for institutions and political actors. He wants to avoid discussing Candace Owens directly, partly on strategic grounds, but still traffics in broad denunciations of media and universities. His distrust of gatekeepers is sweeping, yet he also endorses intermediary institutions and barriers. These are not fatal contradictions, but they do show drift between a nuanced structural analysis and a more totalizing rhetorical posture toward disfavored institutions.

Epistemic style

Peterson’s dominant epistemic style is mixed: narrative-hermeneutic, tradition-informed, moral-intuitive, and genealogical, with occasional appeals to psychology and biology. He treats myth, story, and civilizational memory as legitimate sources of orientation, not merely decorative metaphors. He also uses quasi-scientific language about addiction, psychopathy, and game theory, though often in a synthetic rather than strictly empirical mode. This style is well-suited to diagnosing crises of meaning and social cohesion, but less well-suited when he makes strong empirical claims that would require precise sourcing. He is strongest when using narrative and game-theoretic reasoning to illuminate value conflicts; weaker when making broad factual claims in the register of certainty.

Epistemic mismatch note: Harris and Peterson are operating with different standards of what counts as explanatory adequacy. Harris looks for fact-sensitive, norm-governed, institutionally accountable claims; Peterson looks for the deeper narrative and axiomatic structures that determine which facts become salient at all. Harris hears Peterson as risking vagueness or relativizing fact into story, while Peterson hears Harris as underestimating the framing conditions that make fact intelligible and socially actionable.

Polarity: Institutional gatekeeping vs. Decentralized discourse

Summary: The debate turns on whether truth and governance require stronger mediating institutions or whether centralized gatekeepers have become too corrupt to trust. Integration: Accountable open mediation Lever: Friction and accountability

Pole 1 name: Institutional gatekeeping Pole 1 tagline: Standards before amplification Pole 1 protects:

Editorial review and error correction
Shared norms for public truth claims Pole 1 neglects:
Institutional capture and ideological conformity
Exclusion of dissenting but valid voices Pole 1 pathology:
Elite insulation from criticism
Trust collapse through hypocrisy

Pole 2 name: Decentralized discourse Pole 2 tagline: Open access to speech Pole 2 protects:

Wider participation in public discourse
Faster challenge to failing institutions Pole 2 neglects:
Quality control and reputational filtering
The asymmetry between producing noise and checking it Pole 2 pathology:
Misinformation swarms and grift
Fragmented publics without common standards

Speaker enactment:

Speaker: Sam Harris Enacts: Pole 1 Pole Center line: values Pole Center: 3.5 Achiever Pole Center rationale: The pole he defends is primarily about protecting functional truth-seeking goods—standards, correction, accountability, and governability—so values is the right line, and it reads 3.5 because he frames institutions instrumentally as what works to preserve reliable public knowledge. Perspective Structure: 3.5 Managed Perspective Structure rationale: He grants institutional corruption and outsider innovation in principle, but still holds decentralized discourse mainly as a danger to be constrained rather than as a co-equal value he can deeply inhabit. Contributes: He defends institutions as imperfect but necessary containers for standards, correction, and governability. Misses:
- Legitimate distrust of captured institutions
- Innovation from outsider truth-seekers Cues:
- “for all their faults, they had standards”
- “the antidote... is not new standards... apply the old standards”
Speaker: Jordan Peterson Enacts: Pole 2 Pole Center line: worldview Pole Center: 3.0 Expert Pole Center rationale: His defense of decentralized contestability is rooted less in free-speech value pluralism than in a worldview of corrupt gatekeepers, narrative collapse, and distrust of centralized authority, making worldview the right line and 3.0 the best fit. Perspective Structure: 3.0 Oppositional Perspective Structure rationale: He recognizes the need for intermediary institutions and barriers, but in this polarity he mostly treats gatekeeping as captured and dangerous rather than as a legitimate pole with necessary civilizational functions. Contributes: He highlights how gatekeepers lost legitimacy and why centralized control can mutate into coercion. Misses:
- Need for durable verification systems
- Scale effects of unfiltered discourse Cues:
- “I don't trust anything the New York Times prints at all”
- “the gatekeeping institutions have also revealed themselves as catastrophically flawed”

Mismatch: Harris hears anti-gatekeeping as permissionless epistemic chaos; Peterson hears gatekeeping defenses as nostalgia for discredited authority. Mismatch A→B: When Sam Harris says institutions, Jordan Peterson tends to hear captured elites controlling speech. Mismatch B→A: When Jordan Peterson says gatekeepers failed, Sam Harris tends to hear burn down all standards. Bridge move: Specify which functions require institutional mediation and which can be decentralized, then define transparent standards for correction, appeal, and reputational accountability. Synthesis: Institutional gatekeeping protects something civilization repeatedly rediscovers the hard way: truth does not scale on sincerity alone. Journalism, science, and universities exist because raw human cognition is biased, hurried, tribal, and easily manipulated. Harris is defending that civilizational memory. But decentralized discourse protects something equally real: institutions drift, capture happens, prestige can shield error, and ordinary people need channels to challenge official narratives when gatekeepers fail. Peterson is defending the necessity of contestability. In this debate, both men are responding to the same fracture: the old brokers no longer command trust, yet the new open field often rewards those with “no standards to even violate.” The real tension is not authority versus freedom, but how much mediation a society needs to keep speech from dissolving into noise without letting mediation harden into oligarchy.

The talking-past dynamic comes from each speaker treating the other’s feared failure mode as the likely outcome. Harris hears “decentralized discourse” and imagines Tucker, anonymous clipping accounts, Holocaust revisionism, and algorithmic rage markets. Peterson hears “institutional gatekeeping” and imagines the New York Times, captured universities, and digital identity systems drifting toward China-like control. But neither is actually arguing for the pure extreme. Harris concedes institutional embarrassment; Peterson affirms intermediary institutions and subsidiarity. The integrative question is therefore functional, not tribal: which speech environments need lag, identity, editorial review, payment, or moderation to remain playable over time? A productive threshold would ask of any platform or institution: does it increase the odds that falsehood can be corrected without requiring centralized ideological control?

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The Crux

The deepest disagreement was not really about Twitter, institutions, or even misinformation. It was about what must come first if a society is going to remain livable: reliable procedures for sorting truth from falsehood, or a shared moral-narrative frame that tells people why truth matters and how to rank what they see. In the polarity of Objective fact vs. Narrative meaning, Harris kept defending the civilizational necessity of standards that can survive bias, appetite, and tribal pressure. Peterson kept defending the prior necessity of an orienting story, because in his view facts do not arrive with their own hierarchy of importance. Each was protecting something essential. Harris feared the loss of shared reality into appetite-driven chaos. Peterson feared the loss of shared meaning into fragmentation, demoralization, and eventually coercive attempts to restore order from above.

The missing variable was legitimacy. Not truth alone, and not story alone, but the social legitimacy of the processes that tell people what counts as trustworthy, corrigible, and worth acting on. Harris spoke as though old standards could still do the work if reapplied. Peterson spoke as though shared narrative could still do the work if rediscovered. But neither fully named the central modern problem: people no longer just disagree about conclusions; they distrust the very containers that once made correction, ranking, and common orientation possible. Without legitimacy, standards feel like elite control and stories feel like ideological capture. That is why the argument kept circling around institutions, platforms, and culture without quite landing on the deeper issue.

The Higher-Order Reframe

A more adequate frame is this: the real task is not choosing between gatekeepers and openness, or between facts and stories. It is building legible trust architectures—social forms in which truth-seeking, moral orientation, and public accountability reinforce one another instead of competing. In that frame, Harris is right that civilization cannot run on sincerity, virality, and individual intuition; it needs mediation. Peterson is right that mediation only works when people experience it as meaningful, fair, and connected to a larger moral order rather than as mere procedural power. The point is not simply “Accountable open mediation,” though that integration handle from the Institutional gatekeeping ↔ Decentralized discourse polarity points in the right direction.

Made by Corey deVos · About this analysis