- I've listened to the podcast
and I'm happy to do it.
- Which episode did you hear?
I'm super curious.
The one with Dan Harris?
- I heard some of that and then I heard,
I was actually listening to some of your,
like your mailbag one, your Q&A one,
which I also liked.
So I like what you guys are doing.
(upbeat techno music)
- This is the Art of Charm.
Learn everything you need to know
how to crush it in
business, love and life?
- All right, today, we're
talking with Sam Harris.
He is a staunch critic of religion,
advocate of mindfulness without religion,
author, neuroscientist,
researcher, ethicist.
He's an all-around, amazingly
sharp and fascinating thinker
and also very controversial.
And I've got Johnny from
AoC, special co-host,
just for this episode.
So enjoy this one with Sam Harris
and welcome to the Art of Charm.
I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger.
I'm here with producer Jason
and my co-host Johnny D.
for this episode.
The Art of Charm brings together
the best thought leaders,
teachers and exceptional
individuals to teach you
how to be a top performer
in life, love and at work.
If you're new to the show
and I'm sure many of you are,
given Sam as the guest,
we'd love to send you some top episodes
and the toolbox where we
discuss body language,
non-verbal communication,
persuasion, networking,
negotiation and everything
else we teach here at AoC.
Just text charmed, that
C-H-A-R-M-E-D, to 33444,
or check out theartofcharm.com.
We may not have all the answers,
but we definitely have
some of the questions.
All right, here's Sam Harris.
(whooshing sound)
Tell us what you do in one sentence.
- Well, I think in public,
I try to reason as honestly
as possible in public,
and I tend to do this
on controversial issues.
- Yeah. (laughs)
I would agree with that.
Well, first of all, you
are also a neuroscientist.
Let's not leave that behind,
studying, in part, the
physiology of belief
and belief change,
which is something that I think
is an entirely different show
topic for maybe another day
and fascinating, looking
at people's brains
and figuring out where their beliefs are
and whether or not they can be changed
and how the brain does
that or doesn't do that,
depending on which book
you're reading from who,
from which author.
Before we sort of dive
in to some of the work
that I've read from you,
I'm very curious because
you do get challenged a lot.
You are a controversial
character in some ways.
How do you keep an open
mind during intense debate
with people, I should say
with who disagree with you.
It's such a visceral level
that they're actually super angry
or can't even keep control
of maybe their emotions
during that time?
- Well, I think we should acknowledge
that they're two kinds of debate.
There are debates that are really
not at all meant to change
the minds of the participants.
People go into these debates,
public debates usually
have this character,
certainly anything that's
described as a debate in advance
or set up as a debate,
often has this character
where the two sides are not
at all meant to be persuaded
by one another and they're simply trying
to persuade an audience.
And everyone knows that
they're playing a game,
or seeing a public contest,
the resolution of which only takes place
in the minds of the audience
because you just see people on stage,
even if they're being
swayed to whatever degree.
They're pretending that
they're not being swayed,
and that's part of the theater
and the histrionics of the event.
I tend to never do debates like that.
Even if I'm in something
that is billed as a debate,
at least on my side,
I
am open to change in my mind,
except for the fact
that I'm often debating
on a topic where the bar is set so high
that that's just vanishingly unlikely
that I'm gonna change my mind.
If I'm debating a
fundamentalist Christian,
the likelihood that that person in
the context of our debate
is going to convince me
to convert to Christianity
and recognize Jesus as
my savior in that moment,
you know, it's within
the realm of possibility
but it's so minuscule that I never really
have to consider it.
But on any peripheral
points that may come up,
even in the context of that,
kind of truly polarized debate,
you know, I don't wanna be wrong
from a moment longer than I need to be.
My view of saving face
in those moments is that
to attempt to save face my
pretending that you're right
when you're obviously wrong
is to lose face twice over.
What you wanna be is someone who
sees the merits of the
other person's argument,
or the factual inaccuracies
on one's own side,
as quickly as possible.
And get off that shaky ground.
So the people who refuse
to admit they're wrong
even when the audience can see it,
just look terrible.
And that's something that I'm
increasingly sensitive to.
It's hard.
Paradoxically, it's hard
to be truly sensitive
to that in oneself as you
see the evidence of that
all around you where people are just
frustratingly, boorishly,
comically wrong in public,
and refuse to admit it in
real time under pressure,
because they imagine
that they're stubbornness
is somehow a virtue. (laughs)
And it's anything but!
It's just this awful confession
of intellectual dishonesty
and so if you can sort of
triangulate on yourself
and see yourself from the
point of view of an audience
or know what it's like
to have been a member of that
audience on other occasions,
you see that you actually
don't want to be stubborn
and slow to notice that
you just made a mistake
or that there was an
inconsistency in what you said
or that you're mistaken in any other way.
- You receive a lot of criticism.
I've seen it in the research
of you when I was doing
before the show.
I've seen it in just people
even reacting to me saying,
"Hey, I'm having Sam Harris on,
"have you ever heard of that guy?"
And it's just like, not printable.
Some people were really stoked,
the majority, if it makes
you feel any better (laughs)
were very excited.
But a lot of people were very aggressive.
The stuff I've seen on the web is,
while very, very aggressive,
a lot of it quite frankly, heinous.
How do you deal with that so
it doesn't affect your work
and your personal life?
Or at least you minimize those effects,
if you can't make it
not affect you at all?
I would imagine that's very difficult.
- I can't say that I'm an expert at this.
I've had a lot of practice.
But I can't say that I'm especially good
at stewarding my attention in
a way that is truly wise here,
and avoids most of the
unnecessary hassles.
I think what I do for the
most part is ignore it
until something impinges upon me
that it just seems unignorable
and then I react to it.
And I think I'm getting
smarter in how I react,
and in the battles I pick to fight.
I mean, the most
frustrating aspect of this
is not that people criticize me
for views that I actually hold,
and that those criticisms
are in some sense
wounding or destabilizing or
caused me to doubt myself.
I mean, it's great to be criticized
for a view you actually hold.
And to see some merit in that criticism,
I find that incredibly interesting.
That's what conversations are for.
Certainly when you're talking
about issues of consequence.
The vast majority of the criticisms I get,
certainly the most scathing ones,
are based on, in many cases,
deliberate misrepresentations
of what I believe or what I've written
or what I've said publicly,
or just frank misunderstandings
of what my views are.
So I find that really frustrating,
because there's not a
comment thread on earth
at this moment, dealing with
anything I've written or said
which isn't riddled with people
confidently deriding me
for views that I don't hold.
And this is in large
measure the results of
a very calculated campaign
to lie about my views.
I mean, they're public
people who absolutely know
they're misrepresenting me,
and continue to do it
because it's effective.
And that is just an incredibly cynical
and depressing feature of
our public conversation.
But people do this, and they're
not just internet trolls,
these are people who have
significant platforms online
and people who even get
described without scare quotes
as being journalists.
It's a problem that people notice this
and notice that it's
just not worth commenting
on certain polarizing issues
because there's just too much of a hassle.
It's too much of a hassle
to take other people's feet
out of your mouth again and again,
and try to get yourself understood.
You know, in certain cases,
it's just impossible.
I have had to acknowledge
that it is a hopeless battle
on the one hand.
I will never get myself to
a position where I am free
of people openly misunderstanding me
and either not caring or having that be
their goal to spread a
misunderstanding of my views.
I'm just getting less
and less frustrated now
because it's just,
I just have to dial down
the frustration on my side.
There is no remedy apart
from trying to make sense
in the next moment and moving forward.
- Well with social media now,
it just seems to appear
that the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
The loudest person is
gonna get the attention.
And even in my Facebook feed,
memes take over and because
the meme is funny or catchy,
it becomes the truth.
And then I'll start to see
it pop up all over the place
and like, does anyone even went to Snopes?
Does anyone even went to
find where this quote was?
I mean, when it comes to things
that you might have said,
or especially now with
this latest (chuckles)
political campaign,
I mean it's quite amazing
to what it's turned into.
And I don't even know
if some of these people
wanna be vindicated as
right on their views
or opposing a certain view
rather than just being heard,
and getting attention.
- Yeah, well there is that.
And there is the aspect of
what I would call trolling
in the broadest sense.
It's kind of a misuse
of the original meaning
of what it is to be a
troll on the internet.
But it's not really about honestly
even spreading your views.
It's being basically a kind of vandal.
(host laughs)
You're vandalizing people's reputations,
and it's fun.
So there's a lot of that but then,
there are people who believe
they're on the right side
of some important argument.
They believe they could
be extremely to the left,
or extremely to the right, politically.
But usually they're not
moderates of any kind
because moderation is,
almost by definition,
the position of being open to
arguments to your left and
arguments to your right,
and open to modifying your views.
But if you're extremely
ideological, politically,
and you feel you're on the right side
of some important issue,
let's say it's how minorities are treated,
or affirmative action
or black lives matter,
or something that's in the news now,
you find people who are so
convinced of the rightness
of their view that it's
just that they don't care
that they're being dishonest
in the promulgation of their views.
As long as they can score
points to get on the board,
or they can land blows against
their ideological opponents,
basically anything is fair
and they know that people's attention span
is so trimmed down now by
just how much we're paying attention to.
I mean the social media has
become the ultimate example
of this where nothing lasts.
You know, you can just make
your point and move on,
and never have to acknowledge
that you have been shown to be in error.
That the article you just
forwarded about somebody
was debunked and the author
admitted his mistakes.
And you forwarded it,
you're not gonna go back
to your Twitter feed
and clean up that mess.
And that mess stands for all time now.
The person who feels more
scrupulous about all that
and wants to apologize for his errors
and has an audience that cares
that he's honest and consistent
and is keeping score to some degree,
that person's really at a disadvantage.
And you know, there are
people who have audiences
who have curated their
audiences in such a way
or assembled their audiences in such a way
based on how they operate in public
where they're in an echo chamber,
and some of these echo chambers are vast,
you know, Trump is in one,
where he's trained his
audience not really to care
about his consistency or his honesty.
He's got a new form of honesty.
It's an honesty of being uncensored.
Of saying whatever he can seem
to credibly think in the moment,
whether or not it contradicts something
he thought yesterday.
He feels absolutely no burden
to make his world view cohere
in any kind of comprehensive way,
even in the span of a single paragraph.
And he gets away with it because
his audience doesn't care
what his honesty consists not in
what he's actually saying.
You know, whether the
information is being communicated
in a way that survives any
kind of rational scrutiny.
It's much more of an
emotional authenticity.
It's much more of a just sticking an stick
in the wheel of the system.
And just watching the gears grind.
It is a kind of defacing
of our public discourse
and the institution of government.
It's what people want
to see happen, right?
So people support this without
ever feeling the burden
of really parsing his statements
with anything like an expectation
that they're going to
understand what his views are
and what he intends to do
and what he really thinks.
But there are many
people playing this game.
It's obvious in politics but
it's happening more
and more in journalism,
where journalism just becomes
a political act of
expressing highly polarizing
and ultimately dishonest
or at least knowingly incomplete
opinions about the world.
And just scoring more
points for your team.
- Since this campaign had started,
from myself, it just seems like
there was a lot of fun in
being this character at first,
and the more it gained steam,
the more he conflated it
to the point where he doesn't
care it's part of the whole,
a joke that got taken out way too far
now that we're beyond
the point of no return.
It's here we go.
- Yeah, it's a very strange phenomenon.
I actually haven't
thought as much about it
as I wish I would have.
But now that we're talking about it,
it's just kind of been happening
out of the corner of my eye
but it just seems to me that
he is playing a character.
It is the kind of bad faith
representation of himself.
I mean, it's just kind
of a pseudo-self and yet
people seem to know that he's doing it.
So it's not starkly dishonest.
People know that he's just
kind of amplifying this.
It's not really what he thinks.
You know he doesn't really
want people punched in the face
at his rallies.
(host laughs)
That's just something he
said to get attention.
And all of that somehow gets accepted
under the rubric of being authentic.
You can be authentically inauthentic,
and somehow win points
for even greater honesty.
It's just kind of a post
modernist performance.
Yeah, it's bizarre,
it's also unhappily pretty consequential.
I think he's probably
still gonna hit the wall
that is shaped like Hillary
Clinton in six months,
(laughter)
and we won't have President
Trump, but who knows?
And I find this increasingly scary is that
everything is taking on
this character of politics where,
it's like your epistemology becomes
political first.
You know, people believe
in climate change or not,
based on their politics.
People believe in vaccinating
their children or not,
based on their politics.
And they think that science
and reason generally
can be beholden to
feeling and what you want to be true
in a way that it can't.
If you are trimming your world view down
based on what makes you feel good,
what your team believes
and it's just you're a member of that team
really just by accident of birth,
you know, it's your
religion or your nation
or your family's politics
that you inherited,
you're not actually in touch with reality.
You're not doing anything
that would reliably
put you in touch with reality
or correct mistakes.
So it's scary because we have
public opinion being swayed
even on fundamental points
that are nothing to do with politics.
You know the age of the universe.
There are some vast numbers
of Americans in polls
that has ranged from
you know, 30% or 45%,
depending on the poll,
believe the universe is 6,000 years old.
That is not an opinion that any sane
or educated person should be
able to hold at this moment.
And yet they think they're
actually dealing with facts.
And I get it.
In this case, you know,
there are religious reasons,
but it all has this character of thinking
that your reasoning can and
should be constrained by
where you want to arrive on its basis.
It's like you have the
conclusion you want in hand,
you don't want there to
be global warming, right?
You don't wanna believe
that there's anything
you have to take account of economically
that is affecting the
health of the planet.
You just gotta pick and
choose your opinions
to arrive at that conclusion.
It's a starkly delusional
way of operating,
yet it's just more and more common.
- And we see this a lot with
more and more junk science.
Things like, "Chocolate
is now good for you
"if you're pregnant!"
"Oh, global warming is not a thing
"according to this study funded
by people who make plastic
"or whatever."
I even saw a quote from Al
Roker or something like that
from The Today Show, and he's like,
"What you need to do now
is just pick the study
"that you agree with most."
And it's like, "Well, no."
That's not how science
is supposed to work.
- Yeah, I mean, we do that,
you know, kind of helplessly,
and we are confronted with this,
depending on the area of
science you're talking about,
what can be a real
bewildering diversity of opinion.
When we're talking about what to eat,
this is the most humbling,
really a scandal of
science at this moment.
That the fact that there's
any uncertainty at all
about what constitutes a
healthy diet for people
at this point.
It's crazy!
But you know, there seems to be some
significant
grounds for debate about
whether saturated fat is
bad for you, for instance.
And so it's just a measure not of the fact
that nothing is true or
that there's no difference
between good and bad diets
but that it's hard to do science.
And there are many vested interests
contaminating the conversation.
In certain areas of science there's well,
scientific fraud and
just confirmation bias
and publication bias where people
throw away studies that didn't work,
you know, purporting to what
they wanted to have happen,
and they then published a
few studies that did work,
and you what's called
a File Drawer Effect,
where you're only pulling
out positive results
and hiding all the negative results.
And this happens in the
pharmaceutical industry.
But the remedy for that,
I mean as depressing as all that looks,
and as disparaging of science
as that can seem to be,
the remedy for all that
is just more science.
And better science.
It's not some other mode of thinking
that is gonna deliver us the facts.
- There's that old saying,
"If you don't stand for anything,
"you'll fall for anything."
So people look to get their 20s,
and they really start to
wanna start finding out
what they do believe in.
And so there's their world view,
and then there's gonna be their self view.
Being with the Art of Charm
and one of the thing's
the show's about is,
self development and self betterment.
We're talking about world
views of confirmation bias.
I think it's even harder
when it comes to oneself
with being critical of who they are
and what they need to be doing,
what diets they need to be shaping
for their own well-being.
- Well, I think you should
be basically skeptical,
and skeptical requires
a little calibration.
It's not skeptical in the
sense that you're a jerk,
or that you're
(hosts laugh)
you know, just looking to debunk
eveybody's cherished opinions.
But there's a price
to be paid for
changing my world view.
And that price is
good evidence and good arguments.
That's the coin of the realm.
If you come to me with good
evidence and good arguments,
I am going to be swayed to the degree
that you deliver the goods.
And I should want to be swayed.
I shouldn't want there to be
any friction in the system.
I mean, there's naturally
going to be some friction,
depending on what you're talking about.
So if you're gonna try to convince me
that you've built a perpetual
motion machine, right?
Well then the bar is set very high,
because I know all of the reasons why
that hasn't worked out in the past.
I know that it tends to select
where people who are crazy
and there are very good physical reasons
to think that no one who claims to
have come up with a
perpetual motion machine
is actually right about
what they're claiming.
So people have limited time and attention
and limited patience.
So it's not like you
have to give every crank
a full hearing or the same
hearing you would give
you know, a Nobel Laureate in physics
who says he's found something interesting
at the margins of his actual expertise.
But, generally speaking,
you should be really just hungry
to confront your own mistakes.
And to be shown where you're
beliefs about the world are,
in fact, not true.
And what you discover in
people is a very strange bias
in the other direction,
which is, they have what they believe,
they spend a lot of time
and a lot of effort,
not wanting to change their
beliefs under pressure,
especially in public.
And they spend very little time worrying
about the possibility that they
actually might be mistaken,
and might be paying a price
for those mistakes even now,
in the sense that their
beliefs are not equipping them
to get what they want out of life.
And that other people can
see that they're mistaken,
and that their reputations
that they think they're safeguarding
by persisting to hold on to these beliefs
and not change them even in the face
of good evidence and good arguments,
that this persistence is actually
making them look both stupid and stubborn.
It's amazing that there is this mismatch
between what we think makes us look good,
and what we effortlessly recognize
looks bad on other people.
If there was a piece of
clothing you could wear
which you thought looked
great on yourself,
but the moment you put
it on another person,
you either recognize that this is like
the least flattering thing a
person could possibly wear.
There are many pieces
of clothing like that.
We just tend to recognize them.
One example that comes
to mind is name dropping.
Like name dropping is,
it almost never looks good.
Obviously there are people who are famous
and are around famous people all the time,
and they just can't help but name drop.
They're not even name dropping
because they are themselves famous,
and they're just talking about
their friends on some level.
You sort of know it when you see it.
But people who are name
dropping, you recognize that
it doesn't look good.
It's almost never having the effect
they're hoping it will have,
and yet the temptation to do it oneself
is often irresistible.
And the person who's doing it
never notices that they are now the person
who looks like a name dropper.
They never notice there's
something unseemly
about what they're doing.
And there's so much of life is like this,
where people are functioning
with a basic lack of self awareness.
And yet it's an awareness
that they immediately have
of others.
So if we could bring in those two lenses
in to some kind of registers,
it's certainly helpful.
- Well, I think, especially
with today's technology
being able to have your friends
either tape a conversation
with you not knowing of yourself
chatting with somebody new
or that there was a tape rolling,
where somebody mentions to you,
"I don't know if you notice this, (laughs)
"but you have a tendency to name drop,"
But of course your reaction
would be, "Well, that's not me.
"I don't do that."
"Well, let me play you back the tape
"of you talking to my friend." (laughs)
And then hearing you just unload!
Like, "Oh, find anything
wrong about that?"
or, "I unconsciously did
that," to such a degree,
what else is there going
on that I am not aware of?
- And there's so much going
on that we're not aware of.
And that is something you can be aware of,
at least in the abstract.
You can be aware of the fact
that you are transparent to others
in
ways that you are not
transparent to yourself.
And despite your best efforts,
this is going to be the case.
So you can
be unaware of your emotions in a moment
in a conversation.
You can be unaware, for
instance, that you're angry
or that you're getting angry,
but it can be absolutely
obvious to other people.
The look on your face can be angry,
your tone of voice can be angry,
and they are, in that
moment, it is true to say,
more aware of your mental
states than you are.
If someone can say it
to you at that moment,
"Why are you getting so angry?"
And you will deny it.
You'll say, "I'm not angry."
'Cause it's like a basic
lack of self awareness
is almost a given.
I mean, there are ways
to correct for this.
You can learn to meditate,
you can go into therapy,
you can think in these terms more and more
and try to triangulate
on yourself and be better
at playing this part of the
video game that is your life.
But still there's just this basic fact
that we are not perfectly equipped
to know ourselves totally in each moment,
and yet part of ourselves
is
believing into the world that
is being known by others.
You have to understand and be mindful of
to the degree that you can actually
do less damage to
yourself and other people
into your reputation.
There's a sort of a humility
that can creep in here
that is, I think, very healthy to have.
(whooshing sound)
- This episode of AoC is sponsored in part
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Now, back to Sam Harris.
(whooshing sound)
You're a scientist, but most of your work,
at least as far as I've seen,
seems to be philosophy at least recently.
Why did you take a road through science
to get to philosophy?
Do you consider yourself more scientist,
or more philosopher,
and does that distinction even matter?
- Yeah, that's a good question.
It doesn't matter to me
at all.
I've learned that it
matters to other people.
And it shouldn't.
I have an argument about
why it shouldn't matter.
But it does and so in the generic case,
call myself a neuroscientist.
You know, an author and a neuroscientist
because my PhD is in neuroscience.
But my interest in the brain
has always been philosophical.
And I went in to neuroscience
very much as a philosopher.
I was thinking like a philosopher,
I was reading philosophy,
I had thought that I was
gonna do a PhD in philosophy,
and then at the last minute,
decided to switch to neuroscience.
And I did that because
I wanted to know more
about the brain.
And my interest in philosophy
has been focused on
the nature of the mind
and questions about what consciousness is.
Just all the questions of higher cognition
and human subjectivity that
are really easily talked about
in philosophy and even most
talked about in philosophy,
but are more and more
tied down to the facts
as we understand them
in a neuroscience lab.
But you wanna understand the mind
and you wanna understand
people in general,
ultimately you have to
understand the brain.
And we are really at the
beginning of that effort,
and I wanted to be as
conversant as I could be
with all of that.
And so I went into
neuroscience to do that.
And I still do some
proper neuroscientific
research but mostly what I do
is I read and I write and speak.
And so I operate much
more like a philosopher,
but academic philosophers,
you know, those who like
my philosophy don't care
but those who don't
would point to the fact
that I don't have a PhD in philosophy
and that would disqualify me in their eyes
from claiming to be a philosopher.
But I think you are what you do.
There are neuroscientists
whose degrees are in psychology,
or linguistics, or even philosophy.
There are physicists who
are top flight physicists
who do not have PhDs in anything.
- I don't think Aristotle had
a PhD in philosophy, either.
- Right and so if you go back far enough,
no one had a PhD in anything.
And credentials don't matter at all
unless you're making mistakes
and people need to figure out why.
If you're functioning appropriately
in an area of discourse,
you're saying smart things
that are well-justified
and that people adequate to
that conversation recognize
to be smart and justified
and people wanna hear the next
sentence out of your mouth,
because the last one was a good one,
and you show up at the conferences,
or you write books or papers,
and all of that is working,
if you can play the language game,
then all that matters is
that you're playing it
at whatever level you're playing it.
But if you're failing,
you know, if you're
playing a game of tennis,
and you keep hitting
the ball into the net,
or out of the stadium,
well then,
at a certain point people are gonna ask,
"Well why can't this person
get the ball in bounds ever?"
Well, it's because he never
learned to play tennis, right?
So the explanation may be,
"Well, this person is pretending
to be a neuroscientist,
"or he's pretending to be a philosopher,
"but the reason why he's
not making any sense
"is that he's not actually
educated in any of those fields."
Well, fine but if you are making sense,
that's all that matters and
I think the other point here,
really, is that there is no real boundary
between certain areas of philosophy
and
their contiguous areas of science.
What kinds of questions
you're intending to ask,
and how you would go about answering them
in the near interim.
If there's an experiment you can run,
well then you're talking science.
If there's no experiment,
you can run neceassarily
or what you're saying would
just affect the interpretation
of experiments but not
actually change the experiments
that you would do, well then
you're talking philosophy.
I think we move rather
seamlessly and unconsciously
back and forth between these two domains.
I don't think you have to
have your world view defined
by the buildings as they are
arrayed on a university campus.
And that's what seems to happen.
That people are very
concerned about whether
something's philosophy or science,
or which part of science are we talking.
Is this physics or is this chemistry?
Well, it's both or one or the other,
depending on your matter
of emphasis at that moment.
Or the tools you would
use to run an experiment.
- Well, getting back to your work,
some of your more controversial stuff,
you've mentioned you don't
translate your work into Arabic
because you don't wanna have
kind of a Salman Rushdie event
where a translator is murdered because of
a fatwa by some crazy Jihadist, etc.
Would you be open in theory,
an anonymous translation
posted for free online,
just to get the work out there?
- Yeah, and I think
that may have happened,
or if hasn't happened,
it probably is happening.
And it's not that I have
a hard and fast rule
that I just will not
permit anyone to translate
my stuff into Arabic or Urdu
or any of the other relevant languages.
But the times I have
been asked and declined
has forced me to think
about the consequences,
and for me to be uncertain
whether or not the person
who is offering to do this
has thought about them
as fully as he or she should.
And for those who don't know,
Salmon Rushdie's book The Satanic Verses,
when it was translated and published,
and it wasn't just in
Muslim-majority countries,
one of it is Japanese
translators, if I'm not mistaken,
was attacked or even killed.
But anyway, there was
some number of casualties
around the translation and
foreign publication of his book,
I'm aware of taking
risks in what I publish,
particularly on the topic of Islam
but I'm reluctant to have
people absorb those risks for me
without not really having
thought it through.
- Do you ever fear for your own safety?
I mean, a lot of your critics
are absolutely insane,
and have actually made good on threats
to murder other people who
do and say similar things
that you have said and done.
- Yeah, well, I take
security very seriously.
And it's something I
think about and plan for
and train for and I take
it more seriously than
I think many other people
who are doing similar work.
But I also recognize that
I don't have the same risk
as some of my friends and colleagues.
You know, I have friends
like Ayaan Hirsi Ali
or Maajid Nawaz, who I wrote
this last book on Islam with
Islam and the Future of Tolerance,
who
are
taking much more significant
risks just by dint
of the underlying theology
to be a former Muslim,
to now be an apostate, as Ayaan is,
is to be running in a
much greater risk than
just being an infidel like me
who's disparaging all religion.
You know, to be a Muslim
reformer as Maajid is,
and to be an apostate
from the point of view of
more
doctrinaire and maniacal people,
their security concerns
are much higher than mine.
Yeah, I don't take it lightly at all,
and there are things I wouldn't do.
There are places I wouldn't go to speak,
because of I would perceive it,
you know, rightly or wrongly
as being a much greater risk
than is warranted.
- I think that makes perfect sense.
It seems like you would
have put real thought into,
"Should I do this or should I not,"
whereas a lot of people will just say,
"Sure, spread the work far and wide."
And then they kind of turn back
and keep smoking their pipe
or whatever and reading the newspaper.
You probably have put more
thought into it than that,
especially given Salman's
experience as well.
- Yeah.
There's also just the fact that
you can't always anticipate
what's going to actually
bring the heightened risk
to your door.
I mean, there are two kinds
of risks that I deal with.
There's the ideological risk,
the Jihadist who doesn't agree with me,
or the Christian fundamentalist,
white supremacist, who
doesn't agree with me.
Then there's just the
crazy person who thinks
I have said something
that got into his head,
or destabilized his life,
or has meaning that only he can see
and now has to persuade me of.
That's a very distinct and in some cases,
even more plausible risk.
I'm always surprised at
the things that provoke
very weird communications,
and so I wrote a book about free will,
arguing that it's an illusion.
And I was amazed at how
agitated
some of the response was to that.
I mean, there are people
who really felt like
they kind of lost their
minds reading my book.
And this was obviously
not at all my intention.
And one point, I was giving public talks,
when I released that book,
I think I said at the beginning
of a few of them that,
"Listen, if what I'm
saying over the course
"of the next hour seems
to be affecting you
"in a way that seems
pyschologically unhelpful,
"please leave the room.
"Go get a drink.
"You can come back for
the Q&A or whatever."
But there are some people
who are not up to thinking
about certain things.
And if you're one of them in this case,
you know, recognize it early
and get out of the room.
This is something I never
imagined having to say
but my email box
convinced me that I had to
because I was getting
totally anguished emails
from people who had really
been quite destabilized
by my argument about free will
in a way that I really couldn't understand
from a first person side
but I just had to accept
as being honest and worth
taking into account.
- I'd love to talk more about lying.
This book I've ready entitled
Lying is fascinating.
Especially the basic premise
which reeled me in right away
is that we often behave in
ways that are guaranteed
to make us unhappy,
and lying itself is so common,
people do it without even thinking.
We don't even know what life would be like
without it.
And some of the analogies
are quite brilliant.
We wouldn't want a car that
told us we don't need gas,
when we really do just because
we're too lazy to stop.
So why would we want that in our lives,
and yet this is what most
people seem to be doing.
- Yeah.
Where it gets controversial
is on the topic of white lies.
So most people acknowledge
that there's a problem,
or at least a potential problem
with lying
in general where you're
the head of a company
and you're lying about your financials,
or you're engaged in a fraud,
you're Lance Armstrong
and you're taking steroids
and you're having press
conferences and lying about it,
and lying about your teammates
and you're suing them
to shut them up when they tell
the world that you're lying.
All of that seems pathological
and people recognize,
most people recognize
that that's worth avoiding
if you can at all help it.
But they nevertheless
reserve the right to lie
on all these other occasions
where they think it's actually
a good thing to do and a
compassionate thing to do,
and they think that
it's actually improving
their relationships rather
than undermining them.
They call these white lies.
So much of the book is, as you know,
is purposed to an arguing
against this very notion
of a white lie.
I think if you look closely
at the circumstances where
you think you are doing
yourself or anyone else a favor
by misleading another person
about what you actually
believe to be true,
you're not and you can
discover that what you're doing
is quite obviously motivated
by an inner personal fear
with that person,
and you're, in some
sense, ramifying that fear
and allowing your
relationship to conform to it.
Whenever you're found out,
you're diminishing the trust
in the relationship.
The trust that the other person
could possibly have in you,
even if they were
consoled by your white lie
when you told it.
One of my favorite examples in the book,
I released that book as an e-book first.
It was just a very short hardcover book,
but initially it was just
a PDF that I released,
and then I got reader feedback.
I had readers tell me
their stories about lies
that had misfired for them
and the price they had paid for lying,
or the lies of others in their lives.
And one story that came in which I used
in the subsequent edition of the book,
was of two women who were out to lunch
and one said to the other,
brought up a third friend,
and one said, "Yeah, I'm
supposed to see her tonight
"but I just can't do it,
"I'm so busy, I don't wanna go out.
"I'm gonna call her and just tell her
"I can't go out tonight."
So in the presence of her friend,
she gets on her phone and
calls this third person,
and gets her voicemail and just lies
about why she can't
have dinner that night.
She says something about her
kids being sick or whatever.
In the presence of this other friend.
And so now this story was
delivered to me by this friend,
who just watched her friend
lie with just perfect alacrity,
to a friend that's kind
of at the same level,
and recognizing that
moment that it just subtly
but rather fatally
diminished her trust in her friend.
I mean, she just wondered immediately,
she couldn't help but wonder
how often she had been
on the receiving end of
that kind of treatment.
What was so insidious about this is that
it was not the kind of lie,
nor was it the kind of friendship
that required that she say anything.
So she never communicated
that she perceived
as the inethical problem or
does it harm their relationship.
And so the person who was lying never knew
that she had just sort of
lost a friend to some degree.
But all of this is just so corrosive
and so uninspected by most people.
And so that's where the book focuses.
- Yeah.
The book is fascinating
in that it explains
how lying damages trust,
how it never needs to be done.
Light deception versus lying,
I mean you don't have to tell,
"Hey, how you doing?"
"Well, I've got a little bit
of bowel dysfunction today,
"it's going like this."
You can sort of separate that
between why we can't make
your birthday party or
why Lisa can't hang out.
It's fascinating that you
also get into the idea,
which I think marketers and
online personalities do a lot,
and now, of course, the
laymen through social media,
we deliberately allow others
to draw erroneous conclusions
all the time.
And you've even separated
the act of commission
versus act of ommission,
and how one is punished
more than the other.
I would love to talk
about things like candor
and why candor doesn't
necessarily equal truth
in measuring truthfulness.
That's almost impossible to do this
without a lot of deep thought,
which you have mostly done.
- So the commitment to telling the truth
is definitely not the commitment
to being totally uncensored
and lacking in all tact.
It's not like you need to
become a Tourette's patient
and just blurt out
whatever's on your mind.
And that's not to say that's
actually the phenomenology
of Tourette's syndrome.
But, you know, that's the
cartoon version of it.
But it's a commitment to
saying what's true and useful.
The filter is true and useful.
And there are certain
circumstances where you,
I think, are wise to worry.
First of all, there is no whole truth.
I mean, you can't say everything
you think about anything.
You'd be there forever, right?
So you're always picking
and choosing things to say.
And there are circumstances
where I would admit
that a slightly more
paternalistic view of the person
you're talking about is relevant,
so that if you're talking to a child,
if your seven year old
asks you, "What is ISIS?"
You don't have to
immediately start telling her
about all the decapitations
happening in the Middle East.
There's a reason to edit the truth
and it doesn't require any lying.
It just requires that you see
that there's certain blanks on the map
that are not appropriate to
fill in for a seven year old.
And there are grown ups who occasionally
have to be treated like children,
but which you recognize
that that's in fact
what we're doing.
If you think someone really
can't handle the truth
about their life,
if you think this person's
gonna commit suicide
if you tell him that his
wife is cheating on him,
or that you didn't like
his novel or something,
well then you have to
acknowledge that you're dealing
with someone who you
think, rightly or wrongly,
is not a fully competent interlocutor.
I mean, this is somebody
who you are protecting
from himself.
Those are really unique circumstances
when you're talking about adults.
And it's far more often,
we're just uncomfortable
communicating what is true,
because we don't think it
makes us look very good.
It puts us in an awkward situation,
and so we're protecting ourselves,
or imagine we're protecting ourselves.
We're not giving the other people
in many cases an honest
look at what our situation
actually is and what our
relationship actually is,
and what they can expect
from us in the future,
and the kinds of friendships
we want to have with them.
And there's a mismatch
between their expectation
and what, in fact, you intend to do
the next time you're in a room with them.
So if someone sending you emails about
you know, wanting to
get together for lunch,
and you just simply don't want
to have lunch with this person,
and you don't want this
kind of relationship
with this person and you
don't even like this person,
and they don't know it, right?
I would grant you that there
are more and less tactful,
more and less polite ways
to resolve that situation,
but the thing that most
people do is they just punt.
They tell a white lie.
They say, "Oh, you know, I'm
just really busy this week,
"sorry, just can't do it."
And then, you know, you get an email
from that person next week.
At a certain point, you'd
have to confront this
or you just keep making
up more elaborate lies,
and hope they get the point.
If you wanna live your
life with integrity,
I mean, just look at what integrity means.
Integrity is a closeness of fit
between what you will
say to someone's face
and what you will say about
them when they leave the room.
It's this real distance there.
One, you're not a good friend,
if that person is in fact, your friend.
But also, you're a scary
person for others to be around.
We've all been this person.
We've occupied each one of these roles.
You know what it's like when
someone leaves the room,
and the people who are left
immediately start talking
about them, when you see
someone say something
that you know there's no
way they would say that
in the presence of the
person who has left,
you know that this person
is advertising to you
something about themselves,
I think diminishes your trust of them.
What are they saying about
you behind your back?
And yet the person who's dishing
now about the other person
is rarely aware that this
is in fact what's happening.
They're rarely aware
that they are advertising
their capacity to stab others in the back.
I mean, there are many people
who I would say terrible things about
because I think terrible
things about them,
but I will also say these
things to their face.
I've worked very hard to do that.
I can't say that honestly
there's no difference
between how I would speak
about someone to their face
and behind their back.
But there's much less difference than
there ever has been in my life.
And certainly there's much less than I see
in the lives of others.
And there's an immense power to that.
You can be overheard by anyone
and be unembarrassed.
And it also forces you to confront
your mind as it actually is.
I mean, if you're a petty, judgemental,
self-serving asshole,
forcing yourself to be
honest with other people
holds a mirror up to
that side of your life
very, very quickly.
If the truth about why
you don't wanna go out
with someone, right,
is that you only wanna date people
who are 15 years younger than yourself
and look like they're,
you know, fitness models,
well that's a truth you have to confront
if you don't give yourself
the out about lying.
If you can't have recourse to,
"Well, sorry, I just don't feel like
being in a relationship now."
Whatever the lie is,
it's something that
you do have to confront
about yourself whereas the liar need,
in fact, never even notice it,
or never see its implications.
- Do you think this is more of a epidemic
as of lately in the last few decades?
Has it has been and say
the several decades ago
in the 50's, 40's, 30's where people
were more straight up honest?
I mean, it seems that
what's going on on campuses
right now where it's more important
to watch people's feelings
than to be honest with them?
- I think this is more or
less there's a constant
in human relationship.
The moment we acquire the
facility to represent the world
in language and express our beliefs,
acquire new ones and modify
the beliefs of others.
In conversation, I think, we
very quickly learned to lie
and notice that in certain circumstances
there was a real benefit to lying.
The one place where I do
reserve the right to lie
in any circumstance where
I would otherwise also act
in a way that would seem unethical,
or in a way where I would use violence.
Like in a self defense situation.
If you're in a situation
where you could punch someone
in the face and call it self defense,
well then obviously you
can also lie to that person
as a lesser act of violence.
So I think we've always seen the utility
of manipulating one another with lies,
and then there's just all
of these cultural artifices
that we've acquired since which,
depending on what culture you're in,
they have dignified certain kinds of lies
necessary for appropriate
social relations.
So you're being polite when you're telling
that particular kind of lie.
Certain ones of these are
still hard to get around
and I'm not especially
dogmatic about this.
You brought up one when
you raised this topic.
You would talk about just the
nature of greeting somebody.
What if they say, "How are you doing?"
Then you'd say, "Oh I'm
great, fine, how are you?"
You realize that the question
isn't what it seems to be.
It's not that they really want to know
about the state of your bowels
or whether you slept last night,
or how your marriage is going.
They're just saying hi.
This is just in your language,
this is how you say hi.
You say, "How's it going?"
You know, in another
relationship it would be a lie
to say you're fine if,
in fact you're miserable
and you're not talking to your wife,
or someone very close to you,
who actually does want to
know day in and day out
how your life is going.
There are things that can
seem like lies on the surface
which, in fact, there aren't lies
because what's really being asked is,
people are asking to
perform a kind of ritual.
But for the most part,
I think there's just
a constant and differs
from culture to culture.
I don't know that it's
actually gotten worse
in any way in our lifetime.
I think one thing has gotten better.
It's harder to successfully
lie if you're at all
a public person.
Because nothing disappears
on the internet.
Everyone is just trailing more or less
everything they've ever said or written,
and now for all time that
this is gonna be the case.
So you can just look to
see what the person said
on that occasion and some
great examples of people lying
and then being caught, or lying
about what others have done
and then being caught,
that there's a video
record of the very event
they're talking about.
I think that's very useful.
I think the more sensitized
people get to the prospect
of being caught in their lies
that will make for a better
society just across the board.
(whooshing sound)
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Skip a meeting or two
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host a meeting in your underwear, why not?
All right, back to Sam Harris.
(whooshing sound)
Right, it causes different behavior.
I mean, I've read the book
and I've done this before
in years past.
I monitor how often I tell
things like white lies
and I realize, "Wow, I do this a lot more
"than I think I do."
And the reason is to make things easier
for us in the short term.
Easier for me and them,
frankly, in the short term,
friends, family, etc.
But once you stop, you start to see,
"Oh, people might see me as brash."
But in the end, they appreciate it.
And like you said, it makes
you almost scandal-proof.
Because weakness comes in
pretending to be somebody,
especially if you're a public figure,
that you are not.
And it makes you the
bad kind of vulnerable.
And the honesty that you mentioned before
can really force any dysfunction,
any sort of thing that's
wrong in your intimate life
to come to the surface.
The example in the book,
if you're in an abusive relationship,
if you won't lie to others and
ask how you got that bruise,
or why you look terrible
or things like that,
I mean it would cause you to come to grips
with this situation very quickly.
Drugs, alcohol addiction,
lying is really a key component
of addiction that goes untreated.
And if you have no recourse
to lying about things,
you can really unravel things early enough
to maybe make the damage not so severe.
- Yeah, oh yeah.
I've experienced that in many ways.
To go back to something
you just said though,
about making it easier for yourself
and easier for the other
person in the moment,
it's worth lingering on
just of the conception
of easier for the other
person for a moment.
Because it's often making
it easier in the sense that
you're telling them
what they want to hear,
or telling them something more pleasant
than is, in fact, what's true.
But you might
also be causing to them waste
a tremendous amount of
time or encouraging them
to waste a tremendous amount of time
where you could be helping them
to get their life on track,
in a way that other
people around them aren't.
So the classic example for me is
when someone asks you to give
your opinion of their book
or their screenplay, or you know,
something they've been working on.
So let's say you read their book
and you think it's terrible,
obviously it'd be much more
convenient for both of you
if you read their book and
you thought it was great.
Because then you could say it was great
and then you feel good and they feel good
and your friendship is intact
and there's no problem.
But if a friend of yours
comes to you with something
they've spent a lot of time working on
and you think it's terrible,
if you think you're helping them
by sparing them this momentary discomfort
of you not supporting
their rosiest conception
of themselves,
I think you really need to
look more closely at that
because I've been on both sides of this
and I can tell you that the people
who didn't give me honest feedback
or just didn't have good
critical feedback to give,
were far less helpful
to me than the people
who said, "Listen, you have
to tear this thing down
"to the studs.
"This is awful.
"You're lucky only I saw this."
(host laughs)
Other people who aren't their friends
are not going to spare
them their criticism.
The way to think about it in
these cases of creative work,
what you're doing for your friend,
is this thing is not yet
out in the world, right?
It's a different circumstance
when it's out in the world
and there's nothing they can do about it,
then you're having a
different conversation,
which is arguably harder.
But if you're still in a
position to give them some help,
by giving them honest feedback,
then you really should give that feedback
and you can always give it
in a way that acknowledges
that it's just your opinion.
You're not omniscient,
you're not the ultimate arbiter
of what is good in the world.
But if you have an informed opinion,
and you have reason to
think that other people
are going to share your view of the things
that are getting wrong, well then,
you should really just be candid.
And if the person you're
dealing with is at all
an adult and actually wants
to be spared future embarrassment,
well then they're gonna be
grateful for your candor.
And they're actually
gonna find the friends
who just glad-handed them
and sent them on their way,
totally useless.
It's always interesting to look back
on the praise one received for things
that one now thinks
were terrible.
Imagine you've got two friends.
You're doing something you
really hope is gonna be great,
you show it to two friends,
and the first friend tells you,
"Everything is wrong with this,
"and it's gonna take you a lot
of effort to make it right,
"but you gotta get in there and do it
"because in its present form
this thing is terrible."
And you wind up agreeing with him, right?
And you do the work and you
make all those improvements.
But you have this other friend
who saw your first draft
and said, "I think it's great."
That person is far less valuable
to you in that capacity.
And it'll be an irony if the
person was simply lying to you,
thinking he was going to
spare you some discomfort.
- You know, I think if
you were going to ask
for that criticism, (laughs)
then you have to be honest
in wanting to hear real criticism.
- There are people who ask what you think,
and they actually don't want to know!
Right?
These people are functioning
like children in a way.
The one thing that happens
once you become more and more
committed to being honest,
is you train the people in your life.
They know what to expect from you.
I don't find people coming to me
anymore who don't actually
want to know what I think.
And that's also very helpful.
And then people return the favor.
If you're someone who was really honest
in criticizing what somebody was doing,
and then you need
criticism of your own work,
well then you could get it.
There are people who are locked and loaded
and ready to return in kind.
At a certain point,
you're desperate for this.
Because it's just, why would
you want anything else?
You're not gonna be spared this feedback
once you go public with your work.
- It goes back to what you're
saying when we lie to people,
we treat them like children
because it fails to prepare
them for encounters with others.
The public, for example, who
will treat them like adults,
and won't be as kind to spare
their feelings short term,
and research shows even in
own intimate relationships,
that lies are correlated with
less satisfying relationships.
So that short term over long term,
like you and I have both
discovered first hand,
and me especially more recently
after having read the book,
once you commit to telling the truth,
you start to realize how rare it is.
You start to realize that,
"Wow, I only know a few people
"who will tell me the
truth about their truth
"about pretty much anything."
And honest people's
opinions become worth more
because they're trusted.
To link this back to
Art of Charm principles,
it is better to be
trusted than merely liked.
Because it's easy enough
to get people to like you,
it's hard to get people to trust you.
One is certainly, in my opinion,
more valuable than the other.
- Oh yeah.
Trust is
certainly in this domain,
where we're talking about
relationships that matter,
and again, we started talking about people
who've managed to function really
with a different kind
of currency of trust.
I mean, someone like Trump.
They're trusting him to be himself,
but they're really not trusting him
beyond that because it's
impossible what he's saying
can't be squared with what
he said five minutes ago.
Trust is the most important thing here.
And one thing that I'm happy about,
with respect to my own
audience in large measure,
the result of having
written that book Lying.
You know, I've gone on record as someone
who just doesn't lie.
And I now have a core audience of people
who really are engaged with my work,
who have just the
shortest fuse imaginable,
with respect to
any perceived inconsistency
or lack of intellectual
honesty on my part.
I've got the anti-Trump audience.
The irony here is that I'm often accused
of having a cult of followers
who will just take my
side in any argument,
you know, will just flame
people on social media
in ways that are not warranted.
But what in fact I have
is many core readers
and listeners to my podcast
who just have zero tolerance
for what they perceive
as a contradiction or intellectual
dishonesty on my side.
I love that.
It's a bit of a hassle, because often,
these people are
perceiving a contradiction
where there isn't one or I simply misspoke
or there's some glitch,
just gets magnified because
everyone is just watching me,
really keeping score
in a very rigorous way.
But I really do love it because
what's being said to me again and again,
under this guise is
if people really trust me,
and that's the most important thing,
and if I break that trust, I'm screwed.
I'm happy that I have taken
my conversation on this topic
so far in that direction
that hypocrisy there
will not be tolerated.
- What about relationships
with friends, spouses
and even family that are essentially
really, really difficult
to maintain without lying?
I think a lot of people have
relationships like this.
Even if it's just,
"You gotta keep telling
Angela she's pretty
"because they're propping
up her self-esteem,"
"I've gotta keep telling
Jordan he looks good
"in those pants," or whatever.
What do we do about those relationships?
Do we sever ties or do we just
start being honest right away
and deal with the consequences?
- I think you can move it in the direction
of more and more honesty
or however incrementally,
and deal with the consequences.
And certainly if the
relationship is important,
it should be important to improve it,
in whatever way you can.
I acknowledge that there are circumstances
where this is just not practical.
Basically, you have one
Thanksgiving dinner a year
with these people and your
job is just not to ruin it.
You're not gonna change anybody,
you're not gonna perform an exorcism
that's going to make your aunt or uncle
a fundamentally different person.
But in those cases, I think
you can just be tactful,
you can change the topic,
you can just simply not comment on things
that you might have a lot to say about.
So being political in that sense,
or just being wise to
avoid specific issues,
is not the same as lying.
Even keeping a secret is
not the same as lying.
If someone says to you,
"How much money do you have
"in your bank account,"
or ask you to divulge information
that you actually don't want to divulge,
the truth is you don't wanna tell them.
So you can say, "Listen,
I don't wanna tell you.
"I don't give that information out."
You can be perfectly honest
and withhold certain things.
You can also be honest and just not get in
to certain conversations with people
where you know it's not gonna go well.
It's good to play with the
uncomfortable edge of this,
a little bit and be more honest
than people might expect you to be.
What's important in those circumstances,
and certainly in
relationships that matter,
where you're actually trying to maintain
a good relationship with this person,
you're on the same team.
This is not an adversarial
form of honesty.
You're trying to have
a better relationship.
There's a psychological
cost that you are paying
for having to conceal how you
really feel about something
in this person's presence.
And you don't wanna pay that cost anymore
because
you
want to have a better
relationship with them.
You respect them too much
or you love them too much.
Or like this is intolerable
that this is so weird
that you can't talk about
how you feel about X, Y and Z
with your mom or whoever it is because
you're so busy sparing her feelings,
because she is such a brittle person
that she has just
endlessly advertised to you
that if you say the wrong
thing about X, Y and Z,
she's gonna go berserk, right?
So you can either try to improve all that
or you can treat this person
as an adversary, in some sense.
I'm not saying adversaries don't exist,
but then what you have to
acknowledge is that you are,
in large measure, avoiding a
relationship with that person.
They're the kind of
person that is incapable
of an honest relationship
and you can't cut
all those people out of your life.
And certainly, you can't cut
your mom out of your life,
or you shouldn't be eager to.
You can decide who to spend time with.
Obviously you wanna spend time with people
who you don't have to do that with.
- Especially given the
pyschological cost of lying,
having to then keep track of lies,
and other peoples' lies if
we're complicit with their lies.
You mentioned in the book as well
there's a pyschological process
where we actually devalue
people that we lie to
in order to rationalize our own behavior.
Like they matter less subconsciously
because we're willing to lie to them.
Therefore the reason we're
willing to lie to them
is because well, they matter less.
They're less important
or they're less evolved
or they're less salient in our own lives.
And that can be very toxic.
The willingness to be honest about things
we might otherwise conceal
is a really strong foundation
for great rapport in
relationships with others.
At Art of Charm,
one of the AoC core skillsets
we're talking about vulnerability
when it comes to generating
rapport with other people.
And people bond very strongly
on insecurities when shared,
almost like a superpower,
to be strong enough to tell
people the truth about yourself.
The reactions that you
get from other people
who find this so refreshing and powerful
can have a ripple effect around you
and your social and intimate circles.
- Yeah and that's another
one of these blind spots
that people think that being vulnerable
is a position of weakness
and it's unattractive.
And so they conceal their vulnerabilities.
It's like the opposite of
the name dropping example
I gave you.
It's that from the inside you
don't like feeling vulnerable,
you wanna hide this about yourself,
you don't want people to see it.
So it's the last in the world
you're going to do is tell a story
where you have to reveal
what a schmuck you are.
As you say it, once you get
to the other side of that
where you see how much
enjoyment you get from
other people's exposing
this about themselves.
And you see whole careers
are built on nothing more
than a person's ability
to expose their most vulnerable parts.
Again, this can cross over in to schtick
and become just performance.
But you know, obviously like comedians
and other beloved
entertainers are often beloved
precisely because
they're just like performing
a perpetual autopsy
on their failures.
And that's how they're succeeding in life.
It is a kind of superpower
to just have nothing
that's going to embarrass you.
Again, this is where integrity
is worth meditating on
for a moment.
When there is no distance
between who you are in private
and who you are in public,
there really is no
capacity for embarrassment.
If you're not concealing
something about yourself,
that you're hoping others will not notice,
you're not trying to foist
any illusions on people
about you.
But you're simply just of at
peace and living your life,
honestly representing your views
and willing to talk about anything,
that's a kind of superpower.
It's just so rare.
Again, I certainly can't say
I've perfectly achieved it.
I know what the bullseye looks like
and I know when I land in it,
and I know when I land just outside it.
And as a matter of ethics
and a matter of just personal growth,
I think it's useful to become
less and less comfortable
with one's own duplicity.
Being two-faced and saying
the thing to the person's face
and having something very different to say
when they leave the room.
All of those dichotomies,
ultimately I think we should
find them intolerable.
There's a lot of strength
that comes from it.
- What about lying on a cultural level?
Like lies in public
discourse, for example,
which have led to ridiculous
conspiracy theories
and rampant distrust of authority.
It seems now, and you mentioned
this a little bit earlier,
we can't even talk about serious things
like climate change and going back to,
originally what we were
mentioning, nutrition.
Because we don't even trust the scientists
and the experts now.
It's become almost a cultural phenomenon
in which you'd just expect
everybody's totally full of it.
- Yeah, well, a part of that
is just having the incentives misaligned.
The conflicts of interest
and we know that this
confounds people's ability
to reason honestly,
and we need a system
that corrects for that.
And science taken in its totality
does correct for vested interest
and wishful thinking and even fraud.
The consequence of public lies,
the consequence of governments lying,
and corporations lying and
individual scientists lying,
and getting away with it
for some period of time,
is just enormous.
It's incredibly toxic and
this distrust of authority
or not being able to figure out
who the actual authorities
are on any given topic,
it's a real problem.
There's a kind of nihilism
that creeps into the public conversation
on really consequential issues that is,
if taken seriously, just
a perfect impediment
to getting anything of value
happening in the world.
People who think there's
basically no such thing as truth
or that it just doesn't
matter what the truth is
or you can make up any truth
that you find can solve
when the influence of conspiracy
theory thinking so much
of the public on any given topic
is very harmful.
Paradoxically, the internet
has both enabled it
and provided an antidote simultaneously.
It's much easier to debunk lies,
given the internet,
but it's also much easier
to wall yourself off
in a echo chamber that's filled
with almost nothing but
lies and just stay there
and never have any other way
of thinking impinge on you
because you've basically
just curated your ignorance
and misunderstanding.
You have all the tools to do it.
- What are you working on now?
It sounds like from your show,
you're working on a book on AI.
I would love to have
you back at some point
to talk about AI.
- Sure.
Yeah, yeah, I know, it's
great to talk you guys.
I have my podcast,
which I do sporadically.
I don't think not nearly
as regular as you guys are,
but it is something I'm regularly doing.
I am writing another book
which won't be out for a while.
Reasonably speaking
it'll be like two years,
but I just started writing it.
But I'm writing a book on
somewhat in this area.
Really on intellectual honesty
and what it means to make sense.
I think the AI book is going
to be an audio only book.
I've been in dialogue
with this AI ethicist
and I think we're gonna
do it just audio only,
but we're still working that out.
I have a TED talk coming up
on the subject of AI ethics.
So, yeah, I'll be happy to talk about it
on a future podcast.
- Great, yeah.
'Cause I definitely have
big questions about that
and I wanted to ask
you something more deep
but I just thought it was too nebulous.
What are the most important goals
of the human race right now?
- Well, I think
well-being is our main concern.
And I mean, you can define that
as elastically as you want.
The concept can absorb every distinction
between happiness and
suffering that we can find,
and those that we've yet to even discover.
This arrives in every way imaginable.
I mean, suddenly the zika virus, right?
We've got a mosquito-borne virus
that is causing women
to
give birth to microcephalic kids, right?
If there were a god who
was dishing this out to us,
he would be an invisible psychopath
who we would
be right to fear but certainly
wouldn't want to love, right?
This is the world we live in
where this kind of thing happens.
How can we deal with this?
Well, prior to science
there was nothing to do
and now with science,
there might very well be something to do
in pretty short order.
We can have a vaccine against zika,
we can genetically engineer mosquitoes
that can't pass it on,
or we may in fact be able
to engineer mosquitoes
out of existence.
That's just one question of a million
where you just see clear thinking
about the nature of the world
and honest conversation
being really our only tool
to solve
a crushingly
tragic problem.
It just comes out of nowhere.
Who could imagine that
mosquitoes could do something
that will cause
a woman to now have a
retarded child
who will die early?
And that is going to be her
experience of motherhood,
and this child's experience of life,
totally defined by a process
that generations prior to us
not only didn't understand
but were in no position
to possibly understand.
Most of human history has been a time
of no progress at all, right?
Where we're just apes trying to eek out
a less miserable existence.
We're really on the cusp
of either the problem
has a solution or it doesn't.
If we could just cease to
needlessly make ourselves miserable
by fighting unnecessary wars
or having this significant
subset of humanity
devote their lives to
just divisive delusions,
we could just get down to the business
of maximizing human flourishing.
And that I think is really what
we should be doing all day long.
And their creativity and love and wisdom
and good conversations is all we need.
- Thanks so much.
This has been awesome.
- Sure.
Well, pleasure to meet you guys and
to be continued.
- Pleasure talking to you, Sam.
- Awesome, all right, guys!
- Thanks, Sam!
(whooshing sound)
Great show with Sam.
Lots to chew on there.
I love the topic of lying.
I read the whole book,
I highly recommend that
you do the same thing.
The whole book, it's like
a hundred and 50 pages.
I highly recommend you all do the same.
A lot of Sam's work is fascinating.
His blog is fascinating.
I'm creating a link to all of that
in the show notes,
which of course you can
check out on your phone.
It's important, though in this one,
I really recommend this practical exercise
in thinking about how would
your relationships change
if you resolved to never lie again?
What truths about yourself
might suddenly come into view?
What kind of person would you become
and how might you change
the people around you?
It's really worth finding out.
And as Sam said, there's
no reason to believe
that this behavior, lying,
is something that is good for humanity,
and may indeed be what we need to outgrow
in order to build a better world.
If you enjoyed this one,
don't forget to thank Sam on Twitter,
we'll have that in the
show notes as well as
all the other resources
as mentioned on the show.
You can tap our album art in
most mobile podcast players
to see the cheat sheet for this episode,
link to the show notes
directly on your phone.
I'm also on Twitter, @theartofcharm.
You can find info on our sponsors
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and of course,
I also wanna encourage you to join us
in our Social Capital Challenge,
that's at theartofcharm.com/challenge
or text charmed, that's
C-H-A-R-M-E-D to 33444.
The challenge is about
improving your networking
and connection skills.
Inspiring those around you to develop
a personal and professional
relationship with you.
We'll also email you
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that I mentioned earlier on the show.
And of course, I do
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and exercises, very practical,
to help you move forward
every single week.
It'll make you a better networker,
a better connector and a better thinker.
That's theartofcharm.com/challenge,
or text charmed to 33444.
This episode of The Art of Charm
is produced by Jason DeFillippo.
Jason Sanderson is audio
engineer and editor,
show notes on the website
are by Robert Fogarty.
I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger.
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