Joe Rogan Experience #804 — Sam Harris Transcript

Transcript

0:00 The infamous Jamie double finger gun. I'm glad to be here. Stop putting your bullshit on us. I go to forums and I read the things they say. you know, the environmental implications of it. So you said you look healthy. B12 is essential. Well, it's all good stuff, but it's really important. I'm a big fan of avocados. No one's holding you down. I eat a lot of eggs.

4:15 Yeah, yeah. Not enough of a yard. No, they just go in the chicken coop. One of them's. They just fucking die sometimes. Right, and you don't know why. No, they just go in the chicken coop. I open the door. want to right so there's no like animal captivity there's no cruelty there's nothing weird going on plants well one of the things they're doing is they're displacing wildlife. They're chewing up this ground and these combines, if you eat grain in particular, combines indiscriminately just chew up all that stuff and they get deer fawns, mice, rabbits, rats, rodents, untold amount of bugs if you want to get really deep. I mean, there's no, like being a vegan and being a vegetarian is most certainly less cruel

6:57 I had this guy on my podcast, Uma Valetti, who's running this company called Memphis Meats, which is cultured meat. And you would just grow this in a vat the way you, you know, brew beer, essentially. creepy for people, right? They want that. I mean, that's the natural way to get meat. And if I told answered the poll. So it's not a scientifically valid poll of the general population. It's just whoever got it on my feed. But it was interesting

9:58 serious market yeah oh for sure well there'd be a serious market for it for sure if they could get I'm like, good Lord, We don't. where i am as a vegetarian yeah they get fucking mad at you yeah They get mad. Did you see that family, a couple that runs a bunch of vegan restaurants, Like, oh, okay. now forgive me if this is no longer true, but at one point every employee there did the landmark forum, you know, the successor to Est.

13:01 So Est, which I've never done this so again i'm speaking outside and people have to ask permission to go to the bathroom. And one of the exercises they forced these guys to do is, and they almost People are just very – lots of eye contact and it's just an intense restaurant. Okay, well they're retarded. justifying their meat consumption because it was real weird.

16:32 There's no slaughterhouse in the garden. Cows make an extreme sacrifice for humanity, but that's their position in God's plan as food for the predators. I mean, that's what they're doing, right? We're talking about factory farming and these weird businesses where they slam all these animals to these entirely too small places. four's book which is um worth reading if you think you're immune to the details.

19:40 that you don't want, that are still getting into you through this food chain. because they're so small and more of the process of killing them is automated that they almost get I mean, there's no, and again, this is in some ways an artifact of them being so small it's so weird that we're allowed to do that with some animals. and we're not really big into reptiles.

23:08 And so something obviously like an ape or something that's cute. cute face and if you did then you would appreciate her you should think of this lobster as something with a cute face and if No, actually, there are what are called bivalve vegans who eat clams and oysters and mussels. I think anything that can behave, that can move, right, and move away from a stimulus, the evolutionary rationale for it to experience pain.

25:43 And our pain response is that for us. They're weird. Yeah. of? Right. Right. So when you ask like, like, why is it a tragedy or why would it be a tragedy to, have done over the next million years aren't going to get done. All of Though there are people who say— I forget when this came out. Well, I think it's the only thing that's valuable to anything.

30:05 can be made happy or be made miserable, depending on how I behave around it or toward it, If I hit a squirrel, I'm going to feel worse. They're just running around the woods, trying not to get eaten. who's deeply invested in their work. Yeah. There's much more complexity. Yeah. There's much more I mean, it's entirely possible that, like, it's going to sound really stupid, but I've said a lot of stupid shit.

32:48 It felt like there was a tangible vibe of life in there. I'm not, don't, people are ready up in arms with their Twitter fingers ready to get off. It's just an existence, right? agree that there's very likely a condition of something like pure consciousness that really is separable from the details of any given species. and yet you are. atoms are not conscious.

36:18 So plants are not having conversations like this, right? You'd be a good person to ask this. Is that an urban myth that if you sing to your plants, I sing to my flowers and they grow so beautiful. eat peyote if you uh if you try the san pedro cactus out this spring uh you you can you can It's all it all exists inside the the intelligence that's Every brain.

39:44 Producing dimethyltryptamine so it's been proven think anyone's done this neuroimaging experiment where you can get people who can reliably produce unless they're having hypnagogic images before sleep or they just happen to be, you know, super good visualizers of imagery, you close your eyes and you just basically have darkness there, right? you're functionally blind, you can't see anything, and we're not interested in that space. But you

43:26 Now, you know how people see things and they thought they saw something and it turns out to not be true at all, whether it's Bigfoot or whether it's a robbery or a suspect. And then these people that swear they saw these things albeit inadvertently. I mean, you can do this on purpose too, but people just do it with bad was that she could have developed functional memory of the crime scene by being told you're being prosecuted for a crime.

46:16 and they use EEG as a way of monitoring their familiarity. And especially if it's a murder, Well, no one in the States, as far as I know, unless this has changed in the last year or so since I've paid attention to this, none of this is admissible in court. you can, I mean, this has been, again, it's been a long time since I've looked at this particular

48:38 I think there's also no question that we don't have them now, about the state of your brain that can be discriminated by a person outside your brain blind to. And I'm scanning your brain while you're reading this journal entry or a Just as the, the meat is scary, the fake meat, that idea is terrifying. The idea of losing the, I mean, if you're at a murder trial, right, if you're someone who may have killed somebody, you, I mean, the Fifth Amendment becomes interesting in that case.

52:32 you're basically walking around the corridors of their brain. think we could pull. Certainly when you have prisons that are filled with a lot of people It would be such a simple solution, really. But, you know, when someone gets murdered, this doesn't get publicized very much, but it's a very common experience of police officers or but on a satanic panic case where a guy got accused of running a satanic cult by, I think, his daughter,

56:29 And he was giving more details, and he went to prison. Justice has been done. like a perfect twilight zone episode where like now you realize that this guy has been put away Because she shares his genes probably. his mind is probably so screwed up functionally deeply, deeply damaged, but they're functional. delusional like people that have these um hallucinating uh hallucinogenic visions like

1:00:12 When they're hearing internal voices, it's active. Yeah. How do they do that? They've been able to do that recently and to try to Yeah, yeah, yeah, sorry. So they're keeping people awake, and they're probing those areas of the cortex to see what it's correlated with in the body. And consciousness now seems to be located, you know, elsewhere. And that's a, there's just a,

1:03:36 in space, this is And you can trick people with, you know, visual changes of display. Like you can wear headgear where you can make me feel like it's called the body swapping illusion. and I can feel like my hand is being touched. I'm not explaining that setup great, but people can look it up. Right. You're behind your eyes. Amazing podcast. One of the best ever.

1:07:59 this machine they attach this electrode to a certain certain area of her brain stimulate achieve this mindset and that they're trying to do it. Well, no. Sobhs are. doing, at least in that task. As much as we know about the mind and being able to do things like we know regions of the brain that absolutely govern language process, which where there are no guarantees. I mean, the way we can intervene in the functioning

1:13:00 We don't know how consciousness is arising in the brain. So there's no reason why artificially intelligent machines, or you just want to go down the path of maximizing intelligent behavior in machines, own bladder back in her body. That is insanely fascinating. Now, if they can figure out how to And whether we take... system is processing information, and our brains are doing that. And any machine that is going to

1:17:04 We may get there before we actually understand our brains in a way that would allow us to emulate it. We're going to make livestock that essentially can just move forward and consume food. There's no thought whatsoever. be like spare parts for for you that for sure that's an option. But I think also, an artificial human, so we're going to build a biological person.

1:19:03 Somebody would. I believe they are. CRISPR. So when you're talking about changing the genome, brain. So presumably there's no experience in this animal, but it is the fully functioning animal, and build up only what we need, we would just be able to print the kidneys. things to some bizarre place a thousand years from now for some reason. one of the things, obviously,

1:23:14 Like we're getting better and better at changing things and manipulating things and extracting power from the sun and extracting salt from the water. would unless we have done something terrible and knocked ourselves back a thousand years, I think we will decide to change ourselves in that time in ways that will make us – there may be many different species.

1:24:40 Maybe that's what the aliens are. Everybody's so confusing. in yeah with a passion for molesting cattle allegedly i think that's people people are or the potential role that it plays. I mean, we exist, right? I mean, literally, so you could start with nothing but hydrogen, right? Anything that is organized. And so the limiting factor in that case is always the knowledge, right?

1:28:38 But presumably it'd be possible Everything would be equivalent to magic if we could see it now. The idea of creating a little machine that you could shoot out into the universe and it'll build you a planet. And, yeah, once you begin thinking about building things atom by atom, are then virtually limitless. but you're talking about actually repairing.

1:32:50 were trying to create yeah you could you could essentially like make an earth somewhere else But now you can really trick the eye. The attack leaner of a capro. a super intelligent mind could do with a thousand years to to work at it right and that's Yeah. amazing oh yeah if you stop and think about the revenant from 200 years ago we couldn't figure

1:35:55 And now they have this insane ability to recreate things like Game of Thrones, wolves, and dragons. There are certain gains that are truly incremental, where everything were and where you go from just fundamentally not But the difference between not being able to fly— shoes. And, you know, I think, you know, and they say, you know, should we be doing any of this? But then, you know, China does it or

1:40:06 are man-made diseases when we went to the cdcc is that disease control cdc cdc in uh galveston i Yeah, it was for a TV show with Duncan Trussell, the Questions Everything show. talking about how they had vats of this stuff they had all kinds of crazy diseases that they of the flu that become impossible. Yeah. because the market can't generate the rationale for developing antibiotics

1:43:18 from from uh being in that world and you're freaking me out, Sam Harris. I don't like to get freaked out. He pulls up his pants. apparently they can get it again, and it can get pretty bad. I don't know if it was Mercer. And these are horrific photos that look like something took a bite out of him. No exaggeration. But who knows, like, how devastating that might have been.

1:45:48 So it's probably one of the reasons why And she's not 100% out of the woods yet, but she's back home now. Like, heavy antibiotics right away. And the idea that we are not producing the next generation of antibiotics as quickly as possible is just unthinkable to me. And maybe they're actually doing this and I just don't know about it. if it was totally obvious how to build the next generation of antibiotics that would not be vulnerable to having their efficacy canceled in three years by just the natural selection among the microbes, you know, someone would do it very, very cheaply.

1:49:23 Or kind of incompetence in dosing Right. They're just in the hospitals. You go when you are, by definition, you're most vulnerable. that we have these bugs that try to get into your body and kill you. you are going to wash your hands in in as complete a way as as 21st century science of happenstance, they are producing changes in their genome that leaves them no longer vulnerable to antibiotic X, right? So whether it's methicillin or any of its related antibiotics.

1:53:55 but some percentage of them in any generation will tend to become, So you don't know what we're doing to ourselves. I mean, that's another element to it. And you have viruses that jump species from birds to pigs and back again. this, you know, the possibility of a pandemic. And also the time course of an illness is relevant. So if And they all have one function.

1:58:13 and there's no Is it toxoplasmosis that makes mice less fearful in the presence of cats? Yeah. I think it was bacterial. with the right antibiotic regime. reports about it that it's a particularly disturbing because it's I do remember comedians doing jokes about it. Like when was it all going bad for him? He goes, Mr. President, next time you sell arms to Iran, jot it down, make a note,

2:02:43 Remember that guy, the mob guy? what reagan was doing he was getting to like i don't remember what i did what i ran matter of Like, how good of an actor was Ronald It's really the baby boomer moment is coming. He's the guy that's like one of the forefront researchers and one of the guys who's really vocal about it. guy who came into the er victim of a motorcycle crash but it kind of makes sense yeah well you

2:06:05 on people. Was it Steve? I remember I was supposed to bring this up to you before, um, when you were talking about, um, plants and plants having some sort of a consciousness, was it Steven Pinker? That's one of the reasons why I wanted to bring it up to you. Please decipher. Maybe I did. The Pinker one I know of a human bladder. Oh, how dare you? it to you here. When you guys were talking about AI about ai i pulled up something on minority report and it pulled

2:08:56 i got down to this part in chicago they're doing something and they have it's called a heat list We will serve as outreach partners within the social service and community partners. Jamie. There's like in L.A., there's all sorts of microphones all over the place listening for I mean, just look at just consumer behavior. Facebook, obviously, is at the forefront of this. But when you talk about, when you add everything else that's coming, the more intrusive technology of the sort we've been talking about, it's, you know, none of that's surprising, right?

2:11:50 who got arrested for falling asleep inside his Look at this guy. So the moment we crack that, which we're very close to doing, it's just going to seem, I mean, you've got your old muscle cars or whatever you're into. Take them somewhere. Yeah, I mean, if you look at it in terms of safety, for sure. And it seems to be the thing that's the recurring theme, right?

2:14:09 But my question to you is, if you could get inside someone's mind, and it was like that really super suggestive guy that you were talking about earlier that just confessed all the horrific demonic possession stuff and eaten babies what You know, it's like if you have, we don't even need a lie detector if you have someone who's openly lying. He has a stance that is A on Tuesday and it's B on Wednesday. And when the discrepancy is pointed out, he tells you to go fuck yourself, right?

2:17:05 politics, and this is at least a year ago. But at that point, I said, there's no way we're going to it's for hillary or whether you're a trump supporter whatever it is like you have to be But she's also involved in two criminal investigations. And the way you do that is to talk like this. You can't talk like a normal person. the sound you get very smart and she's well-informed and she's qualified and she is absolutely who I will vote

2:20:18 I mean, the way she's doing it. No one said, oh, thank God someone smart is for Hillary. and recognize that there is a vast difference none of that for Clinton. It's like people are just sheepishly saying that they're just divulging that they will vote for Clinton. Because it's so brilliant. It's pretty good. It's like as if we're going to play the Super Bowl with three of the shittiest teams we could find.

2:23:46 Like what he's doing is like he's putting on a great show and he's going to win probably because he's putting on such a great show and people like a great show. change the system, but they're not really thinking about the implications of radically changing the system. And in the case of Trump, I mean, here is someone seems and is just pandering. But the thing that can't be true is there's no way he's actually

2:26:39 everything. If you look at the transcripts of his speeches and the fact that he can't, That moment never comes. But minds aren't like that. When I see what this guy says, he does not say anything that a well-informed, intelligent person would say. And ideas are connected, right? It's like you can't fake this stuff. You can't fake being this uninformed, and you can't fake being really well informed. And he's just, I mean, we just look at one policy that he

2:28:58 And many of them have kids who are American citizens, right? Someone's got kids under the age of 10 who are American I know that he said that he wanted to build a wall, but I didn't know that he said that he wanted to get rid of the illegal aliens. The only reason why people would come to America is because they felt like it would make their life better.

2:30:25 just because they were born on the right side of some for having people who, as you say, are just trying to have better lives, the idea that you're going He was one of the original birthers. I just wanted to show you that you can be manipulated and get it together. And he's doing this on all these issues where smart people see that he looks like a buffoon

2:33:53 guilty, Bill Clinton isn't really guilty of a rape, right? And now he's calling him a rapist, purely opportunistic reasons, he's willing to call a guy a rapist who he knows isn't. The only fascinating versions of this that I've been hearing from people that I respect are that the idea that he is like that big corporations He's a billionaire. He made all his

2:37:13 there's a lot of rich people who are totally confused about economics. Um, and they're, I would hope, which is like if I had a crystal ball, they could tell you. She's going to be a politician. They're tight. government system but a lot of people are That would be a terrible thing, right? predominantly. But are we attached too much to this idea of one person being the figurehead?

2:42:30 We had no previous understanding of government. You would think, starting from your zero set point of just now we're going to reboot civilization, you would think that if you had this kind of process, each candidate would be more impressive than the next. the next guy comes along. Yeah, yeah. a mature basically you haven't been in dialogue with the world. But there's something, it's so taboo to change your

2:45:43 how to give the mic to someone else. where there's nothing so crazy that could disqualify him among the people who like him now. You would see a tweet storm of a billion people who say, And it's so hard to rework. So when you look at, like 9-11 reality to deal that person is like, That's just, I mean, it's worse than having no one in charge. and even he will be scared of the prospect

2:49:18 generals when it comes time to make war. Being really pragmatic about how they pick Like, how could you say that? positive guy. That's not what I mean. I mean, but that sort of ability to excite people, Did you see this press conference he held? And he said, yes, this is exactly what it's going to be like. Is it is this what it's going to be like covering you with your president? Yeah, it is. Let me have

2:52:03 was saying I didn't raise any money for them. Not only did I raise it, much of it was given a long time ago. giving to Veterans Affairs. And he gave money very recently after people started fishing around the press pool is. And the press do need to just be beaten up by a strong man who who's not going to stand for their bullshit but it's it it's a um i mean if you it's unbecoming at the very least that kind of

2:54:59 Just be the end, right? Okay. you have to hold on to those weapons yeah but i But I mean, had it been a had Cruz been the nominee, it would have been all about religion. What's what's odd is that that's That's how you would say it? that the person in charge share them just you just if you You have to believe in God to be president in 2016, right? of faith. I don't think anyone really thinks that.

2:59:35 I mean, it would probably be a person who doesn't seek attention. So there's a kind of pathology of power-seeking that might be just intrinsic to it. ignorance so quickly, and he remedies it as fast as possible. He, you know, he seeks out the best experts, defers to them. And, you know, Just grab the best experts she can find. experience these cycles, these waves, these in and outs, these high and low tides of really smart presidents and really stupid presidents. And we just, people revolt. And there's just,

3:04:00 And then without the low tide, you cannot have the high tide, Sam Harris. for the Republicans. How is that even possible? We're that close. He's said, he's talked on both sides He said both of those things. I think it's entirely possible tank the Republican Party kept trying to make stuff up about Mexicans, that a guy can just do this, can just not really have any interest in politics.

3:08:07 Right. But that person's not there. be the tsunami of risk and hassle and waste and just all the rest of the world's chaos to optimize the system to deal with these kinds of things. And if we're promoting end well? Maybe this is just a weird But only with heavyweights, right? in office, whether it's a liar slow to recognize what a sinister character he was and he was he was considered a buffoon and

3:11:45 I think this is it. It's just like Architectural Digest does the Eagle's Nest. It's going to make America great again. What would he do if he actually had more power than anyone in the world? so when you get the really super athlete guys um they tend to gravitate towards the the big name i And in the heavyweight division, those guys were being lured into other ways.

3:15:22 Our favorite sports require bigger people, like basketball and football and I think There's never been like a guy who looks like Mike Tyson that came out of Japan in the 80s. and a giant neck that started above his ears and went down to his traps. And I think also in a lot of poorer countries, you'll see much smaller men. i think uh what it would wait to johnny tapia fight out? See if you can find that out.

3:17:34 and then people have to recover Super flyweight, which is, what is that, like 126 or something? That's tiny. But he had a lot of problems with drugs and crime and craziness. So many guys are in that mix. They're moving like 20% faster than anybody. just out of this world technical just so perfect no wind up no slop just drilled them in on each him up beating him up in the clinch and broke his nose. There's one where, yeah, I remember a victory.

3:21:03 That was a brutal but what what mighty mouse did I mean, you couldn't have a 30-foot tall person who could walk around surface area. It's a giant. if you had chimp strength and human tendons like good luck just I mean, it's totally tragic. you know, just kind of dragging it around. We have to assume that that gorilla is going to know that a baby is more fragile than a baby gorilla.

3:24:40 Torn his head off. No. If it was your kid? who was going to take the law I saw some horrible comments, too, well, but it's been happening with like I mean, they can launch you. Yeah. place where people are staring at them they're pacing and trying to get away from people's It's a very good point when you present it that way, because the people that are over there are

3:29:15 you go into the bush you go into and it's like hunting but you just shoot everything well it's The term bushmeat is always associated with primates for some reason. I read about people eating chimps and how common it was. They have handmade bows and arrows, Yeah, they got a Russian shotgun that somehow they got from somebody, You could recognize a certain amount

3:32:43 concepts here. And it's like, I mean, so you, I mean, when you, if you bite a fingernail and swallow it, are you practicing auto cannibalism? Right. I mean, it's, it's a, um, If you can eat meat, you have to eat human meat. Soylent green is people. believe where we were talking about how when areas become more educated and women become more careers, want to go to college, and they delay pregnancy to the point where they have realized

3:35:31 Or if you have some religious dogma which says you, though it's possible to avoid, Which is China where they don't let you have girls. No, the other, there's an overpopulation crisis in certain countries and disproportionately in the developing world. there are more adult diapers sold in Japan relying on the going to wind up with, did I say a million? Nine and a half billion people. You said billion.

3:38:45 I don't think anyone thinks, because we're just, fertility is falling everywhere, but labor-saving technology, right? Where you imagine just having a machine that can build any machine This, if in the right political and economic system, I mean, if someone just handed us It would do exactly what we want spread that they had built it, right? What are the implications for Russia and China? Well,

3:42:26 has instantaneous, if we give it access to the internet, it has instantaneous access but to say that this is not possible makes no scientific sense at this point. There's no reason they make 20,000 years of progress, right? It's not anything especially spooky. I just have a year. I'm going to go spend the next year getting ready for ability to work faster.

3:45:51 where it's just this thing doesn't do anything You solve the protein folding problem, and it's just off and running. this, right? Because their worst fears could be realized. If Donald Trump is president, massive wealth inequality, which we have to figure out how to spread this wealth. It's supposed to be very complicated, though. the cartoons are unfortunately not so far from what is possible.

3:49:50 We play Space Invaders and Breakout and all these games that are highly unlike one another. some trillionaire who's trumpeting his new device and just, you know, everything and everything fixed and easy to i mean what if this thing comes along and says listen there's a way to do you can abandon all this is why it's called the singularity right it's like this like this is a, it was John von Neumann, the inventor of game

3:54:05 important breakthroughs are certainly at the level of better software. I mean, we have, But it's just, when you imagine, people don't, people seem to always want to, I mean, I just had this conversation with Neil deGrasse Tyson on my podcast. What does he think? He thinks that we just use—he's drawing an analogy from how we currently use computers, that they just keep helping us do what we want to do.

3:56:11 And then all of this will just proceed to make life better, right? The best engineer is a computer, right? Goode described as the intelligence explosion, that we don't have to worry about it now. is 50 years enough for us to prepare politically and economically I mean, that seems like, it's more likely, from what I, it could be in 5 years very little progress

4:01:30 100 years i don't know that anyone is good at that how could you be with giant leaps come giant We might be here to make that thing. I mean, that's what woke me up to how interesting this area is. so, people want to do this. then we'll pull the brakes and talk about it. and now they've got something like, We have to share the information. This truly has to be open source in every conceivable way.

4:06:11 it will have the tools that but that was that was the content of what he was saying he's like we're going to build the next Right. You know, super powerful, does everything better than we do. Well, that would be a very good thing. It acts as an individual thinking unit, right? So with every week, this thing constantly gets better at even doing that. Right.

4:10:06 A regular person. Already being out in the wild, right? But once you... it's the biggest change in human history Like this is just, we're going to get there and it's either not going to happen or it's going to be trivial. But if you don't have an argument for why this isn't going to happen, then you're left with, okay, what's it going to be like to have

4:13:29 Or the idea that a person, a regular person like of today, could be in control of essentially a god. So just imagine, I mean, what would China do with it now, right? What would given what they say about is that the only basis for fear is, yeah, And we're going to have veto power. Everyone's going to be close enough to making the final breakthrough that unless we have some agreement about how to proceed, someone is going to

4:16:39 so david deutsch also thinks i'm wrong but he thinks i'm wrong because we will integrate if we can build AI such that we can merge our brains with it, someone can also just build AI and they would have like an insult contest. like it, I think is now really inconceivable. make suddenly make it compelling. I mean, just imagine, I mean, chess doesn't do it because

4:19:42 It's a very discreet ability. with your phone, like your phone knew you better than you know you. Like, I mean, I don't know what Let's all move on if you could accelerate it or you okay you're right man right man Slow down, dude. Remember when you had a Walkman, like a cassette player? Just let them stick me in your brain. We'll be together all the time. I've been giving

4:22:20 Did you see Her? Vikander, Elisa Vikander or something. Our computers are about to fill up? Is there any sort of concept of Across the board, Now, that seems counterintuitive, but there's no reason, when you kind of dig deeply into At least I don't think anyone can see why that's ruled out in advance. I mean, there's no reason why we would intentionally build that. But the

4:26:24 If you say, take me to the airport as fast as you can, again, this is Bostrom, Yeah, maybe so. It doesn't seem that, I don't know. I'm bad at it. Appreciate it If you go to audible.com forward slash Joe That was awesome.