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I ve listened to the podcast and I m happy to do it.
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Which episode did you hear?
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I m super curious.
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The one with Dan Harris?
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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 like.
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So yeah, I like what you guys are doing.
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This is the art of charm.
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Learn everything you need to know to crush it in business, love, and life.
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All right, today we re talking with Sam Harris.
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He is a staunch critic of religion, advocate of mindfulness without religion, author, neuroscientist, researcher, ethicist.
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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.
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So enjoy this one with Sam Harris, and welcome to the Art of Charm.
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I m your host Jordan Harbinger.
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I m here with producer Jason and my co-host Johnny D for this episode.
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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.
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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, nonverbal communication, persuasion, networking, negotiation,
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and everything else we teach here at AOC, just text charmed, that s C-H-A-R-M-E-D, to 33444, or check out theartofcharm.com.
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We may not have all the answers, but we definitely have some of the questions.
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All right, here s Sam Harris.
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Tell us what you do in one sentence.
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Well, I think in public.
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I try to reason as honestly as possible in public, and I tend to do this on controversial issues.
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Yeah, I would agree with that.
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Well, first of all, you are also a neuroscientist.
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Let s not leave that behind.
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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.
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Before we sort of dive into some of the work that I ve read from you, I m very curious because you do get challenged a lot.
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You are a controversial character in some ways.
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How do you keep an open mind during intense debate with people, I should say, with whom disagree with you at such a visceral level that they re actually super angry or can t even keep control of maybe their emotions during that time?
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Well, I think we should acknowledge that there are two kinds of debate.
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There are debates that are really not at all meant to change the minds of the participants.
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If people go into these debates, public debates usually have this character.
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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.
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Buy 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.
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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.
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I tend to never do debates like that.
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Even if I m in something that is billed as a debate, at least on my side, I am open to changing 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.
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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, you know, 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.
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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 want to be wrong
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for a moment longer than I need to be.
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My view of saving face in those moments is that to attempt to save face by pretending that you are right when you are obviously wrong is to lose face twice over.
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What you want to 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.
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So the people who
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refuse to admit they re wrong, even when the audience can see it, just look terrible.
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And that s something that I m increasingly sensitive to.
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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 their stubbornness is somehow a virtue.
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And it s anything but.
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It s just this awful confession of intellectual dishonesty.
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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.
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You receive a lot of criticism.
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I ve seen it in the research of you when I was doing Before the Show.
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I ve seen it in just people even reacting to me saying, hey, I m having Sam Harrison.
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Have you ever heard of that guy?
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And it s just like not printable.
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Some people were really stoked.
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The majority, if it makes you feel any better, were very excited.
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But a lot of people were very aggressive.
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The stuff I ve seen on the web as well, very, very aggressive.
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A lot of it, quite frankly, heinous.
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How do you deal with that so it doesn t affect your work
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and your personal life, or at least you minimize those effects if you can t make it not affect you at all.
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I would imagine that s very difficult.
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I can t say that I m an expert at this.
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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.
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I think what I do for the most part is ignore it until something
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impinges upon me that just seems unignorable, and then I react to it.
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And I think I m getting smarter in how I react and in the battles I pick to fight.
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I mean, the most frustrating aspect of this is not that people criticize me
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for views that I actually hold and that those criticisms are in some sense wounding or destabilizing or cause me to doubt myself.
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I mean, it s great to be criticized for a view you actually hold and to see some merit in that criticism.
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I find that incredibly interesting.
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I mean, that s what conversations are for, certainly when you re talking about issues of consequence.
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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.
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I find that really frustrating because there s not a common 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.
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And this is in large measure the result of a very calculated campaign to lie about my views.
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I mean, they re public people who absolutely know they re misrepresenting me and continue to do it because it s effective.
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And that is just an incredibly cynical and depressing feature of our public conversation.
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But people do this and they re not just internet trolls.
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These are people who have significant platforms online and people even get described without scare quotes as being journalists.
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It s a problem that people notice this and notice that it s just not worth commenting on certain polarizing issues because it s just too much of a hassle.
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It s just too much of a hassle to take other people s feet out of your mouth again and again.
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and try to get yourself understood.
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In certain cases, it s just impossible.
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I have had to acknowledge that it is a hopeless battle on the one hand.
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I will never get myself to a position where
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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.
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I m just getting less and less frustrated now because it s just, I just had to dial down the frustration on my side.
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There is no remedy apart from trying to make sense in the next moment and moving forward.
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Well, with social media now, it just seems to appear that the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
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The loudest person is gonna get the attention.
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And even in my Facebook feed, memes take over, and because the meme is funny or catchy, it becomes the truth.
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And I ll start to see it pop up all over the place.
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Does anyone even, went to Snopes?
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Does anyone even want to find where this quote was?
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I mean, when it comes to
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things that you might have said or especially now with this latest political.
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campaign and it s quite amazing to what it s turned into and I don t even know if some of these people want to be vindicated as right on their views or opposing a certain view rather than just being heard and getting attention.
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Yeah, well there is that.
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There is the aspect of
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what I would call trolling in the broadest sense.
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It s kind of a misuse of the original meaning of what it is to be a troll on the Internet.
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But it s not really about honestly even spreading your views.
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You re basically a kind of vandal.
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You know, you re vandalizing people s reputations.
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And it s fun.
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So there s a lot of that, but then there are people who believe they re on the right side of some important argument.
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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.
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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, 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
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that they re being dishonest in the promulgation of their views.
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As long as they can score points that get on the board or they can land blows against their ideological opponents, basically anything is fair.
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And they know that people s attention span is so trimmed down now by
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just how much we re paying attention to.
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I mean, social media is kind of the ultimate example of this, where nothing lasts.
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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.
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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.
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and is keeping score to some degree, that person s really at a disadvantage.
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And 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.
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I mean, Trump is in one, where he s trained his audience not really to care about his consistency or his honesty.
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He s got a new form of honesty.
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It s an honesty of being uncensored,
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of saying whatever he can seem to credibly think in the moment, whether or not it contradicts something he thought yesterday.
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He feels absolutely no burden to make his worldview cohere in any kind of comprehensive way, even in the span of a single paragraph.
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And he gets away with it because his audience doesn t care.
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His honesty consists not in what he s actually saying, whether the information is being communicated in a way that survives any kind of rational scrutiny,
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It s much more of an emotional authenticity.
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It s much more of a just sticking a stick in the wheel of the system and just watching the gears grind.
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It is a kind of defacing of our public discourse and the institution of government.
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It s what people want to see happen, right?
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So people support this without ever feeling the burden of really parsing his statements with anything like an expectation that they re going to
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understand what his views are and what he intends to do and what he really thinks.
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There are many people playing this game.
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I mean, 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.
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Since this campaign had started, for myself, it just seems like
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There was a lot of fun in being this character at first, and the more it gained steam, the more he inflated it to the point where he doesn t care.
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It s part of the whole joke that got taken out way too far now that we re beyond the point of no return.
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It s here we go.
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Yeah, it s a very strange phenomenon.
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I actually haven t thought as much about it as I wish I would have now that we re talking about it because it s just kind of been happening out of the corner of my eye.
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But it just seems to me that he is playing a character.
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It is a kind of bad faith
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representation of himself, I mean, it s kind of a pseudo-self, and yet people seem to know that he s doing it.
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So it s not starkly dishonest.
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People know that, oh, he s just kind of amplifying this.
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It s not really what he thinks.
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He doesn t really want people punched in the face at his rallies.
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That s just something he said to get attention, and all of that somehow gets accepted under the rubric of being authentic.
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You can be authentically inauthentic,
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and somehow win points for even greater honesty.
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It s just kind of a post-modernist performance.
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Yeah, it s bizarre.
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It s also unhappily pretty consequential.
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I think it s probably still gonna hit the wall that is shaped like Hillary Clinton in six months.
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And we won t have President Trump, but who knows?
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And I find this increasingly scary is that everything is taking on this character of politics where it s like your epistemology becomes
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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
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feeling and what you want to be true in a way that it can t.
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If you are trimming your worldview 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, it s your religion or your nation or your family s politics that you inherited, you re not actually in touch with reality.
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doing anything that would reliably put you in touch with reality or correct mistakes.
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And so it s scary because we have public opinion being swayed even on fundamental points that are nothing to do with politics.
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You know, the age of the universe.
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There are some vast numbers of Americans in polls that has ranged from
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you know, 30% to 45%, depending on the poll, believe the universe is 6,000 years old.
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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 again,
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In this case, 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.
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It s like you have the conclusion you want in hand.
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You don t want there to be global warming, right?
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You don t want to believe that there s anything you have to take account of economically that is affecting the health of the planet.
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You re just gonna pick and choose your opinions to arrive at that conclusion.
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It s a starkly delusional way of operating, yet it s just more and more common.
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And we see this a lot with more and more junk science.
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Things like, chocolate is now good for you if you re pregnant.
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Oh, global warming is not a thing according to this study funded by people who make plastic or whatever.
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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.
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And it s like, well, no.
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That s not how science is supposed to work.
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Yeah, we do that, and 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.
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When you re talking about what to eat, this is the most humbling, really, 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 just, it s crazy.
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But there seems to be some significant
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grounds for debate about whether saturated fat is bad for you, for instance.
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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.
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In certain areas of science, there s both scientific fraud and just confirmation bias and publication bias where people
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You throw away studies that didn t work according to what they wanted to happen and they,
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then publish the few studies that did work, and so you have 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.
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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 of that is just more science, and better science.
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It s not some other mode of thinking that is gonna deliver us the facts.
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There s that old saying, if you don t stand for anything, you ll fall for anything.
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So people look to get in their 20s and they really start to wanna start finding out what they do believe in.
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And so there s their worldview and then there s gonna be their self-view.
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Being with the Art of Charmant, one of the things this show s about is self-development and self-betterment.
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We re talking about worldviews of confirmation bias.
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I think it s even harder when it comes to oneself and 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.
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Well, I think you should be basically skeptical, and skeptical requires a little calibration.
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It s not skeptical in the sense that you re a jerk or that you re just looking to debunk everybody s cherished opinions, but there s a price to be paid for changing my worldview, and that price is good evidence and good arguments.
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That s the coin of the realm.
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If you come to me with good evidence and good arguments,
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I am going to be swayed to the degree that you deliver the goods.
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And I should want to be swayed.
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I shouldn t want there to be any friction in the system.
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I mean, there s naturally going to be some friction depending on what you re talking about.
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So if you re going to try to convince me that you ve built a perpetual motion machine.
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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.
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I know that tends to select for 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.
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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 a Nobel laureate in physics who says he s found something interesting at the margins of his actual expertise.
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But generally speaking, you should be really just hungry to confront your own mistakes and to be shown where your
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beliefs about the world are, in fact, not true.
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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
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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,
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that this persistence is actually making them look both stupid and stubborn.
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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.
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If there was a piece of clothing you could wear which you thought looked great on yourself,
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but the moment you put it on another person, you could recognize that this is like the least flattering thing a person could possibly wear.
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There are many pieces of clothing like that.
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We just tend to recognize them.
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So if you have one example that comes to mind is name dropping.
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Like name dropping is it almost never looks good.
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Obviously there are people who are famous and are round famous people all the time and they just, they can t help but name drop.
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They re not even name dropping because
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They are themselves famous and they re just talking about their friends on some level.
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You sort of know it when you see it.
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The people who are name dropping, you recognize that it doesn t look good.
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It s almost never having the effect they re hoping it will have.
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And yet the temptation to do it oneself is often irresistible.
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And the person who s doing it
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never notices that they are now the person who looks like a name dropper.
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They never notice there s something unseemly about what they re doing.
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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.
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of others, so bringing those two lenses into some kind of register is certainly helpful.
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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 there was a tape rolling,
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where somebody mentions to you, I don t know if you noticed this, but you have a tendency to name drop, and of course your reaction would be, well, that s not me, I don t do that.
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Well, let me play you back the tape of you talking to my friend, and then hearing you just unload, like, oh, if I m wrong about that, or I unconsciously did that to such a degree, what else is there going on that I m not aware of?
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and there s so much going on that we re not aware of.
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And that is something you can be aware of, at least in the abstract.
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You can be aware of the fact that you are transparent to others in ways that you are not transparent to yourself.
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And despite your best efforts, this is going to be the case.
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So you can be unaware of your emotions in a moment,
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in a conversation.
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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.
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The look on your face can be angry, your tone of voice can be angry, and they are, in that moment, it s true to say, more aware of your mental states than you are.
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Someone can say it to you at that moment, you know, why are you getting so angry, and you ll deny it.
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You ll say, I m not angry, because it s like a basic lack of self-awareness is almost a given.
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I mean, there are ways to correct for this.
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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.
2
SPEAKER_00
But still, there is just this basic fact that we are not perfectly equipped to know ourselves totally in each moment, and yet part of ourselves
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is bleeding into the world and is being known by others.
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You have to understand and be mindful of to the degree that you can actually do less damage to yourself and other people and to your reputation.
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And this is sort of a humility that can creep in here that is, I think, very healthy to have.
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You re a scientist, but most of your work, at least as far as I ve seen, seems to be philosophy, at least recently.
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SPEAKER_04
Why did you take a road through science to get to philosophy?
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Do you consider yourself more scientist or more philosopher, and does that distinction even matter?
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that s a good question.
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It doesn t matter to me at all.
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I ve learned that it matters to other people, and it shouldn t.
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I mean, I have an argument about why it shouldn t matter, but it does.
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So in the generic case, call myself a neuroscientist, an author and a neuroscientist, because my PhD is in neuroscience.
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But my interest in the brain has always been philosophical, and I went into neuroscience very much as a philosopher.
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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.
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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, and 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.
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So, if you wanna understand the mind, and if you wanna understand
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people in general, ultimately you have to understand the brain, and we re 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.
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And I still do some, you know, proper neuroscientific research, but mostly what I do is I read and I write.
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and speak.
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And so I operate much more like a philosopher.
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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.
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But
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You know, I think you are what you do.
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There are neuroscientists whose degrees are in psychology or linguistics or even philosophy.
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There are physicists who are top flight physicists who do not have PhDs in anything.
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I don t think Aristotle had a PhD in philosophy either.
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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.
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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 want to hear the next sentence out of your mouth because the last one was a good one.
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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.
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But if you re failing, if you re playing a game of tennis and you keep hitting the ball into the net or out of the stadium,
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Well then, at a certain point, people are gonna ask, well, why can t this person get the ball in bounds ever?
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Well, it s because he never learned to play tennis, right?
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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 he s not actually educated in any of those fields.
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Well, fine.
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If you are making sense, that s all that matters.
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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.
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What kinds of questions you are tending to ask and how you would go about answering them.
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in the near term.
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If there s an experiment you can run, well then you re talking science.
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If there s no experiment you can run, necessarily, 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.
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I think we move rather seamlessly and unconsciously back and forth between these two domains.
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I don t think you have to have your worldview defined by the buildings as they are arrayed on a university campus.
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And that s what seems to happen.
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And people are very concerned about whether something s philosophy or science or which part of science are we talking?
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Is this physics or is this chemistry?
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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.
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Well, getting back to your work, some of your more controversial stuff, you d mentioned you don t translate your work into Arabic because you don t want to have kind of a Sam and Rushdie event where a translator is murdered because of a fatwa by some crazy jihadist, et cetera.
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Would you be open, in theory, an anonymous translation posted for free online just to get the work out there?
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Yeah, and I think that may have happened, or if it hasn t happened, it probably is happening.
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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 ve been asked and declined, it s 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.
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And for those who don t know, Salman Rushdie s book, The Satanic Verses,
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when it was translated and published, and it wasn t just in Muslim-majority countries.
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One of his Japanese translators, if I m not mistaken, was attacked or even killed.
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But anyway, there was some number of casualties around the translation and foreign publication of his book.
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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.
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Do you ever fear for your own safety?
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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 ve said and done.
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Yeah, well, I take security very seriously.
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And it s something I think about and plan for and train for.
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And I take it more seriously than I think many of the people who are doing similar work.
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But I also recognize that I don t have
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the same risk as some of my friends and colleagues.
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I have friends like Ayaan Hirsi Ali or Majid 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.
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To be a former Muslim, to now be an apostate, as Ayaan is, is to be running a much greater risk than just being an infidel like me who s disparaging all religion.
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you know, to be a Muslim reformer as much it 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.
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But it s yeah, I don t take it lightly at all.
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And there are things I wouldn t do.
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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.
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I think that makes perfect sense.
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It just seems like you would have put real thought into, should I do this or should I not?
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Whereas a lot of people 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.
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You probably have put more thought into it than that, especially given Salman s experience as well.
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Yeah, 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.
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I mean, there are two kinds of risks that I deal with.
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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.
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Then there s just the crazy person who thinks I have said something that
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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.
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I m always surprised at the things that provoke very weird communications.
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And so I wrote a book about free will.
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arguing that it s an illusion, and I was amazed at how agitated some of the response was to that.
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I mean, there were people who really felt like they kind of lost their minds reading my book, and that was obviously not at all my intention.
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At one point, I was giving public talks when I released that book.
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I think I said at the beginning of a few of them that, you know, listen, if what I m saying over the course of the next hour
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seems to be affecting you in a way that seems psychologically unhelpful, please leave the room.
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Go get a drink.
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You can come back for the Q&A or whatever, but there s some people who are not up to thinking about certain things, and if you re one of them in this case, recognize it early and get out of the room.
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It was something that I d 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
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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 just had to accept as being honest and, you know, worth taking into account.
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I d love to talk more about lying.
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This book I read 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.
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And lying itself is so common, people do it without even thinking.
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We don t even know what life would be like.
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without it.
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And some of the analogies are quite brilliant.
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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.
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So why would we want that in our lives?
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And yet this is what most people seem to be doing.
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Yeah, well, where it gets controversial is on the topic of white lives.
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So most people acknowledge
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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, 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 suing them to shut them up when they tell the world that you re lying, and so it s like all of that seems pathological, and people recognize, most people recognize that that s worth avoiding,
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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 a thing that is actually improving their relationships rather than undermining them.
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They call these white lies.
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So much of the book is, as you know, is purposed toward arguing against this very notion of a white lie.
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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.
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And you can discover that what you re doing is quite obviously motivated by
4
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an interpersonal 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.
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One of my favorite examples in the book, I released that book as an e-book first.
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It was just a very short hardcover book, but initially it was just a PDF that I released and then I got reader feedback.
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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.
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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, oh 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.
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So in the presence of her friend, she gets on her phone, calls this third person, and gets her voicemail, and just lies about why she can t
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have dinner that night, she says something about her kids being sick or whatever, in the presence of this other friend.
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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 kind of at the same level and recognized in that moment that it just subtly but
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rather fatally diminished her trust in her friend.
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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.
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What was so insidious about this is that it was not the kind of lie, nor was it the kind of friendship that required
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that she say anything.
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So she never communicated that she perceived this to be an ethical problem or this had harmed their relationship.
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And so the person who was lying never knew that she had just sort of lost a friend to some degree.
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I mean, all of this is just so corrosive and so uninspected by most people.
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And so that s where the book focuses.
4
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Yeah, the book is fascinating in that it explains how lying damages trust, how it never needs to be done, light deception versus lying.
4
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I mean, you don t have to tell, hey, how you doing?
4
SPEAKER_00
Well, I ve got a little bit of bowel dysfunction today.
4
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It s going like this.
4
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You can sort of separate that between why we can t make your birthday party or why Lisa can t hang out.
4
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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 layman through social media, we deliberately allow others to draw erroneous conclusions all the time.
4
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And you ve even separated the act of commission versus act of omission and how one is punished more than the other.
4
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I would love to talk about things like candor and why candor doesn t necessarily equal truth.
4
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and measuring truthfulness.
4
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That s almost impossible to do this without a lot of deep thought, which you have mostly done.
4
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So the commitment to telling the truth, it s definitely not the commitment to being totally uncensored and lacking in all tact.
4
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It s not like you need to become a Tourette s patient and just blurt out whatever s on your mind.
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That s not to say that that is actually the phenomenology of Tourette syndrome, but that s the cartoon version of it.
4
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But it s a commitment to saying what s true and useful.
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The filter is true and useful.
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And there are certain circumstances where you, I think, are wise to worry.
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First of all, there is no whole truth.
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I mean, you can t say everything you think about anything.
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You d be there forever, right?
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So you re always picking and choosing things to say.
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And there are circumstances where I would admit that
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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, you know, what is ISIS, you know, you don t have to immediately start telling her about all the decapitations happening in the Middle East.
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There s a reason to edit the truth, and it doesn t require any line.
4
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It just requires that you see that there s certain, you know, blanks on the map that are not appropriate to fill in for a seven-year-old.
4
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And there are grownups who occasionally have to be treated like children, but we should recognize that that s in fact what we re doing.
4
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If you think someone really can t handle the truth about their life, you think this person is going to commit suicide if you tell him that, you know, that his wife is cheating on him or that you didn t like his novel or something.
4
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Well, then you have to acknowledge that you re dealing with someone who you think
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rightly or wrongly, is not a fully competent interlocutor.
4
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This is somebody who you are protecting from himself.
4
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Those are really unique circumstances when you re talking about adults.
4
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Far more often, we re just uncomfortable communicating what is true because we don t think it makes us look very good.
4
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It puts us in an awkward situation.
4
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And so we re protecting ourselves, or imagine we re protecting ourselves.
4
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We re not giving the other people
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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.
4
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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.
4
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So if someone s sending you emails about 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?
4
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grant you that there are more and less tactful, more and less polite ways to resolve that situation.
4
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But the thing that most people do is they just punt.
4
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They tell a white lie.
4
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They say, well, you know, I m just really busy this week.
4
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Sorry, I just can t do it.
4
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And then, you know, you get an email from that person next week.
4
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At a certain point, you either have to confront this or you just keep making up more elaborate lies and hope they get the point.
4
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If you wanna live your life with integrity, I mean, just look at what integrity means.
4
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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.
4
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If there s a real distance there, one, you re not a good friend, if that person is in fact your friend,
4
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but also you re a scary person for others to be around.
4
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We ve all been this person.
4
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We ve occupied each one of these roles.
4
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You know what it s like when someone leaves the room and the people who are left immediately start talking about them.
4
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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.
4
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you know that this person is advertising to you something about themselves, I think diminishes your trust of them.
4
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What are they saying about you behind your back?
4
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And yet the person who s dishing now about the other person is rarely aware that this is in fact what s happening.
4
SPEAKER_01
They re rarely aware that they are advertising their capacity to stab others in the back.
4
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I mean, there are many people who I will say terrible things about because I think terrible things about them, but I will also say these things to their face.
4
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I ve worked very hard to do that.
4
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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.
4
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you can be overheard by anyone and be unembarrassed.
4
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And it also forces you to confront your mind as it actually is.
4
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I mean, if you re a petty, judgmental, self-serving asshole, forcing yourself to be honest with other people holds a mirror up to that side of your life very, very quickly.
4
SPEAKER_01
If the truth about why you don t want to go out with someone, right, is that you only want to date people who are 15 years younger than yourself and look like they re fitness models,
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, that s a truth you have to confront if you don t give yourself the out about lying.
4
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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 actually do have to confront about yourself, whereas the liar need, in fact, never even notice it or never see its implications.
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more of a epidemic as of lately in the last few decades, as it has been in, say, several decades ago, the 50s, 40s, 30s, where people were more straight-up honest.
5
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I mean, it seems that what s going on on campuses right now, it s more important to watch people s feelings than to be honest with them.
5
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I think this is more or less just a constant in human relationship.
5
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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 learn to lie.
5
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notice that in certain circumstances there was a real benefit to lying.
5
SPEAKER_02
But 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, where I would use violence, like in a self-defense situation.
5
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If you re in a situation where you could punch someone in the face and call it self-defense, well then obviously you could also lie to that person as a lesser act of violence.
5
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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, have dignified certain kinds of lies necessary for appropriate social relations.
5
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So you re being polite when you re
5
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you re telling that particular kind of lie.
5
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Certain ones of these are still hard to get around, and I m not especially dogmatic about this.
5
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You brought up one when you raised this topic.
5
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We talk about just the nature of greeting somebody.
5
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They say, how are you doing?
5
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And you say, oh, I m great, fine, how are you?
5
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You realize that
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The question isn t what it seems to be.
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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.
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They re just saying hi.
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This is just in your language.
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This is how you say hi.
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Say, how s it going?
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In another relationship, it would be a lie to say you re fine if in fact, you know, you re miserable and, you know, you re now talking to your wife or someone very close to you who actually does want to know
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day in and day out how your life is going.
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There are things that can seem like lies on the surface, which in fact aren t lies because what s really being asked is people are asking you to perform a kind of ritual.
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But for the most part, I think it s just a constant and differs from culture to culture.
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I don t know that it s actually gotten worse in any way in our lifetime.
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I think one thing that s gotten better is it s harder to successfully lie if you re at all a public person because nothing disappears on the internet.
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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.
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So you can just look to see what the person said on that occasion.
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Some great examples of people lying and then being caught or lying about what others have done and then being caught.
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There s a video record of the very event they re talking about.
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I think that s very useful.
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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.
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Right, it causes different behavior.
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I mean, I read the book, and I ve done this before in years past.
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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, et cetera, but once you stop,
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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.
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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.
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The example in the book, if you re in an abusive relationship, if you won t lie to others and they 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 the situation very quickly.
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Drugs, alcohol addiction, lying is really a key component of
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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.
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Yeah, oh yeah.
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I ve experienced that in many ways, and 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 that.
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just 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 them to 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.
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So the classic example for me is
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when someone asks you to give your opinion of their book or their screenplay or something they ve been working on.
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So let s say you read their book and you think it s terrible.
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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 can say it was great and then you feel good and they feel good and your friendship is intact and there s no problem.
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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
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by sparing them this momentary discomfort of you not supporting their rosiest conception of themselves.
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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.
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This is awful.
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You re lucky only I saw this.
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Other people who aren t their friends are not going to spare them their criticism.
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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?
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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.
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But if you re still in a position to give them some help by giving them honest feedback,
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then you really should give that feedback.
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And you can always give it in a way that acknowledges that it s just your opinion.
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You know, you re not omniscient.
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You re not the ultimate arbiter of what is good in the world.
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But if you have an informed opinion and you have reason to think that other people are going to share your view of
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the things that are getting wrong, well then you should really just be candid.
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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.
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It s always interesting to look back on the praise one received for things that one now thinks
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were terrible.
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Imagine you ve got two friends.
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You re doing something you really hope is gonna be great.
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You show it to two friends, and the first friend tells you, oh, everything that s 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.
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And you wind up agreeing with him, right?
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And you do the work, and you make all those improvements.
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But you have this other friend who saw your first draft and said, I think it s great.
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That person is far less valuable to you in that capacity.
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It would be an irony if the person was simply lying to you, thinking he was going to spare you some discomfort.
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You know, I think if you were going to ask for that criticism, then you have to be honest and wanting to hear real criticism.
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There are people who ask what you think, and they actually don t want to know, right?
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These people are functioning like children in a way.
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The one thing that happens once you become more and more committed to being honest is you train the people in your life.
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They know what to expect from you.
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I don t find people coming to me anymore.
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who don t actually want to know what I think.
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And that s also very helpful.
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And then people return the favor.
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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 can get it.
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There are people who are locked and loaded and ready to return in kind.
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At a certain point, you re desperate for this because it s just, why would you want anything else?
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you re not gonna be spared this feedback once you go public with your work.
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It goes back to what you were 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.
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And research shows, even in our own intimate relationships, that lies are correlated with less satisfying relationships, so that short term over long term,
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like you and I have both discovered firsthand, 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.
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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
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become worth more because they re trusted.
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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.
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One is certainly, in my opinion, more valuable than the other.
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Oh yeah, trust is, certainly in this domain, we re talking about relationships that matter, and again, we started talking about people who ve managed to function
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really with a different kind of currency of trust.
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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.
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What he s saying can t be squared with what he said five minutes ago.
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Trust is the most important thing here.
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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, I ve gone on record as someone who just doesn t lie.
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I now have a core audience of people who really are engaged with my work, who have just the shortest views imaginable with respect to any perceived inconsistency or lack of intellectual honesty on my part.
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I ve got the anti-Trump audience.
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These are people
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The irony here is that I m often accused of having a cult of followers who will just take my side in any argument and I will just flame people on social media in ways that are not warranted.
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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.
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I love that.
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It s a bit of a hassle because often these people are
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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 the really keeping score in a very rigorous way.
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But I really do love it because what s being said to me again and again under this guise is
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If people really trust me, and that s the most important thing.
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And if I break that trust, you know, I m screwed.
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I really, I m happy that I have kind of taken my conversation on this topic so far in that direction that hypocrisy there will not be
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tolerated.
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What about relationships with friends, spouses, and even family that are essentially really, really difficult to maintain without lying?
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I think a lot of people have relationships like this.
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Even if it s just you gotta keep telling Angela she s pretty because they re propping up her self-esteem.
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I ve gotta keep telling Jordan he looks good in those pants or whatever.
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What do we do about those relationships?
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Do we sever ties or do we just start being honest right away and deal with the consequences?
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I think you can move it in the direction of more and more honesty, however incrementally, and deal with the consequences.
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And certainly if the relationship is important.
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it should be important to improve it in whatever way you can.
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I acknowledge that there are circumstances where this is just not practical.
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Basically, you have one Thanksgiving dinner a year with these people, and your job is just not to ruin it.
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You re not gonna change anybody.
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You re not gonna perform an exorcism that s going to make your aunt or uncle a fundamentally different person.
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But in those cases, I think you can just be tactful.
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You can change the topic.
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just simply not comment on things that you might have a lot to say about.
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So being political in that sense, and just being wise to avoid specific issues, is not the same as lying.
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Even keeping a secret is not the same as lying.
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If someone says to you, how much money do you have in your bank account, or asks you to divulge information that you actually don t want to divulge, the truth is you don t want to tell them.
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So you can say, listen, I don t want to tell you.
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I don t give that information out.
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So you can be perfectly honest and withhold certain things.
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You can also be honest and just not get into certain conversations with people where you know it s not gonna go well.
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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.
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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.
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This is not an adversarial form of honesty.
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You re trying to have a better relationship.
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There s a psychological cost that you are paying
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for having to conceal how you really feel about something in this person s presence.
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And you don t want to pay that cost anymore because you want to have a better relationship with them.
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You respect them too much or you love them too much.
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This is intolerable, 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
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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?
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So you can either try to improve all that, or you can treat this person as an adversary in some sense.
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I m not saying adversaries don t exist, but then what you have to acknowledge is that you are in large measure avoiding relationship with that person.
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They re the kind of person that is incapable of an honest relationship.
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You can t cut all those people out of your life.
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I mean, certainly you can t cut your mom out of your life, or you shouldn t be eager to.
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You can decide who to spend time with.
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Obviously, you want to spend time with people who you don t have to do that with.
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Especially given the psychological cost of lying, having to then keep track of lies and other people s lies if we re complicit with their lies.
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You mentioned in the book as well, there s a psychological process where we actually devalue people that we lie to in order to rationalize our own behavior.
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Like, they matter less subconsciously because we re willing to lie to them.
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Therefore, the reason we re willing to lie to them is because, well, they matter less.
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They re less important or they re less evolved or they re less...
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salient in our own lives, and that can be very toxic.
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The willingness to be honest about things we might otherwise conceal is a really strong foundation for great rapport and relationships with others.
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At Art of Charm, one of the AOC core skill sets, we re talking about vulnerability when it comes to generating rapport with other people.
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People bond very strongly on insecurities when shared.
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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 ripple effects around you and your social and intimate circles.
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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.
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And so they conceal their vulnerabilities.
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It s like the opposite of the name dropping example I gave you.
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So from the inside, you don t like feeling vulnerable.
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You want to hide this about yourself.
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You don t want people to see it.
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So it s the last thing in the world.
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you re going to do is tell a story where you have to reveal what a schmuck you are.
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As you say, 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.
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Again, this can cross over into shtick and become
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just performance, but obviously comedians and other beloved entertainers are often beloved precisely because they re just like performing a perpetual autopsy on their failures.
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And that s how they re succeeding in life.
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It is a kind of superpower to just have nothing that s going to embarrass you.
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Again, this is where integrity is worth meditating on for a moment.
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When there is no distance between who you are in private and who you are in public, there really is no capacity for embarrassment.
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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 a piece and living your life.
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honestly representing your views, and willing to talk about anything, that s a kind of superpower.
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It s just so rare.
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Again, I certainly can t say I ve perfectly achieved it.
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I know what the bullseye looks like, and I know when I land in it, and I know when I land just outside it.
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And just as a matter of ethics and a matter of just personal growth, I think it s useful to become less and less comfortable
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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.
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All of those dichotomies, ultimately I think we should find them intolerable.
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There s a lot of strength that comes from that.
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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?
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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.
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It s become almost a cultural phenomenon in which you just expect everybody s totally full of it.
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Yeah, well, part of that is just having the incentives misaligned, the conflicts of interest.
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And we know that this confounds people s ability to reason honestly.
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and we need a system that corrects for that and science taken in its totality does correct for vested interests and wishful thinking and even fraud.
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The consequence of
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public lies, the consequence of governments lying and corporations lying and individual scientists lying and getting away with it for some period of time.
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It s just enormous.
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It s incredibly toxic.
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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.
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It s just a, there s a kind of nihilism
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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.
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people who think that 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 consoling.
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The influence of conspiracy theory thinking so much of the public on any given topic, it s very harmful.
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Paradoxically, the internet has both enabled it and
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provided an antidote simultaneously.
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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
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you have all the tools to do it.
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What are you working on now?
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It sounds like, from your show, you re working on a book on AI.
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I would love to have you back at some point to talk about AI.
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Sure, yeah, yeah, no, it s great to talk to you guys.
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I have my podcast, which I do sporadically.
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I don t think I m nearly as regular as you guys are, but that is something I m regularly doing.
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I am writing another book, which won t be out for a while, at least, reasonably speaking.
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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.
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I think the AI book is going to be an audio-only book.
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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.
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I have a TED Talk coming up on the subject of AI ethics.
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So yeah, I ll be happy to talk about it on a future podcast.
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Right.
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Yeah, because I definitely have big questions about that.
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And I wanted to ask you something more deep, but I just thought it was too nebulous.
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What are the most important goals of the human race right now?
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Well, I think well-being is our
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main concern, and I mean, you can define that as elastically as you want, it just, the concept can absorb every distinction between happiness and suffering that we can find, and those that we ve yet to even discover.
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This arrives in every way imaginable, I mean, so, you know, Zika virus, right?
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We ve got a mosquito-borne virus that is causing women to give birth to microcephalic kids, right?
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You know, 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?
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This is the world we live in where this kind of thing happens.
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How can we deal with this?
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Well, prior to science, there was nothing to do.
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And now with science,
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there might very well be something to do in pretty short order, and 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.
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So 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
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a crushingly tragic problem that just comes out of nowhere.
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Who could imagine that mosquitoes could do something that will cause a woman to now have a retarded child who will die early?
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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.
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Most of human history has been a time of no progress at all, right?
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Where we re just apes trying to eke out a less miserable existence.
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I mean, we re really on the cusp of either a problem has a solution or it doesn t.
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If we could just cease to needlessly make ourselves miserable by fighting unnecessary wars or having a significant subset of humanity devote their lives to just divisive delusions,
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we could just get down to the business of maximizing human flourishing.
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And that, I think, is really what we should be doing all day long.
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And there, creativity and love and wisdom and good conversations is all we need.
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Thanks so much.
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This has just been awesome.
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Sure.
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Well, pleasure to meet you guys and to be continued.
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Pleasure talking to you, Sam.
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Awesome.
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All right, guys.
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Thanks, Sam.
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Great show with Sam.
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Lots to chew on there.
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I love the topic of lying.
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I read the whole book.
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I highly recommend that you do the same thing.
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The whole book, it s like 150 pages.
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I highly recommend y all do the same.
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A lot of Sam s work is fascinating.
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His blog is fascinating.
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We re gonna link to all of that in the show notes, which of course you can check out on your phone.
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It s important though in this one,
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I really recommend this practical exercise in thinking about how would your relationships change if you resolved to never lie again?
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What truths about yourself might suddenly come into view?
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What kind of person would you become, and how might you change the people around you?
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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.
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If you enjoyed this one, don t forget to thank Sam on Twitter.
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We ll have that in the show notes as well as all the other resources mentioned on the show.
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You can tap our album art and most mobile podcast players to see the cheat sheet for this episode.
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We ll link to the show notes directly on your phone.
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I m also on Twitter, at The Art of Charm.
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You can find info on our sponsors at theartofcharm.com slash advertisers, and of course, I also want to encourage you to join us in our social capital challenge.
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That s at theartofcharm.com slash challenge or text charmed, that s C-H-A-R-M-E-D to 33444.
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The challenge is about improving your networking and connection skills, inspiring those around you to develop a personal and professional relationship with you.
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We ll also email you our fundamentals toolbox that I mentioned earlier on the show.
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And of course, I do regular videos with drills and exercises, very practical, to help you move forward every single week.
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It ll make you a better networker, a better connector, and a better thinker.
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That s theartofcharm.com slash challenge, or text charmed to 33444.
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This episode of The Art of Charm was produced by Jason DeFillippo.
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Jason Sanderson is our audio engineer and editor.
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Show notes on the website are by Robert Fogerty.
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I m your host, Jordan Harbinger.
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Go ahead, tell your friends, because the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to someone else, either in person or shared on the web.
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Now stay charming and leave everything and everyone better than you found them.
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Thanks for listening to the Art of Charm.
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Get more confidence, relationship skills, life hacks, and more at theartofcharmpodcast.com.