#386 — Information & Social Order

Making Sense with Sam Harris

Waking Up with Sam Harris

Samharris, Currentevents, Politics, Ethics, Religion, Neuroscience, Science, Society & Culture, Philosophy

4.6 • 29.1K Ratings

🗓️ 7 October 2024

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Sam Harris speaks with Yuval Noah Harari about his new book, Nexus, and its application to current crises. They discuss humanity’s capacity for self-destruction, democracy and dictatorship as information networks, the “naive view of information,” the advantages of fiction over truth, trust in institutions, self-correction in a democracy, truth vs. power, truth vs. order, the suicide of conservatism, fixing social media, algorithms as editorial choices, efficiency vs. inefficiency, threats to democracy, the authoritarian character of Trump’s candidacy, the need for patriotism and nationalism, Israeli politics, the peaceful transfer of power, Putin and the war in Ukraine, the vulnerability of world order, the killing of Hassan Nasrallah, antisemitism and anti-colonialism, religious fanaticism among Israelis, the status of Arabs in Israeli society, biblical and post-biblical Judaism, whether a wider war in the Middle East is necessary, the danger of spirituality without ethics, and other topics.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast, this is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this you're not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. podcast, you'll need to subscribe at Sam Harris.org. There you'll also find our
0:24.9	scholarship program where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't afford one. We
0:29.0	don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers.
0:34.0	So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Okay, well I'm about to go on a trip overseas, so I'm recording this housekeeping about a week in advance of dropping this episode.
0:57.0	This is just to say that if anything extraordinarily important has happened in the world that you would
1:01.8	expect me to comment on here. I do not
1:04.2	currently know about it and no doubt we'll talk about it after I get back.
1:09.2	Today I spoke to Yvonne O'Hare, who's been on the podcast before.
1:15.0	Yevall is a celebrated historian, an author.
1:19.0	He is almost certainly the most popular historian on Earth at the moment. He has written Sapiens and
1:25.2	Homo deus and his latest book is Nexus, a brief history of information networks
1:30.8	from the Stone Age to AI.
1:33.0	And in the first part of the conversation,
1:35.0	we talk about the book,
1:36.0	and then we use it as a lens through which to look at current events,
1:40.0	of which there are far too many.
1:42.0	On the day we recorded this, Israel had just bombed Beirut
1:47.1	in an operation that successfully killed the leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah.
1:53.0	And based on much of the media coverage, you could be forgiven for thinking that this was a pure act
1:58.8	of aggression on the part of Israel.
2:01.9	There was almost no mention of the fact that Hezbollah has been
2:04.8	launching rockets by the thousands unprovoked into civilian centers in Israel since October 8th at the behest of Iran and in
	...

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