New Podcast Release: Sam Harris
The latest episode of "Lives Well Lived," the podcast I co-host with Kasia de Lazari-Radek, is now available.
Kasia and I had a recent conversation with Sam Harris. Below are some highlights from our discussion, lightly edited for clarity. You can now listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred platform.
On MDMA and Consciousness:
Sam Harris: "The crucial part of the epiphany I had on MDMA was that this was more real, not less real, than my normal attitude. So, as I came down from the drug, the sense very viscerally was of layers of psychological encumbrance and complication were kind of being reapplied to my mind by default, by my habits of attention. And what was more true about me was being obscured by this process. And so my default state of consciousness and my average level of neuroticism and self-concern and ambition and envy and just string all the usual mental states together for as long as you like. All of that was not me. It was taking me further away from not only what was optimal or normative in the case of me or anyone else, but further away from what was actually psychologically real at bottom.”
On Meditation vs. Psychedelics:
Sam Harris: “I don't view the psychedelic experience as necessarily equivalent to what one discovers through meditation. It can be certainly useful to get one interested in this whole project, but I don't view them as precisely the same methods or the same target states that one experiences.”
On the Illusion of Self and Free Will:
Sam Harris: "The self as it's normally sensed and constructed is an illusion, right? This sense that there is an ‘I’ in the middle of experience, that there's a ‘me’ on the edge appropriating my experience moment to moment, rather than me being simply identical to my experience, subjectively speaking. Most people feel that they're on the edge of experience grasping at it, resisting it, trying to make the most of it, trying to change it, thinking about it."
On Compassion and Cognitive Reframing:
Sam Harris: “All of this connects to a psychological literature that we're well aware of, which attests to the power of cognitive reframing. I mean, just take the classic case that you're driving and somebody cuts you off and you find that immediately annoying. So your default reaction is to contract and to think of what a bastard that person is in the car in front of you who just cut you off. But a reframing exercise…is to recognize in that moment that, wait a minute, you don't know anything about this person. You can't even see this person. This person's in a car in front of you, right? How do you know this person hasn't just been diagnosed with cancer or how do know this person isn't rushing to an emergency like maybe their wife is in the hospital delivering their first child and they're trying to get there. You’re lacking certain information. And if you gave them a minimally charitable, you know, construal of what they could be going through, all of a sudden your contraction relaxes and you realize that it's much more appropriate to feel patience and even compassion for this person...”
On Free Will and Determinism:
Peter Singer: " You seem to think that this fact [that free will is an illusion] makes a big difference in how we ought to act in the world. And I think I'm more of a compatibilist. That is, I think, yes, we can accept the truth of determinism in the sense that I just described. But how much of a difference does that make to how we live our lives? Now, you know, maybe it makes some difference around the edges in terms of more understanding, you know, less hatred, no retributive theory of punishment. But then I was never a retributivist. I've always been a consequentialist in terms of punishment. But when it comes to my own decisions, of course, we still have to make our decisions. We can't say, well, because of my influences and my genes and my environment, this is what I'm going to do. We have to choose decisions that we make…So I'm wondering what kind of a difference you think seeing through what you call the illusion of free will, what difference that really makes to the way we live our life and to the kind of society that we should be.”
Sam Harris: “The illusoriness of free will I've argued is really the obverse of the same coin that I just began to describe…If you lose the sense of subject of ‘I’ in the middle of experience, … if every time you pay close attention to what it's like to be you, this feeling of being a subject drops away and you just notice experience itself, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, all happening in this mysterious condition that we call consciousness, but there's no sense that there's a ‘me’ in the middle of it. So if you just imagine what it's like to have that change in you, then the question ‘do I have free will?’ really has no place to land. The truth is you don't even need to lose the sense of self to notice this. You can just notice this, but it's especially salient if you do. You can just notice that everything is happening all by itself all the time, right? So the next thought simply arises, right? There's no ‘you’ that brings the next thought into being. That would be tantamount to thinking the next thought before you think it, right? Like, at a certain point, things just simply have to spring out of the darkness.”
On Lying:
Sam Harris: "My argument for telling the truth is with lies, there's always something to keep track of. There's always something to navigate around. There's always something that might not match the current circumstance because the map doesn't fit the territory. Whereas with the truth… That's always, that's infinitely flexible because whenever you bump into some corner of reality that has not been modeled by the thing you said, you're free to say, here's the actual, here's more truth, right? Like, I'm sorry, I got that wrong. Like, obviously I got it wrong. Here's what I think now, right? I don't have to keep track of what I told you yesterday. I don't have to explain that look on my face that meant something that I'm not willing to own because I was lying to you. I can just be honest. I can just give you more words and more hugs and more good vibes because we're on the same team and there's nothing I'm holding back. There's nothing that I'm calculating. There's no math I'm doing before the word comes out of my mouth in defense against your reaction to the thing I think you can't handle.”
On Animal Welfare:
Peter Singer: "Factory farming is a moral atrocity. And I think it's a huge moral atrocity, right? I mean, we're talking about something like 200 billion vertebrate animals raised for food in intensive conditions each year. That includes fish, but fish are sentient beings. And it's also environmentally destructive. It wastes a lot of food because in all of these cases, we have to produce the food to feed the animals and we get back only a small fraction of the food value. It contributes to climate change. And you're an influential person”
Sam Harris: “I don't feel like I have all my ducks in a row to have this conversation, so you're getting the raw, you're at the coal face of my hypocrisy and confusion at the moment. But it's not clear to me that the most compassionate and ethically desirable outcome isn't a revolution in how we treat animals and raise animals for food as opposed to just converting all of humanity to vegetarianism or veganism. Or to, I think, a happier outcome still, maybe it's cultured meat as opposed to ethically or sustainably raised animals, right? But you need a market for that to have that come into being. So what's it going to take for that to happen?
Peter Singer: “Well, for cultured meat, we don't have the product at a price that's anywhere near competitive with meat products. That's the problem…”
Sam Harris: “I invested in one of those companies. I had Uma Valeti on my podcast and, I decided to invest in his company just to have some skin in that game. He had an $18,000 meatball at that point. I think it's a cheaper meatball at the moment, but it's not cheap enough to have found its way into every fast-food restaurant.”
Peter Singer: “If you want to say, look, ‘I don't buy factory -found products, I really make a very conscientious effort to find that, if I do eat animal products, they come from animals who've been outside, who've had good lives, who've eaten grass, which we can't eat, and so they haven't wasted food.’”
Sam Harris: “We do that. But I'm skeptical about whether those standards are stringent enough…It's quite possible that we want a thriving marketplace of meat eaters who care more and more about the ethical treatment of animals to force all of those changes in our current practices and to make farming as ethical and sustainable and environmentally responsible as it could possibly be, that might be better, all things considered, than just trying to convince everyone that you can be just as healthy as you ever would have been by eating nothing but protein replacements for meat and being a vegan. Like honestly, as a parent, trying to get our girls to eat enough food that covers all their bases is hard enough even when animal protein and dairy is on the table…”
Peter Singer: “I brought up three daughters as vegetarians, I should say, not as vegans, but they're fine. They have always been fine. Their tests have always come out well. I think there is good evidence that you can bring up children healthily as vegans. You need to give them supplemental B12. I think that's really the only thing. You talked about anemia. So I think really all you need to do there is have some vitamin C with your meals, which helps you absorb iron.
So you eat plenty of grains and leafy green vegetables and other iron sources. And you know, I have my blood checked regularly and I am basically vegan rather than vegetarian. But as I said, I didn't bring up my children that way. So I don't think it's a problem. But anyway that's not something to settle here. I really would urge you to think a little bit more about the influence that you can have in this direction.
Even if you don't see the world becoming vegan, which I think is realistic, at least in the relatively short term, urging people to reduce their animal consumption is really essential because we are not going to be able to produce the quantities of animal food from ethically defensible ways of raising animals.”
I've learned a lot from Sam over the years, and have great admiration for him. I looked forward to a stimulating conversation between two of the smartest people I have read and listened to (Kasia, please don't take offense, I was unfamiliar with you and your work until episode one of this podcast). Some of the conversation was great, but I was very surprised to learn how uninformed Sam is about animal issues. One would think that prior to the interview he might have made at least a cursory attempt to do a bit of reading.
If Sam had picked up a copy of Peter's Animal Liberation Now, perhaps the very first sentence in the introduction by Yuval Noah Harari would have grabbed his attention. It reads "Animals are the main victims of history, and the treatment of domesticated animals in industrial farms is perhaps the worst crime in history." Sam would no doubt strongly disagree with this statement, but it might have grabbed his attention to read further. Hearing Sam refer to factory farms, where animals are tortured, as "non-optimal places" is dismissive, unempathetic, and, to those of us who care about and advocate for animals, infuriating.
Sam's belief that dairy products provide essential nutrients for his family is a testimony to the industry, that even someone as brilliant as he has fallen into the propaganda trap than so many of us have swallowed (pun intended). It took me decades to finally realize that I was similarly brainwashed. The misinformation is everywhere, and often begins on our first day of kindergarten, if not before. Yet a quick dive into the scientific evidence reveals what should be logical, that is is not natural for a human to suck the milk out of a pregnant cow's teat, or to have someone else or a machine squeeze it out for them. Cows’ milk is designed for baby cows, who have four stomachs and weigh hundreds of pounds within a year of birth. It's as nonsensical as drinking the milk of a dog, cat, rat, etc. No animal drinks milk beyond infancy, and no animal drinks the milk of another species (except when humans feed it to them, like with cats). Big ag is no different than big oil and big tobacco, they all put profits first. They have spent billions of dollars (yes, billions) deceiving the public with false advertising and their hired biostitutes. San thinks that raising children as vegetarians and vegans is irresponsible and a "medical experiment." Infants, children, and adults don't merely survive, they thrive, on whole food, plant-based diets. Sam has apparently fully bought into The Protein Myth. A big problem in our society is that people get much too much protein. if Sam has ever met someone with a protein deficiency, for every one of them, he has met hundreds, and perhaps thousands, who suffer from having consumed excess protein.
If only people would take notice of what scientists and nutritionists who are not on the industry payroll have to say. Like Dr. Frank A. Oski, Former Director of Pediatrics, Johns Hopkins University, and author of "Don't Drink Your Milk!, Frightening Medical Facts About the World's Most Overrated Nutrient." He tells us this: "There's no reason to drink cow's milk at any time in your life. It was designed for calves, not humans, and we should all stop drinking it today." Or Dr. T. Colin Campbell, Cornell University nutritional researcher and author of the China Study, "The vast majority, perhaps 80 to 90 %, of all cancers, cardiovascular diseases and other forms of degenerative illness can be prevented, at least until very old age, simply by adopting a plant-based diet." An educated consumer is the meat, dairy and egg industries' worst nightmare.
Sam buys into the "humane myth," and while less cruelty is certainly better than more, no one should have the impression that "humane" dairy farms are kind to animals. If anyone reading this believes otherwise, I suggest checking out Annie Lowrey's piece in The Atlantic, "The Truth About Organic Milk."
Sam also seems to know little, if anything, about the tremendous environmental damage caused by raising animals for food. And while many people blame this on factory farming, all animal farming is grossly inefficient, period. Cramming animals tightly into factories actually provides some efficiencies of scale, bring lower prices to consumers and higher levels of suffering to the animals. While family farms do employ some environmentally beneficial practices, in some ways they’re actually less eco-friendly. Animals allowed to move around expend more calories and thus consume more resources than those crammed into tiny crates and cages. Chickens not pumped full of antibiotics and genetically manipulated to reach optimal slaughter weight at 6 weeks take longer to raise — and consume more food in the process. Cows raised on pasture produce more methane (a greenhouse gas 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide) than those crammed into feedlots. Supporting a meat-based diet requires five times as much land as a plant-based diet, and smaller farms use even more land per animal. Additional demand for these products means deforestation, which leads to increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The amount of land needed to produce all the meat Americans now consume by so-called “sustainable” methods would be astronomical — and it simply isn’t available.
Animal activists are often accused of trying to force our beliefs on others. Ironically, we are often asked, why can't we just live and let live?, when that is exactly what we advocate. At the core of our actions is the desire to shine a spotlight on the hidden abuses routinely suffered by our fellow sentient earthlings. Once people are aware of the issues, they have to face up to their cognitive dissonance. Most people profess to caring about animals. If they are forced to confront the facts, then they must either make lifestyle choices in accordance with their own ethical standards, or admit that they just don't give a damn about the suffering. They must face the question, if they wouldn’t abuse an animal, why are they comfortable paying others to do it for them?
I am not a great thinker or writer, and certainly not a moral philosopher, but this all seems so simple to me. There is absolutely no need for most people to ever eat animal products. If we can be kind rather than cruel, while improving our health, reducing our carbon footprint, etc., why on earth would we choose otherwise? I wish Animal Liberation Now was required reading for everyone, and hope Sam some day gives it a read.