Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay. Well, I have been trying to gather my thoughts for this podcast for more than a week, and I've actually been unsure about whether to record it at all, frankly. I mean, conversation is the only tool we have for making progress. I firmly believe that, but many of the things we most need to talk about seem impossible to talk about. And I think social media is a huge part of the problem. I've been saying for years now that with social media, we've all been enrolled in a psychological experiment for which no one gave consent, and it's not clear how it will turn out.

And it's still not clear how it will turn out, but it's not looking good. It is fairly disorienting out there. You know, all information has been weaponized. All communication has become performative. And on the most important topics, it now seems to be fury and sanctimony and bad faith almost all the time. We appear to be driving ourselves crazy, actually crazy, as in incapable of coming into contact with reality, unable to distinguish fact from fiction, and then becoming totally destabilized by our own powers of imagination and confirmation bias and then lashing out at one another on that basis. So I'd like to talk about the current moment and the current social unrest and its possible political implications and other cultural developments and suggest what it might take to pull back from the brink here. And I'm gonna circle in on the topics of police violence and the problem of racism because, you know, that really is at the center of this, and there's so much to talk about here, and it's so difficult to talk about.

And there's so much we don't know. Right? And yet most people are behaving as though every important question was answered a long time ago. I've been watching our country seem to tear itself apart for weeks now and perhaps lay the ground for something worse to come, and I've been resisting the temptation to say anything of substance. Not because I haven't had anything to say, but because of my perception of the danger, frankly. And if I feel that way, given the pains I've taken to insulate myself against those kinds of concerns, I know that almost anyone with a public platform must be terrified. Journalists and editors and executives, celebrities, everyone has to be terrified that they might take a wrong step here and never recover. And this is really unhealthy, right, not just for individuals, but for society. Because, again, all we have between us and the total breakdown of civilization is a series of successful conversations.