Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast.

This is Sam Harris.

Okay, 2022.

That sounds like the future, doesn't it?

More of most of the science fiction movies of our childhoods placed in a time no later

than this.

One was the original Blade Runner, like 2017, something like that.

Anyway, this is the future.

Maybe the people who lived to see this future, and it is dystopian in some ways, certainly,

but you start the new year with the world that you have.

I wanted to reflect on a couple of pieces of feedback I've gotten in various forms.

It amounts to points on which many people said that I disappointed them.

So I guess the topic of this podcast is on disappointing one's audience.

I don't consider these majority opinions, in most cases, but there's a discernible signal

of grief amid the satisfied noises of the rest of you.

So I just want to touch on this stuff because it is interesting to figure out how to do

this job, what to talk about, who to talk to.

And not quite sure how to zero in on the problem here.

The basic problem, as I see it, is that we are living through what is at least in my

lifetime an unprecedented crisis of legitimacy across our institutions, or living in a society

that has been poisoned by misinformation and disinformation.

I should look at this through the lens of the two topics which have been most provocative

...