The following is a conversation with Sam. Harris his second time in the podcast as I said, two years ago, when I first met and spoke with Sam, he's one of the most influential pioneering thinkers of our time as the host of The Making Sense podcast creator of the waking up app and the author of many seminal books on human nature and the human mind, including the end of Faith, the more landscape lying Free Will and waking up in this conversation.
Besides our mutual fascination with a GI and free. Will we do also go deep into controversial challenging topics of Donald Trump Hunter, Biden, January, 6th, vaccines lab, leak, Kanye West, and several key figures at the center of public discourse, including Joe, Rogan, and Elon Musk. Both of whom have been friends of Sam, and I have become friends of mine.
Somehow an amazing life trajectory that I do not deserve an anyway. And in fact believe is probably a figment of my imagination.
And if it's all right, please allow me to say a few words about this personal aspect of the conversation of discussing Joey lawn and others. What's been weighing heavy on my heart since the beginning of the pandemic. Now, three years ago is that many people I Look to, for wisdom in public discourse, stop talking to each other as often with respect. Humility and love when the world needed those kinds of conversations. The most, My Hope Is that they start talking again. It's star being
Friends. Again, they start noticing the humanity that connects them, there is much deeper than the disagreements, that divide them. So let me take this moment to say with humility and honesty, why I look up to and I'm inspired by Joe Elon and Sam. I think Joe Rogan is important to the world as a voice of compassionate curiosity and open-mindedness to ideas both radical mainstream. Sometimes with humor. Sometimes the brutal honesty always pushing
More kindness in the world. I think Elon Musk is important to the world. As an engineer leader, entrepreneur, and human being who takes on the hardest problems, that face humanity and refuses to accept the constraints and conventional thinking that made the solutions to these problems seem impossible.
I think Sam Harris is important to the world as a Fearless Voice, who fights for the pursuit of Truth against growing forces of echo Chambers and audience capture taking unpopular, perspectives and defending them with rigor and resilience. I both celebrate and criticize all three privately and they criticize me usually more effectively for which I always learn a lot, and always appreciate, most importantly, there is respect and love for each other as human beings.
Beings the very thing that I think the world needs most now, in a time of division and Chaos, I will continue to try to mend divisions, to try to understand, not to ride to turn the other cheek if needed to return hate With Love. Sometimes people, criticize me for being naive, cheesy simplistic, all of that. I know, I agree, but I really am speaking from the heart and I'm trying this world is too.
Fucking beautiful. Not to try and whatever way. I know how I love you all.
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What is more effective at making a net positive impact on the world empathy or
reason? It depends on what you mean by empathy. There to at least two kinds of empathy there's the the cognitive form which is you know I would argue even a species of reason it's just understanding another person's point of view you know you understand why they're suffering or why they're happy or what you know will we just you have a theory of mind.
And about another human being that is is accurate and so you can, you can navigate in relationship to them more effectively. And then there's another layer entirely not incompatible with that but just distinct, which is what people often mean by empathy, which is more kind of emotional contagion, right? Like, you feel depressed and I begin to feel depressed along with you, because, you know, it's just
It's contagious right II. You know, we're so close and I'm so concerned about you and your problems, become my problems, and it bleeds through right now. I think both of those capacities are very important, but the emotional contagion piece and this is not really. My thesis is something I have more or less learned from from Paul Bloom the psychologist who wrote a book on this topic.
Topic titled against empathy. The emotional social contagion piece is a bad guy. I'd rather often for ethical behavior and ethical intuitions, a boy and I would go. So I'll give you the clear example of this which is
We find stories with a single identifiable protagonist who we can effortlessly empathize with far more compelling than data, right? So if I tell you, you know, this is the classic case of the little girl who falls down a well right you know this is Somebody's Daughter. You see the parents distraught on television, you hear her Cries From the Bottom of the well the whole
Country stops. I mean, this is an example of this 20, 25 years ago, I think where it was just wall-to-wall on CNN. This is just the perfect use of CNN. It was, you know, 72 hours or whatever it was of continuous coverage of you just re extracting this girl from a well. So we effortlessly pay attention to that. We care about it, we will donate money toward it. I mean, it's just it Marshalls 100% of our compassion and altruistic impulse. Whereas if you hear that, there's a genocide raging and some
Country. You've never been to and I never intended to go to and the numbers don't make a dent and the and we find the story boring ramble change the channel in the face of a genocide, right? It doesn't matter. This of the it and it literally is perversely. It could be five, hundred thousand little girls have fallen down wells in that country and we still don't care, right? So it's, you know, many of us have come to believe that this is a bug rather than a feature of our moral psychology and so
He plays an unhelpful role there. So ultimately, I think when we're making big decisions about what we should do and how to mitigate human suffering and what's worth value in and how we should protect those values, I think reason is the better tool but it's not that I would want to dispense with any part of empathy either. Well, there's a lot
of changes to go on there but briefly to mention you've recently talked about effective altruism on your podcast. I think
You mentioned some interesting statement, I'm going to horribly misquote you, but that you'd rather live in a world like, it doesn't really make sense. But you rather live in a world where you care about, maybe your daughter and son, more than 100 people that live across the world. Something like this, like where the calculus is not always perfect. But somehow, it makes sense to live in the world where it's irrational in this way. And yet empathetic in the way you've been
discussing, right? I'm not sure what the right.
Answer is there or even whether there is one, right answer. There could be multiple Peaks on this part of the moral landscape but so the opposition is between an ethic that's articulated by someone like the Dalai Lama write it or really any exponent of classic Buddhism would say that these are the ultimate enlightened ethic is true dispassion with respect to friends and strangers, right? So that you would, you know, the mind of the Buddha would be.
Be truly dispassionate. You would love and care about all people equally. And by that light, it seems some kind of ethical failing or at least, you know, failure of to really fully actualized compassion in the limit or enlightened wisdom in the limit to care more, or even much more about your kids, then the kids of other people or and to prioritize your your energy in that way, right? As he's been all this time.
To figure out how to keep your kids healthy and happy and you'll attend to their minutest concerns and however superficial. And and again, there's a genocide raging and Sudan or wherever and it takes up less than 1% of your bandwidth. I'm not sure it would be a better world if everyone was running the Dalai Lama program there. I think some prioritization of one's nearest and dearest ethically.
Might be optimal because we'll all be doing that and we'll all be doing that in a circumstance where we have certain norms and and laws and and other structures that Force us to be dispassionate where that matters, right? So like when I go to when my daughter gets sick I have to take her to to hospital.
You know, I really want her to get attention, right? And I'm worried about her more than I'm worried about everyone else in the lobby. But the truth is, I actually don't want a totally corrupt hospital. I don't want a hospital that treats my daughter better than anyone else in the lobby because she's my daughter and I have you know, bribe the guy at the door or whatever you know where the guy's a fan of my podcast or whatever the thing is you don't want starkly corrupt, unfair situations and when you're when you start to get press,
Down the hierarchy of Maslow's needs, you know, individually and and societally. A bunch of the bunch of those variables change and they change for the worse understandably. But yeah, when things are when everyone's corrupt and it's, you're in a state of of collective emergency, you know, you've got a Lifeboat problem, you're scrambling to get into the Lifeboat. Yeah, then then fairness and norms and and the, you know, the
The other vestiges of civilization, begin to get stripped off. We can't reason from those emergencies to normal life. I mean, in normal life, we want Justice, we want fairness, we want, we're all better off for it. Even when the spotlight of our concern is focused on the people. We know the people who are friends, the people who are family people, we have good reason to care about. We still, by default want a system that protects the interests of
strangers to and we know that generally speaking interesting in game theoretic terms, we're all going to tend to be better off in a fairer system than a corrupt 11
of the failure modes of empathy is our susceptibility. To anecdotal data. Just a good story. Yeah, we'll get us to not think clearly. Well, what about empathy in the context of just discussing ideas with other people and then there's a large number of people like in this country.
You know, right and blew half the population. Believe certain things on immigration or on the response to the pandemic or any kind of controversial issue even if the election was fairly executed having an empathy for their worldview, try to understand where they're coming from, not just in the explicit statement of their idea, but the entirety of like the roots from which their ideas thumbs that kind of empathy at while you're
Are discussing ideas. What is in your Pursuit Of Truth? Having empathy for the perspective of a large number of other people vs. Raw. Mathematical reason,
I think it's important but I just it only takes you so far right? It doesn't it doesn't get you to truth Wright. It's not it either. The truth is not a is not decided by Democratic principles and certain people believe things for us.
Understandable reasons, but those reasons are nonetheless, bad reasons, right? They don't scale. They don't generalize or not reasons. Anyone should adopt for themselves or or respect, you know, epistemological e. And yet, their their circumstances understandable, and it's something you can care about. Right? And so, yeah, like me, just take, I think there's many examples of this you might be thinking of, but
And the one that comes to mind. I've been super critical of trump obviously, and I've been super critical of certain people for endorsing him or not criticizing him when he really made. It painfully obvious who he was, you know, if there had been any doubt initially there was no doubt when we have a sitting president, who's not, not agreeing to a peaceful transfer of power, right? So
I'm critical of all of that. And yet, the fact that
Many millions of Americans didn't see what was wrong with Trump or bought into the didn't see through his con, right? I mean, they bought into the idea that he was a brilliant businessman who could might just be able to change things because he's so unconventional. And so, you know, his heart is in the right place. You know, he's really a man of the people even though he's like, you know, gold-plated everything in his life, they bought the myth somehow of, you know,
Largely because they had seen him on television for almost a decade and a half pretending to be this genius businessman, who could get things done. It's understandable to me that many very frustrated people who have not had their hopes and dreams actualized who have been the victims of globalism and, and many other, you know, current trends.
It's understandable that they would.
Be confused and and and not see the liability of electing a grossly incompetent morbidly narcissistic person into the into the, the presidency. So I don't. So which is to say that, I don't blame their many, many millions of people who I don't necessarily blame for the Trump phenomenon, I but I can on the less bemoan the phenomenon as as indicative of, you know, very bad State of Affairs in our society.
Right? So it's two levels to it. Me one is, I think you have to call a spade, a spade when you're talking about how things actually work and what things are likely to happen or not. But then you can recognize it. People are very different life experiences. And and yeah, I mean, I think empathy and, you know, probably the better word for what I would hope to embody there is compassion, right? Like really, you know, to really wish people. Well, you know, and
I really wish, you know strangers. Well, effortlessly wish them. Well, me to realize that you there is no opposition between in the at bottom. There's no real opposition between selfishness and selflessness because why is selfishness really takes into account other people's happiness? I mean, he was, you know, which do you want to live in a society where you have everything, but most other people have nothing? Or do you want to live in a society where you're surrounded by happy creative?
Self actualized, people who are having their hopes and dreams realized, I think it's obvious that the second Society is much better, however, much. You can guard your good luck,
but what about having empathy for certain principles that people believe? For example, the the push, back the other perspective on this because you said bought the myth of trump, as a great businessman, that could be a lot of people that are supporters of trump who could say.
That Sam Harris bought the myth that we have this government of the People by the people that actually represents the people as opposed to a bunch of Elites who are running a giant bureaucracy. That is corrupt, that is feeding themselves and they're actually not representing the people. And then here's this Kaos agent Trump who speaks off the top of his head. Yeah he's flawed and all this number of ways, he's a more comedian than he is a presidential type of figure.
And he's actually creating the kind of chaos that's going to shake up this bureaucracy. Shake up. The elites that are so uncomfortable because they don't want the world to know about the game that got running on everybody else. So that's, yeah, that's a kind of perspective that they would take and say, yeah, there's these flaws. That Trump has, but this is necessary.
I agree with the first part, is it? So I haven't bought the myth that it's, you know, I truly representative
Democracy in the way that we would, you might idealize and, you know, on some level, this is a different conversation but I'm some level, I'm not even sure how much. I think it should be right. Like, I'm not sure we want in the end. Everyone's opinion given equal weight about just what we should do about anything. And I include myself in that, I mean there many topics around which I don't deserve to have a strong opinion because I don't know.
What I'm talking about, right? Or what I would be talking about if I had a strong opinion. So and I think we'll probably get to that to some of those topics because I've declined to have certain conversations on my podcast. Just because I think I'm the wrong person to have that conversation right there and and it's and I think it's important to see those bright lines in one's life and in the moment politically and ethically. So yeah, I think so leave.
Beside the the viability of democracy. I'm under no illusions that all of our institutions are, you know worth preserving precisely as they have been up until the moment. This great orange wrecking. Ball came swinging through our lives but I just It Was a Very Bad Bet to elect someone who is grossly incompetent and we're worse than incompetent.
Genuinely malevolent in his selfishness right at the end and this is something we know based on literally Decades of him being in the public eye, right? He's not as he's not a public servant in any normal sense of that term, and he couldn't possibly give an honest or saying, answer to the question. The question you asked me about empathy and reason and and like, how should we, you know, what should guide us? I genuinely think he is.
Missing some necessary, moral and, and psychological tools, right? And this is this is I can feel compassion for him as a human being because I think having those things is incredibly important and genuinely, loving other people is incredibly important and and knowing what all that's about is is that's really the good stuff in life and I think he's missing a lot of that. But I think we, we don't want to promote people to to the highest positions of power in our society who
Our far outliers in in pathological terms, right? We want them to be for outliers in if in the best case in wisdom and compassion and some of the things you've, some of the topics you brought up. And then we want someone to be deeply informed, we want someone to be unusually curious, unusually alert to how they may be wrong, or getting things wrong consequentially, he's none of those things and if
Insofar as we're going to get normal mediocrities in that role. Which I think, you know, is often the best we could expect. Let's get normal mediocrities in that role. Not, you know, once-in-a-generation, narcissists and frauds. I mean it is like the Majestic honesty is a single variable, right? I think you want. Yes is possible that most politicians lie at least some of the time. I don't think that's a good thing.
I think people should be generally honest even to a fault. Yes, there are certain circumstances where lying I think is necessary has its kind of on a Continuum of self-defense and violence. So it's like if you're going to, you know, if the Nazis come to your door and ask you, if you've got Anne Frank in the attic I think it's okay to lie to them. But, you know, Trump, there's I arguably, there's never been a person in that anyone
Could name and in human history whose lied with, with that kind of velocity. I mean, it's just, it was, he was a just a blizzard of Lies, Great and Small, you know, to pointless and to and effective but is just it
It says something fairly alarming about our society that a person of that character got promoted and so, yes, I have compassion and concern for for half of the society who didn't see it that way. And that's going to sound elitist and, and, and smug or something to for anyone who's on that side, listening to me. But it's genuine. I mean, I'm just, I understand that like, like I barely have the, I'm like, one of the luckiest people in the world.
I barely have the bandwidth to pay attention to half the things. I should pay attention to in order to have an opinion about half the things we're going to talk about, right? So how much less bandwidth the somebody who's working two jobs or, you know, a single mom, who's who's, you know, tree raising, you know, multiple kids, you know, even a single kid. It's just is unimaginable to me that people have the bandwidth to to Really track this stuff and so then they jump on social media and they see they get inundated by
By misinformation and they see what their favorite influencer just said. And now they're worried about vaccines and there, it's just, it's, we're living in an environment where are in the information space has become so corrupted and we've built machines to further corrupted you know I mean we built a business model for the internet that it further corrupted so it's it is just it's chaos and informational terms and I don't
People for being confused and impatient and at their wit's end. And yes, Trump was a an enormous fuck you to The Establishment. And that's that was understandable, for many reasons,
to me, Sam Harris, the great Sam Harris. Is somebody I've looked up to for a long time as a beacon of voice of reason. And there's this meme on the internet, I would love you to steal. Man the case
For it and against that Trump broke, Sam Harris has brain, that there's something is disproportionately to the actual impact that Trump had on our society. He had an impact on the Divan, the ability of balanced calm. Rational Minds to see the world clearly, to think clearly you being one of the big guns of that is there is there a degree to which he broke your brain?
Otherwise Known As Trump, deranged
Junior, medical well, so I had to cook my issue. Yeah, I think Trump, derangement syndrome is a very clever meme because it just throws the the problem back on the person who's criticizing Trump, but it sure. He in truth that the true Trump derangement syndrome was not to have seen how dangerous and divisive. It would be to promote someone like Trump to that position of power and do not end in the
In the final moment, not to see how untenable it was to still support. Someone who, you know, a sitting president who was not committing to a peaceful transfer of power. I mean, that was if that wasn't a bright line for you, you have been deranged by something because that was, you know, the that was one minute to midnight for our democracy, as well, as far as I'm concerned, and I think it really was, but for,
The the Integrity of a few people that we didn't suffer some real constitutional crisis and real emergency and, you know, after January 6 I mean if Mike Pence had caved in and decided to not certify the election, right? If they literally you can count on two hands, the number of people who held things together at that moment. And so and was so it wasn't for want of trying on Trump's part that we we
I didn't succumb to some, you know, real to truly Uncharted catastrophe with our democracy. So the fact that that didn't happen is not a sign that those of us who were worried, that it was so close to happening were exaggerating the problem. I mean, it's like, you know, you almost got run over by a car and but you didn't. And so you know, you're the fact that you're a journalist and you're thinking, you know. But boy that was dangerous. I probably shouldn't, you know, wandering.
In the middle of the street, with my eyes closed, you weren't wrong to feel that you really had a problem, right? And came very close to something, truly terrible. So I think that's where we were and I think we shouldn't do that again, right? So the fact that he's still, he's coming back around as potentially a viable candidate. You know, I'm not spending much time thinking about it frankly, because it's, you know, I'm waiting for the moment where it requires some thought. I mean, it did,
It took up.
I don't know how many podcasts I devoted to the topic. It wasn't that I mean it wasn't that many in the end, you know, against the number of podcast, I devoted other topics but there are people who look at Trump and just find him funny entertaining. Not especially threatening is like not a you know just it's just good fun to see somebody who's like is just not taking anything seriously and it's just just put
In a, you know, a stick in the wheel of business as usual again, and again, and again, and again.
And they don't really see anything much at stake, right? Doesn't really doesn't really matter if we don't support NATO, doesn't really matter. If he says, he trusts Putin more than our intelligence Services, none of this is it doesn't matter. If he's on the one hand, saying that he loves the leader of North Korea and on the other threatening threatens to to, you know, bomb them back to the Stone Age right on Twitter. It's all it all can be taken in the spirit of kind of reality. Television is like this.
It's just, this is the part of the movie, that's just fun to watch, right? And I understand that I can even inhabit that space for a few minutes at a time. But
There's a deeper concern that we're in the process of entertaining ourselves to death, right? That we're just not taking things seriously and this is the problem. I've had with several other people. We might name who just got her just appear to me to be goofing around at scale and they lack a kind of moral seriousness. I mean, they're touching big problems where lives, hang in the balance, but they're just fucking around and I think they're really important problems that we have to get our heads straight around.
Round and we need, you know, it's not to say that that institutions don't become corrupt. I think they do and I think and I'm quite worried that you know, both about the loss of trust in our institutions and the fact that trust has eroded for good reason, right? That they have become less trustworthy. I think, you know, they become infected by, you know, political ideologies that are not truth, tracking. I worry about all of that. But I just think the we
We need institutions, we need to rebuild them. We need, we need experts who are real experts. We need to Value expertise over, you know, amateurish speculation and conspiracy thinking, and just, you know, and bullshit. The kind of amateur speculation, we're doing in this very podcast.
I'm usually alert to the moments where I'm just guessing or where I actually feel like I'm talking from within my wheelhouse. I try to tell a clip graph that a fair amount with people. So yeah. I mean it, but it's not, it's different. Like, I mean, you you can invite someone onto your podcast, who's an expert about something that you're you, you're not an expert about and then you you
You and the process of getting more, informed yourself. Your audience is getting more informed. So you're asking smart questions, and you might be pushing back at the margins. But you know, that when push comes to shove on that topic, you really don't have a basis to have a strong opinion. And if you were going to form a, a strong opinion that was this counter to the expert, you have in front of you, is going to be by deference to some other expert who you've brought in or who you've heard about or whose work you've
At or whatever, but there's a paradox to how we value Authority in science. That most people don't understand. And I think we should some point unravel that because it's the basis for a lot of public confusion, and, for France, as the basis for a lot of criticism, I've received on these topics where it's people think that I'm a
You know, I'm against Free Speech or I'm an establishment shill or it's like, I just think I'm a Cadet credential list. I just think people with phds, from ivy league, universities should run everything. It's not true. But there's a ton of confused. There's a lot to cut through to get to Daylight there because people are very confused about how we value Authority in the service of rationality. Generally,
you've talked about it, but it's just interesting, the
E of feeling you have, you've had this famous phrase about Hunter, Biden and children in the basement. Can you just revisit this case? So let me let me give another perspective on the situation of January 6th and Trump in general. It's possible that January 6th and things of that nature. Revealed the, our democracies actually pretty fragile
and then Trump is not a malevolent and Ultra competent malevolent figure but is simply a jokester
And he just by creating the chaos revealed that it's all pretty fragile because you're a student history. And there's a lot of people like Vladimir Lenin, Hitler, who are exceptionally competent at controlling power at being Executives, and taking that power, controlling the generals controlling, all the figures involved and certainly not tweeting but working in the shadows behind the scenes to gain power and they did so extremely competently and
that is how they were able to gain power. The the pushback would Trump is it was doing none of that. He was creating what he's very good at creating drama. Sometimes for humor sake, sometimes for drama sake and simply reveal that our democracy is fragile and so he's not this once-in-a-generation. Horrible figure,
once-in-a-generation. Narcissist no II. Don't think he's, he's a truly scary.
Sinister, you know, Putin like or you know, Hitler much less Hitler like figure, not at all. I'm, he's not ideological. He doesn't care about anything beyond himself, so it's not, no, no. He's much less scary than any really scary, you know, totalitarian, right. I mean, and he's
he's more Brave, New World and
1984. This is what, you know, Eric Weinstein never stops badgering me about, but, you know, he's still wrong.
Eric, you know I can my analogy for Trump was that he is evil Chauncey Gardiner. I don't know if you remember the book or the film being there with it, with Peter Sellers. But, you know, Peter Sellers is this Gardener who really doesn't know anything, but he gets recognized as this wise man and because promoted to immense power in Washington because he's speaking in these kind of, as in a semblance of wisdom, he's got these very simple a for
The worry would seem to be aphorisms. He's just talking all he cares about is gardening. He's just talking about his garden all the time, but, you know, he'll say something but yeah, you know, in the spring, you know, the new shoots will Bloom and people read into that, some kind of Genius, you know, Insight politically, and so he gets promoted. So that's, that's the joke of the film for me. Trump has always been someone like an evil Chauncey Gardiner. I'm he's he's, it's not to say he's totally and yes, he has a certain kind of Genius. He's got a genius for
Creating a spectacle around himself, right. He's got a genius for getting the eye of the media always coming back to him. But it's only, it's a kind of, it's a kind of, you know, self-promotion that only works if you actually are truly Shameless and don't care about having a reputation for anything that that I are, you would want to have a reputation for, right? It's like is pure the pure pornography of attention right here and he just wants more of it. I
The truly depressing and genuinely scary thing. Was that?
We have a country that is at least half of the country given how broken our society is, in many ways, we have a country that didn't see anything wrong with that bringing someone who's obviously doesn't know what he should know to be president, and who's obviously not a good person, right? Obviously doesn't care about. People can't even pretend to care about people, really, right? In a credible way.
And so, I mean this, if there's a silver lining to this, it it's along the lines, you just sketched, it shows us how vulnerable our system is to a truly brilliant and Sinister figure, right? I mean, like, I think we are, we really dodged a bullet? Yes, someone far, more competent, and conniving. And ideological could have exploited our system in
The Trump didn't. And and that's yeah. So if we plug those holes, eventually that would be a good thing. And he would have done a good thing for our society, right? And it was one of the things we realized, and I think nobody knew and I certainly didn't know it. And I didn't hear anyone talk about it, is how much our system relies on Norms rather than laws civility rightmost. Yeah. It's just like, it's it's quite possible that
He never did anything illegal. You know, truly truly illegal. I maybe I think he probably did a few illegal things but like illegal such that he really should be thrown in jail for it. You know at least that remains to be seen.
So, all of the chaos, all of the, you know, all of the diminishment of our stature in the world, all of the, Just the, the opportunity costs of spending years focused on nonsense. All of that, which is Norm violations. All that was just, that was just all a matter of not saying the thing you should say. But that doesn't mean they're insignificant, right? It's not that it's like, it's not illegal for a sitting president to
A no, I'm not gonna commit to a peaceful transfer of power, right? We'll wait and see whether I win if I win it. It's it was the election was was, was valid if I lose it was fraudulent, right? But aren't those
humorist perturbations to our system of Civility? Such that, we know what the limits are. And now, we start to think that and have these kinds of
discussion, but that wasn't a humorous perturbation, because he did everything he could,
Could granted, he's wasn't very competent but he did everything he could to try to steal the election. I mean, the irony is, he claimed to have an election stolen from him all the while doing everything he could to steal it, declaring it fraudulent in advance. Trying to get the votes to, to to not be counted as the evening wore on knowing that they were going to be disproportionately Democrat Democrat votes because of the the either because of the position he took on mail-in ballots.
I mean, all of it was fairly calculated the whole circus of, you know, the clown car, they crashed into, you know, Four Seasons Landscaping, right? And you got Rudy Giuliani with his hair dye and you got Sydnee Powell, and all these grossly, incompetent people lying as freely as they could breathe about election fraud, right? And all of these things are getting thrown out by, you know, Republican largely Republican election officials and Republican judges.
It wasn't wasn't for want of trying that he didn't maintain his power in this country. He really tried to steal the presidency. He just was not competent and the people around him weren't competent. So, that's a good thing. And it's worth, not letting that happen again,
but he wasn't confident, he didn't do everything. He could
when he did everything he could, he didn't do everything that could have been done by someone more competent.
Right.
But the the tools you have as a president, you could do a lot of things. You can declare emergencies, especially doing covid, you could postpone the election, you can create military conflict that, you know, any kind of reason to postpone the election. There's a lot of weight but he
tried to do things and he would have to have done those things through other people and their people who refuse to do those things, the people who said they would quit, they would do they would quit publicly, right? I mean, this City's, you start really taking their multiple books written about
The last hours of this presidency and the details are shocking in what he tried to do and try to get others to do, and it's awful, right? I mean, it's just awful, that we were that close to something to, to a true unraveling of our political process. And it's the only time in our lifetime that anything. Like, this has happened and is deeply embarrassing right here.
For at, you know, on the world stage. It's just like we looked like a Banana Republic there for a while and where the lone superpower, it's a bit. It's it's not good and so we shouldn't that. Get there's no, there's no the, I the people who thought, well, we just need to shake things up and this is a great in straight way to shake things up and having people, you know, storm our capital and smear shit on the walls. That's just more shaking things up, right? It's all just for the LOLs.
There's a nihilism and cynicism to all of that. Which, again, in certain people, it's understandable, you know, frankly it's not understandable. If you've got a billion dollars and your you, you know, have a compound in Menlo Park or wherever, it's like that. There are people who were cheerleading this stuff, who shouldn't be cheerleading, this stuff, and who know that they can get on their Gulf Stream and fly to their compound and New Zealand. If everything goes to shit, right? So then there's a cynicism to all of that that I think we should be deeply.
Critical
of what I'm trying to understand. It's not, and analyze is not the behavior of this particular human being. But the effect that had in part on the division between people, as, to me the degree, the meme of Sam Harris is brain being broken by Trump represents.
You're like the person I would look to to bridge the division.
Well I don't think there is something profitably to be said to someone who's truly captivated by the the personality Cult of trumpism, right? Like there's nothing that I'm going to say to. There's no conversation going to have with Candace Owens say about Trump. That's going to converge on something reasonable right there, think so no I'm have try. I haven't tried with Candace. I've tried with you
People who are in that particular orbit. I mean I've had conversations with people who won't admit that there's anything wrong with Trump
anything so I'd like to push for the empathy versus reason is when you operate in the space of Reason. Yes. But I think there's a lot of power and you showing and you somehow are showing that you're willing to see the good qualities of trump publicly showing that. I think that's the
the way to win over again, but
he has. So few of them, he has fewer good qualities in any virtually. Anyone, I can name right. But he's funny. He, I'll grant you that he's funny. He's a good Entertainer.
There's others look at just policies and actual
impacts like, I've admitted that. No, no. So it like, so I've admitted that many of his policies. I agree with many many of his pipe. Is so
Probably more often than not, at least, on balance. I agreed about. So I agreed with his policy that we know we should take China seriously as an adversary, right? We're and I think I'm able to get it again that you have to. There's a lot of fine print, a lot of this, because the way he talks about these things and and many of his motives that are obvious or things that I don't support, but we take immigration. I think there's it's obvious that we should have control of our borders.
Right, like I don't see the argument for not having control of our borders, we should let in who we want to let in. And we should keep out who we want to keep out. And we should have a sane immigration policy. So I don't I didn't necessarily think was a priority to build the wall, but I didn't I never criticized the impulse to build the wall because if you know, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people are coming across the border and we are not in a position to know who's coming, that seems untenable to me. So, and I can,
Has that many people in our society are on balance the victims of immigration? Because and there is a, in many cases, a zero-sum contest between the interests of actual citizens and the interest of immigrants, right? So, I think we should have a, we should have control of our borders. We should have a sane and compassionate immigration policy. We should have we should let in refugees, right? So, I do, you know, Trump on refugees was terrible, but no, like,
I would say 80% of the policy, concerns people.
Celebrated in him are concerns that either share entirely or certainly sympathize with, right? So like that's not, that's not the issue. The issue is
a threat to democracy. In some
quality. The issue is largely what you said it was, it is not so much. The person it's the effect on everything he touches, right? He just he has this, this superpower of
Deranging and destabilizing almost everything he touches and selling the and compromising the Integrity of almost anyone who comes into his orbit. Miss you looked at these people who served as chief of staff for, you know, various cabinet positions, people had real reputations, you know, for for probity and and level-headedness, you know, whether you share their politics or not, I mean, these were real people, these are not, it is, you know, some of them were goofballs.
But, you know, many people who just got totally trashed by proximity to him and then Trashed by him when they finally parted company with him. Yeah, I mean it's just people bent over backwards to accommodate his Norm violations. And it was, it was bad for them, it was bad for our, our, our system and
And but that in, but none of that discounts, the fact that we have a system that really needs a proper house cleaning. Yes. There are bad incentives and entrenched interests. And I'm not a fan of the concept of the deep state but because it's, you know, it's been so propagandize. But yes, there's, there's something like that, you know, that is not
Flexible enough to respond intelligently to the needs of the moment, right? So there's a lot of rethinking of government and of institutions in general that I think we should do, but we need smart. Well, informed. Well, intentioned people to do that job and the well-intentioned part is, is hugely important, right? It's judgement just give me someone
who
is not the most selfish person.
Anyone has ever heard about in their lifetime, right? And what we got with Trump was that like the literally the one most selfish person? I think anyone could name, I mean, and you. And again, there's so much known about this man. That's the thing. It was like, it, predates his presidency. We knew this guy 30 years ago and, and this is, and this is what to come back to the those inflammatory comments about Hunter Biden's laptop. The reason why I can say with confidence that I don't care what was on his last.
Laptop, is that there is an and that includes any evidence of corruption on the part of his father. Right now, there's been precious little of that that's actually emerged, so it's like there is no, as far as I can tell, there's not a big story associated with that laptop as much as people bang on about a few emails, but even if there were just obvious corruption, right? Like, Joe Biden was at this meeting and he took, you know, this amount of money from this Shady guy.
For bad reasons, right?
Given how visible the lives of these two men have been right and given how much we know about Joe Biden and how much we know about Donald Trump and how they have lived in public for almost as long as I've been alive. Both of them. The the the scale of corruption can't possibly balance out between the two of them, right? We if if you show me that Joe Biden, has this secret life or he's driving a Bugatti and his lair living like Andrew Tate, right? And he's doing, he's doing
All these things I didn't know about. Okay. Then I'm going to start getting a sense that all right, maybe this guy is way more corrupt than I realized maybe there is some deal in Ukraine or with China that is just like this guy is not who he seems, he's not the public servant, he's been pretending to be. He's been on the take for decades and decades and he's just he's as dirty as can be, he's all mobbed up and it's a nightmare and he can't be trusted right? That's possible. If you show me that his life is.
At all what it seems. But on the assumption that I having looked at this guy for literally decades, right? And hand. And knowing that every journalist has looked at him for decades, just how many Affair is is he have in just how much, you know, how many drugs is he doing? How many houses does he have? Where, you know, what, what is, what are the obvious conflict of interest? You know, you hold that against what we know about Trump, right? And I mean the Litany of in
Discretions. You can put on Trump side that that testify to his personal corruption to testify The Faculty has no ethical Compass. There's simply no comparison, right? So that's why I don't care about what's on the laptop went. Now, if you tell me Trump is no longer running for president in 2020 for and we can put trumpism behind us. And now you're saying listen, there's a lot of stuff on that laptop that makes Joe by and look like a total asshole. Okay, I'm all ears.
Right? I mean it was a forced in 2020. It was a forced choice between a sitting president who wouldn't commit to a peaceful transfer of power and a guy who's obviously too old to be president, who has a crack-addicted, son, whoo-hoo, you know, who lost his laptop. And I just knew that I was going to take Biden in spite of whatever Litany of Horrors was going to come tumbling out of that
laptop and then might involve sort of. So they actually
Quote is hundred by and literally could have had the corpses of children in the basement. The dark humor to write which is I think he speak to I would not have cared, there's nothing it's Hunter by and it's not Joe Biden, whatever. The scope of Joe Biden's corruption is it is infinitesimally compared to the corruption, we know Trump was involved in, it's like a firefly to the sun is what you're speaking to, but let me make the case that you're really focused on the surface stuff that it's possible to have corruption.
And that masquerades in the thing we mentioned which is civility, you can mint, you can spend hundreds of billions of dollars or trillions towards the war in the Middle East. For example, something that you've changed your mind on, in terms of the negative impact that has on the world. And that, you know, the military-industrial complex. It's everybody's very nice. Everybody's very civil this very upfront. Here's how we're spending the money. Yeah. Sometimes somehow disappears in different places.
But that's the way, you know, war is complicated and it's everyone is very polite, there's no Coke and strippers or whatever is on the laptop, it's very nice and polite. And the meanwhile hundreds of thousands of civilians died. Hate it. Just an incredible amount of hate is created because people lose their family members, all that kind of stuff, but there's no strippers and coconut on a
laptop. So, yeah, but it's not just superficial it is.
When you when someone only wants wealth and power and fame and to this is that is there their objective function, right there. Like a robot that is calibrated just to those variables, right? And they don't care about the risks. We run on any other front, they don't care about environmental risk. Pandemic risk, nuclear proliferation risk. None of it, right? They just, they're just tracking
And money and whatever can personally redound to their self interest along those lines and they're not informed, about the other risk were running, really, I'm easily in Trump. You had a president who was repeatedly asking his generals, why couldn't we use our nuclear weapons? Why can't we have more of them? Why do I have fewer nuclear weapons than JFK? Right? As though that were a sign of anything other than progress, right?
And this is the guy who's got the the button, right? I mean, he's got to be somebody's following him around with a bag, waiting to take his order to launch, right? That is a
It's just, it's a, it's a risk. We should never run one thing. Trump has going for him. I think, because he's, he's doesn't drink or do drugs, right? I although there's, you know, people allege that he does speed, but, you know, let's take him at his word. He's, he's not deranging himself with, with Pharmaceuticals, at least, but apart from Diet Coke,
But it's nothing wrong. Just for the record league,
pushback on that. There's nothing wrong with that girl. Yeah, I know it's a very large amount. I occasionally have some myself. No medical is no
scientific evidence that I observed the negatives of, you know all those studies about aspartame and all that is
like I hope I hope you're right. I mean everything you said about the military industrial complex has true, right? And it's been, we've been worrying about that on both sides of the aisle for a very long time. I mean that's
Just that phrase came from from Eisenhower. It's
I mean, so much of what ails us is a story of bad incentives, right? And bad incentives. Are so powerful that they corrupt even good people, right. How much more do they corrupt? Bad people, right? Like, so, it's like you wanted minimum. You want reasonably, good people? At least non-pathological people in a in the system trying to navigate against the grain of bad incentives.
And better still, all of us can get together, and try to diagnose those incentives and change them, right? And and, and we will really succeed. When we have a system of incentives where
The good incentives are so strong that even bad people are effortlessly behaving as though they're good people because they're so successful incentivised to behave that way. Right? That's and so it's almost the inversion of our current situation. So, yes. And you say I changed my mind about the war. Not quite, I mean, I was never a supporter of the war in Iraq. I was always worried that it was a distraction
action from the war in Afghanistan. I was a supporter of the war in Afghanistan, and I will admit in hindsight, that looks like,
You know, at best a highly ambiguous and painful exercise would be no more likely a Fool's errand, right? It's like that, you know, it did not turn out. Well it's it wasn't for want of trying, I don't, you know, I have not done a deep dive on on all of the failures there and maybe all of these failures are failures in principle. And maybe it's just the maybe that's not the kind of thing that can be done well by anybody, whatever our intentions. But yeah, the
Iraq always seemed questionable to me. And when we knew the problem, the immediate problem at that moment, you know, Al Qaeda was in Afghanistan and you know, and then bouncing to Pakistan anyway all you know, so yes, but my my sense of the possibility of nation-building my sense of you know and so insofar as the the the
Neocon Spirit of responsibility and idealism that, you know, America was the kind of nation that should be functioning in this way. As the world's cop. And we got, we have to get in there and and untangle, some of these knots by force rather often because you know, if we don't do it over there, we're going to have to do it over here kind of thing. Yeah, some of that has definitely changed for me in my thinking.
there are obviously cultural reasons why it failed in Afghanistan, and if you can't change the culture, it's
You're not going to force a change at gunpoint in the culture. Our Le certainly seems that that's not going to happen, and it took us over 20 years to apparently to realize that that's
one of the things you realize with the wars. There's not going to be a strong signal that things are not working. You can just keep pouring money until thing a military
effort will also there are signs of it working till you have all the stories of girls now going to school, right? You know, the girls are getting battery acid thrown in their faces by
By religious maniacs and then we come in there and we stopped that and they'll girls are getting educated and there's and and that's all good. And our intentions are good there. And then we're on the right side of History. They're good. Girls should be going to school. You know Malala yousufzai should have the Nobel Prize and she shouldn't have been shot in the face by by the Taliban, right?
We know what the right answers are there. The question is, what do you do when there are enough? In this particular case, religious Maniacs, who are willing to die and let their children die in defense of crazy ideas and moral Norms that belong in the 7th century. And it's a problem we couldn't solve and we couldn't solve it. Even though we spent trillions of dollars to solve it, this reminded me of the thing that you and and Jack Dorsey.
Jokingly had for a while. Was the discussion about banning Donald Trump from Twitter but does any of it bother you? Now the Twitter files came out that mean it's has to do with sort of the hunter laptop 100 by laptop story. This is bother you that there could be a collection of people that make decisions about who to ban or not. And then that could be susceptible to bias and to ideological influence.
Well, I think
it always will be or in the absence of perfect day. I always will be and this
becomes relevant with the AI as well. Yeah. Because you're some censorship on AI happen here and it's an interesting question there
as well. I don't think Twitter is important as people think it is, right? And I used to think it was more important when I was on it and now that I'm off of it, I think is it's made for somebody say, it's just an unambiguously good thing in my experience to delete your
Our account, right? It's like it is just even the good parts of Twitter that I miss were bad in the aggregate in the the degree to which it was fragmented, my attention, the degree to, which my life was getting doled out to me in periods between those moments where I check Twitter, right? And had my attention diverted ends. And I was, you know, I was not a crazy Twitter addict. I'm a, I was a boy. I was probably a pretty normal user. I'm I
Is not someone who is tweeting multiple times a day or even every day, right? I'm out. I probably I think I probably averaged something like one tweet a day I think I average. But in reality was like, the would be like, for tweets one day. And then, I wouldn't week for the better part of a week. And, but I was looking a lot because it was my newsfeed. I was just following, you know, 200 very smart people and I would just want to see what they were paying attention to, and they would recommend articles, and I would read those articles and
And then when I would read an article, then I would, I would thought I should signal boost. I would tweet and to all of that, seemed good and like, that's all separable from all of the odious bullshit that came back at me and in response to this largely in response to this 100 Biden thing. But even the good stuff has a downside. And and it and it comes at just this point of your phone is this Perpetual stimulus.
Of which is intrinsically fragmenting of time and attention. And now, my phone is a much less of a presence in my life and it's not that I don't check slack or check email, I mean, you know, I use it to work but
My sense of just what the world is and my sense of my place in the world, the sense of where I exist, as a person has changed a lot by deleting my Twitter account. I mean, I had a and it's just it's and the things that I think, I mean, we all know this phenomenon if we could, we say, if someone knew that person's to online, right? I what does it mean to be to online? And where do you draw the that that boundary in a way? How do you know what constitutes being to online? Well,
In sometimes, just be, I think being on on social media at all, is to be to online, make it given what it does to given the kinds of information, it it signal boosts and given the given, the impulse it candles in each of us to reach out to our audience in in specific moments and in specific ways, right? It's like there are lots of moments.
Now, where I have an opinion about something, but there's nothing for me to do with that opinion, right? Like there's no Twitter, right? So, like there are lots of things that I would have tweeted in the last month's that are not the kind of thing. I'm going to do a podcast about. I'm not going to roll out 10 minutes on that topic on my podcast, I'm not going to take the time to really think about it, but had I been on Twitter? I would have reacted to this thing in the news or this thing that some somebody did,
right. What do you do with the thought though? I just let go of it like
Like chocolate ice cream is the most delicious
thing is usually not that sort of thing, but it's it's just but then you look at the kinds of problems people create for themselves. You look at the life, deranged and reputation destroying things that people do.
And I look at the things that that have the analogous things that have happened to me. I mean, the things that have really bent my life around professionally over the past, you know, decade.
So much of it is Twitter. I mean, honestly, in my case almost 100% of it was Twitter, the the controversies I would get into the things, I would think I would have to respond to in a pot. Like I would release a podcast on a certain topic. I would see some blowback on Twitter, you know, it would give me the sense that there was some signal that I really had to respond to. Now that I'm off Twitter, I recognize that most of that was just
It was totally specious, right? It was it was not something I had to respond to but yet I would then do a cycle of podcast responding to that thing that like to taking my foot out of my mouth or taking someone else's foot out of my mouth. And it became this this self-perpetuating
cycle, which
I mean, it's, you know, if you're having fun. Great. I mean, if it's if it's if it's generative of useful information and and engagement professionally and psychologically great. But and and there, you know, there was some of that on Twitter. I mean, there are people who I've connected with because because I just, you know, one, one of us DM the other on Twitter and it was hard to see how that was going to happen, otherwise, but
It was largely just a machine for manufacturing, unnecessary controversy.
Do you think it's possible to avoid the drug of that? So now that you've achieved a Zen state, is it possible for somebody like you to use it in a way that doesn't pull you into the whirlpool and so anytime there's a tax you just? I mean that's how I tried to use it.
Yeah but it's not the way I wanted to use it. It's not the way it promises itself as a wanted to have
Bait I wanted to actually communicate with people. Yeah, I want, I wanted to hear from the person because again, it's like being Afghanistan, right? It's like they're there are the, the Potted cases where it's obviously good, right? So I can Afghanistan, the girl who's getting an education that is just here. That's why we're here. That's that's Obviously good. I've had those moments on Twitter where it's okay. I'm hearing from a smart person. Who's detected an error, I made in my podcast or in a book. Or they've just
Got some great idea about something that I should spend time on and I would never have heard from this person in any other format. And now I'm actually in dialogue with them and it's fantastic. That's the promise of it to actually talk to people. And so I kept getting lured back into that know, the way the sane or, you know, sanity preserving way of using it is is just as a marketing channel, you just put your stuff out there and you don't look at what's coming back at you and that's
You know, for, you know, I'm on other social media platforms, that I don't even touch. I'm in my team, put post stuff on Facebook, and on Instagram. I never even see what's on there.
So you don't think it's possible to see something and they'll let it affect your
mind. No, that's definitely possible. But the question is, and I did that for vast stretches of time, right? And, but then, the promise of the platform is dialogue and feedback, right? So, like, so why am I
If I know for whatever reason I'm going to see like 99 to one awful feedback, you know, bad faith feedback, malicious feedback, some of it's probably even Bots and I'm not even aware of who's a person who's a bot, right? But I'm just going to stare into this fun house, mirror of acrimony, and dishonesty, that is going to be the the reason why I got off is
Not because I couldn't recalibrate and find Equanimity again with all the the nastiness is coming back at me and not that I couldn't ignore it for vast stretches of time. But I could see that I kept coming back to it. Hoping that it would be something that I could use my real tool for communication. And I was noticing that it was insidiously changing the way I felt about people. Both people. I know and people
I don't know, right? I like people, I, you know, mutual friends of ours who are behaving in certain ways on Twitter, which just seemed insane to me and then I, that became a signal. I felt like I had to take into account somehow, right? You're seeing people at their worst, you both friends and strangers and I I felt that it was as much as I could sort of try to recalibrate for it.
I felt that I was losing touch with what was real information because people are performing. People are faking, people are not who themselves or their you can see people at their worst and so I felt like all right. What's at was being advertised to me here on a, not just a daily basis? I, you know, hourly basis or, you know, increment sometimes if you know, multiple times an hour, I'm at probably check Twitter.
You know at minimum 10 times a day and maybe I was checking it 100 times a day on some days right where I would things were really active and I was really engaged with something.
What was being delivered into my brain? There was a, was subtly false information about how dishonest and
you know, just generally unethical
Totally normal, people are capable of being, right? It's like it was a, it is a funhouse mirror. It was, I was seeing the most grotesque versions, of people who I know, right? People who I know, I could sit down and eat dinner with and they would never behave this way. And yet they were, they were coming at me on Twitter in. I mean, it's essentially turning Ordinary People into sociopaths, right? It's like people are just
You know, it's there analogies that many of us have made this like it's like one analogy is road rage, right? Like people behave in the confines of a car in ways that they never would, if they didn't have this metal box around them, you know, moving at speed and it's, you know, all that becomes quite hilarious. And and you know, obviously dysfunctional when they're actually have to stop at the light next to the person they just flipped off and they realized they didn't realize they didn't understand that the person coming out of that car next to them with cauliflower.
Or is someone who they never would have, you know, rolled their eyes at in public because they would have taken one. Look at this person, realize, this is the last person you want to fight with. That's one of the heartbreaking things is to see.
See people who I know who I admire, who I know, are friends the everything from snarky to downright? Yeah, I mean, derisive towards each other, it doesn't make any sense. Like this is the only place where I've seen.
If I really admire who have had a calm head but most things like really be shitty to other people. It's probably the only place I've seen that and I don't I tend to choose to maybe believe that, that's not really them. There's something about the system. Like if you go paintballing, if you Jordan Peterson and co-payment, shoot your friends. Yeah. You're going to choose your friends but you kind of accept it. That's kind of what you're doing in this little game that you're playing, but it's sometimes hard to remind yourself of
that.
And I think I was guilty of that definitely, you know, I don't think I there's nothing. I don't think I ever did anything that I really feel bad about but yeah, it was always pushing me to the edge of snide - somehow and it's just not healthy. It's not, it's not. I'm so, so the, so the reason why I deleted my Twitter account in the end was that it was obviously making me a worse.
Person. And and so, and he is there some way to be on there, where he's not making it worse person. I'm sure there is but it's given the nature of the platform and given what was coming back at me on it. The way to do that, is just to basically users, a one-way channel of communication just, just, just marketing. And it's like here. Here's what I, what I'm paying attention to look at it, if you want to, and just push it out and then you don't, you don't look at what's coming back at you.
I put out a
For questions on Twitter and then actually quite surprising. There's a lot of good. I mean, they're like, even if they're critical, they're like being thoughtful, which is nice.
I used it that way too. And that was what kept me hooked,
but then there's also touch balls. 69, wrote a question asked
what? I can't imagine that this part of it, but one way to solve this is, you know, we got to get rid of anonymity for this is
let me ask the question asked Sam why he sucks was the question.
Well, one reason why I sucked was Twitter that was and I've since solve that problem so much touch ball, 6969. Yeah, that's all 69 should be happy that I suck a little bit less. Now that I'm off Twitter, I mean the fact don't have to hear from touch balls 69 on the regular
the fact that you have to see that it probably can have a negative effect. Just even a moderation just to see that there is like for me the
- effect is slightly losing faith in the underlying kindness of humanity. Yeah, but that was familiar. You can also just reason your way out of it saying that this is unanimity in. This is kind of fun in this kind of just the the shitshow of Twitter. It's okay. But it does mentally affect you a little
bit. Like I don't read too much into that kind of comment, it's like that. It's just, that's just trolling and it's, you know, I get what I get.
I understand the fun the person is having on the other side of that. It's like do you do I do I do. I don't I don't behave that way but I do and for all I know that person could be you know, 16 years old, right? So it's like it
be also an all too common for he Lon. I don't know
what he has right now. I'm pretty sure Ilan would just tweet that under his own name at this point, but, you know, each other,
okay. So the do you think? So, speaking of which now that you Lon
Has taken over Twitter. Is there something that he could do to make this platform? Better this Twitter and just social media in general? But because of the aggressive nature of his Innovation that he's pushing, is there any way to make Twitter a pleasant place for Sam
Harris?
Maybe I can the next five, I don't know. I think I'm agnostic as to whether or not he or anyone could make a social media platform, that really was healthy.
So you would just observing yourself week by week, seeing the effect, as in your mind and on how much you're actually learning and growing as a person. And it
was - yeah, I also seen the negativity in other people's lives and it's obviously it mean he's not, he's not going to admit it, but I think it's obviously - for Ilan, right? And it's just not, it's
that was one of the things that, you know, you know, when I was looking into the funhouse mirror, I was also seeing the funhouse mirror on his side of Twitter. And it was just even more exaggerated. It's like what we want when I was asking myself, why is he spending his time this way? I then reflected on why why, you know, why was I spending my time this way to a lesser degree, right? And with lesser scale and at lesser risk, frankly, right and so
And it was just so it's not just Twitter, it means it is, this isn't part an internet phenomenon like the the whole Hunter Biden mess that you you extort explored that was based on male was on. I was on somebody's podcast. But that was based on a clip taken from that podcast which was highly as misleading as to the the general shape of my remarks on that podcast even, you know, I had to then do my own podcast.
Untangling, all of that. And admitting that even in, even in the full context, I was not speaking especially well and didn't say exactly what I thought in a way that was, would have been recognizable to anyone, you know, even someone with not functioning by a spirit of Charity. But but the clip was quite distinct from the podcast itself. The reality is, is that we're living in an environment now where people are so lazy, and there's their attention is so
Ended that they only have time for Clips, but, you know, 99% of people will see a clip and we'll assume there's no relevant context. I need to understand what happened in that clip, right? And obviously, the people who make those clips know that, right? And they're doing it quite doing it quite maliciously. And, in this case, the person who made that clip and subsequent clips of other podcast, was quite maliciously, trying to engineer, you know, some reputational emulation for me,
And being signal boosted by Elon and other prominent people who can't take the time to watch anything other than a clip even in one, it's their friend or someone who's ostensibly their friend in that clip, right? So, it's a total failure and understandable, failure of Ethics. That everyone is so short on time and they're so fucking lazy that the judge. And the end, and we now have these contexts in which we react. So,
Quickly two things, right? Like Twitter is inviting it an instantaneous reaction to this clip that it's it's just too tempting to just say something and not know what you're even commenting on and most at most of the people who saw that clip. Don't understand what I what I actually think about any of these issues and the irony is people are going to find clips from this conversation that are just as misleading.
And they're going to export those and then people are going to be dunking on those clips. And, you know, we're all living and dying by clips. Now, and it's, it's
dysfunctional. Say, I think it's possible to create a platform. I think we will keep living on Clips, but you know, when I saw that clip of you talking about children, so on just knowing that you have a sense of humor, you just went to a dark place in terms of humor, right? So like I didn't even bother and then I knew that the way Clips work is that people will you
Use it for virality sake but the giving giving a person benefit of the doubt. That's not even the right term sound. Like I was it was really like interpreting it.
In politics, the truth is
past. The truth, is you
even eat like, I even give
Trump, the benefit of the doubt when I see a clip of trump, mr. Because they're famous clips of trump that are very misleading as to what he was saying in context. And I've been honest about that, like, the whole, you know, there are good people on both sides, Scandal around the chartres, his remarks after Charlottesville the clip that got exported and got promoted by everyone, you know, left-of-center, if from Biden on down, you know, the New York Times CNN, there's nobody that I'm aware of
Of who has honestly you know, apologized for what they did with that clip. That clay he did not say what he seemed to be saying In that clip about the Nazis at Charlottesville, right? And I've have always been very clear about that. So it's just, you know, I even even people who I think should be marginalized and people who
Who should be defenestrated because they really are terrible people who are doing dangerous things, and heard at for bad reasons.
I think we should be honest about what they actually meant in context, right? And and this goes to anyone else, we might talk about, you know, who's more where the, where the case is much more confusing. But yeah, so everyone's it's just soda and then I'm sure we're going to get to a I but, you know, the prospect of being able to manufacture Clips with AI and deep fakes and that where it's going to be hard for most people most
Of the time. But even figure out that the, whether they're in the presence of something real, you know, forget about being divorced from Context, there was no context. I mean that is, is that some misinformation apocalypse that is, we are right on the cusp of and, you know, it's this terrifying
or it could be just a new world, like where Alice going to Wonderland or humor is the only thing they have and they will save us. Maybe in the end Trump's approach to social media.
Was the right one after all, nothing is true and everything is absurd
but we can't live that way. People function on the basis of what they assume is true, right? They think
you'll have functioned,
what to do anything? It's like I mean that you have to, you have to know what you think is going to happen. Or what are you have to, at least give a probabilistic waiting over the future, otherwise you're going to be incapacitated by you're not going to like people want certain things and they have to have a rational plan to get those desires grow.
Defied and they don't want to die, they don't want their kids to die. You tell them that there's a comet hurtling toward Earth and they should get outside and look up, right? They're going to do it. And if it turns out it's misinformation, you know, it's, it's it's going to matter because it comes down to, like, what medicines do you give your children, right? Like, what we're going to be manufacturing, fake Journal articles. I mean, this is okay. If I'm sure someone's using chat GPT for for this reader as we
Speak. And if it's not credible, if it's not persuasive. Now to most people honestly, I don't think we're going to I'll be amazed if it's a year before we can actually create Journal articles, they would take, you know, a PhD to debunk that are completely fake and they're people who are celebrating this kind of
You know, coming cataclysm. But I just, it's just, they're the people who don't have anything to lose, who are celebrating it or just or so confused. They just don't even know what's at stake and then they're the people who have met the few people who we could count on a few hands, who have managed to insulate themselves. At least, imagine they've insulate insulate themselves. From the downside here enough that they're not implicated in the great unraveling, we are witnessing or could witness
the shaking up of what is true. So that
See that returns us to experts. Do you think experts can save us? Is there such thing as expertise and experts at something? How do you know if you achieved
it? I think it's important to acknowledge up front that this is there. Something paradoxical about how we relate to to Authority especially within science. I don't think a paradox is going away and it's just, it doesn't have to be confusing. It's just is, and it's not, it's not truly a paradox, it's just like there are different moments in time.
So, it is true to say.
That.
Within science or within a within rationality, generally, I mean, we just whenever you're making it having a fact-based discussion about anything.
It is true to say that the truth or falsity of a statement. Does not even slightly depend on the credentials of the person making the statement, right? So it doesn't matter if you're a Nobel Laureate, you can be wrong or the thing. You could either the last sentence you spoke could be total bullshit, right? And it's also possible for someone who's deeply uninformed to be right about something or endured to be right for the wrong reasons, right? Or someone just gets lucky or
um, what or or, and their middling cases, where you have like a backyard astronomer who's got no credentials, but he just loves astronomy and he's got a telescope and it's, he's spent a lot of time looking at the night sky and he discovers a comet that no one else has seen, you know, not even the professional expert astronomers and I got to think that happens less and less now, but but some version of that keeps happening and it and it may always keep happening in every area of
Produce, right?
So
it's true. That truth is orthogonal to the reputational. Concerns we have among Apes who are talking about the truth, but it is also true that most of the time real experts are much more reliable than frauds or people who are not experts, right? Are you so and expertise really is a
Thing, right? And when it's, you know, when you're flying an airplane in a storm, you don't want just randos come into the cockpit saying, listen, I've got a new idea about how to, you know, how we should tweak these controls, right? You want someone who's a trained pilot and and that training gave them something right a gave them a set of competences and intuitions and they know what all those dials and switches do, right? And I don't right, I shouldn't be flying that plane.
When things really matter.
You know, and putting this at 30,000 feet in a storm, sharpens this up, we want real experts to be in charge, right? And we are at 30,000 feet, a lot of the time on a lot of issues, right? And whether they're public health issues, whether it's issue, whether it's a geopolitical, emergency, like Ukraine, with climate change. I mean, just pick your pick your topic. There are
Are real problems. And the clock is rather often ticking and their Solutions are not obvious, right? And, and so expertise is a thing and deferring to experts. Much of the time makes a lot of sense. It's at minimum, it, it prevents either spectacular errors of incompetence and
Just foolhardiness, but even in the case of somewhere, you're talking about, someone people like ourselves, who are like, well educated, we were not the worst possible candidates for the dunning-kruger effect. When we're going into a new area where we're not experts were fairly alert to the possibility that we don't. You know, it's not as simple as things seem at first. And we don't, you know, we don't know how our tools translate to this new area. We can be fairly circumspect.
But we're also because we're well-educated, we can work and we're pretty quick studies. We can learn a lot of things pretty fast, and we can begin to play a language game. That sounds fairly expert, right? And in that case,
The invitation to do your own research, right? Is in went when times are good, I view as an invitation, to waste your time pointlessly, right? When times are good. Now, the truth is times, are not all that good, right? And we have the ongoing public display of failures of expertise. We have experts, who are obviously corrupted by bad incentives. We've got experts who you know, perversely won't admit.
They were wrong when they in fact you know are demonstrated to be wrong, we've got institutions that have been captured by political ideology that's not truth tracking and this the this whole woke encroachment into really every place. You know, whether it's University is or science, journals or government, or it's just like that is, that has been genuinely deranging. So there's a lot going on that we're experts and and the Very concept of
Teas have seemed to discredit itself. But the reality is that there is a massive difference. When anything matters. When there's anything to know about anything, there is a massive difference. Most of the time between someone who is really done the work to understand that domain and someone who hasn't. And
if I get sick or someone close to me gets sick,
you know, I'm I have a PhD in Neuroscience write, so I can read a medical journal article and understand a lot of it, right? And I, you know, so I'm just fairly conversant with the medical terminology. And I understand this methods and I'm alert to the different because I've, you know, because in Neuroscience I've spent hours and hours in journal clubs, you know, diagnosing, you know, the difference and analyzing the difference between good and bad studies.
I'm alert to the difference between good and bad studies in medical journals, right? I understand that. Bad studies can get published and, you know, Etc, and and experiments can be poorly designed. I'm alert to all of those things, but when I get sick or when someone close to me, get sick, I don't pretend to be a doctor, right? I've got no clinical experience. I don't go down the rabbit hole on Google, for days at a stretch, trying to become a doctor, much less a specialist in the domain of
Lumber that has been visited upon me or my family, right? So if someone close to me gets cancer, I don't pretend to be an oncologist. I don't go ahead and start RI, I don't start reading, you know, in journals of oncology and try to really get up to speed as an oncologist, because it's not, it's
One is a bit, one is a bad and potential and very likely misleading, use of my time right now. And it's
if I decide if I had, if I had a lot of Runway of I decided, okay, it's really important for me to know everything I can. To this point, I want to, I know someone's going to get cancer, I may not go back to school and become an oncologist. But what I want to do is I want to know everything I can know about cancer, right? So I'm going to take the next four years and spend most of my time on cancer, okay? I could do that, right. I still think that's a waste of my time. I still think at the end of even at the end of those four years, I'm not going to be the best person.
To form into wishes about what to do in the face of the next cancer that I have to confront. I'm still going to want a better oncologist than I've become to tell me what he, or she would do if they were in my shoes or in the shoes of, you know, my family member, I'm going to, you know, what, I'm what, I'm not Advocate. I'm not advocating a, a blind trust in Authority, like if you get cancer,
And you're talking to one oncologist and they're recommending some course of treatment, by all means get a second opinion, get a third opinion, right? But it matters that those opinions are coming from real experts and not from, you know,
Robert, Kennedy jr. You know who's telling you that, you know, you got it because you got to get a vaccine, right? It's like it's just it, there's, we're swimming in a sea of misinformation, where you've got people who are moving the opinions of millions of others who, who should not have an opinion on these topics. Like, there's no, there is no scenario in which you should be getting your opinion about vaccine safety or, or
A change or the war in Ukraine or anything else that we might want to talk about from Candace Owens, right? It's just like like she. She's not a relevant expert on any of those topics. And what's more she doesn't seem to care, right? And and, and she's living in a culture that has had that has Amplified that not caring into a business model and an effective business model, right? So it's just it's and that is something very trumpian.
At all that. I like that's that's the problem. The problem is the culture is not these specific individuals. So the Paradox here is that expertise is a real thing.
And we defer to it a lot as they labor-saving device as just as. And just based on the, the, the reality that is very hard to be a polymath, right? And specialization is a thing, right? And so, there are people who specialize in a very narrow topic. They know more about that topic than the next guy, no matter how smart that that guy or gal is
And that those differences matter. But it's also true that when you're talking about facts, sometimes the, the best experts are wrong. The scientific consensus is wrong. You get a sea change in the thinking of a whole field because one person who's an outlier, for whatever reason decides, okay. I'm you know, I'm going to prove this point and they proved it, right? So somebody like,
The Doctor Who believe that that stomach ulcer is, were not due to stress, but we're due to to H pylori infections, right? So he just drank a vial of H pylori bacteria and and prove that and it quickly got an ulcer and convinced the field that minimum H pylori was involved in that process. Okay, so he has, everyone was wrong. That doesn't disprove the reality of expertise, it doesn't disprove the
The of rely on Experts, most of the time, especially in an emergency, especially when the clock is tickin, especially when you know, you're in this particular cockpit. And you only have one chance to land this plane, right? You want the real pilot at the
controls, but there's just a few things to say go. So one you mentioned this example with cancer and doing your own research. There's several things that are different about our particular time in history.
One, doing your own research has become more and more effective because you can read the internet made information a lot more accessible so you can read a lot of different meta-analyses. You can read blog, post that describe to you exactly the flaws in the different papers. They make up the meta and meta-analyses they and you can read a lot of those blog posts that are conflicting with each other, and you can take that information. Then in a short amount of time, you can start to make
Good faith interpretation. So example, I don't know, I don't want to overstate things, but if you suffer from depression, for example, then there, you could go to an expert in a doctor that prescribes you some medication, but you could also challenge some of those ideas and seeing like, what are the different medication? What are the different side effects with a different solution to the depression? All that kind of stuff? And I think depression just a really difficult problem. That's very
I don't want to Again State incorrect things, but I think it's there's a lot of variability of what depression really means. So it being introspective about the type of depression you have and the different possible solutions. You have just doing your own research as a first step, before approaching a doctor or as you have multiple opinions, could be very beneficial in that case. Now, that's depression. That's something that's been studied for a very long time, with a new pandemic, that's affecting
Anybody.
There. It's you know, with the airplane equated to like 9/11 or something like a new emergency just happened and everybody every
expert in the
world is publishing on it and talking about it. So doing your own research there could be exceptionally effective and asking questions and then there's a difference between experts virologist and it's actually a good question. Who is exactly the expert in a pandemic? Yeah.
But there's the actual experts, doing the research and Publishing stuff and then there's the communicators of that expertise. And the question is, if the communicators are flawed to to a degree where doing your own research is actually the more effective way to figure out policies and solutions because you're not competing with experts, you're competing with the communicators of expertise. That could be who CDC in the case of the pendant.
MC or politicians or political type of signs figures like Anthony fauci. There's a question there.
Of the effectiveness of doing your research, your own research in that context and the competing forces, their incentives that you've mentioned is you can become quite popular by being contrarian by saying everybody's lying to you all the authorities aligns. You all the institutions allowing to you. So those are the waters just swimming in your but I think doing your own research in that kind of context could be quite
effective. Let me be clear. I'm not.
Saying you shouldn't do any research, but I'm not saying that you shouldn't be informed about an issue. I'm not saying you shouldn't read articles on, on whatever the topic is. And yes, if I got cancer or someone close to me, died, cancer, I probably would read more about cancer than I've read thus far about cancer and I've read some
So I'm not, I'm not making a virtue of ignorance and a blind obedience to Authority and I again I recognize that that authorities can discredit themselves or they can be wrong, they can be wrong. Even when they had that, when there's no discredit that just there's a lot, we don't understand about the nature of the world, but still this, this vast Gulf between truly informed opinion and bullshit.
exists, it always exists and and conspiracy thinking is
Rather often, you know, most of the time, the species of bullshit but it's not always wrong, right? There are real conspiracies and there really are just
awful
Corruptions of you know but born of bad incentives within our you know our scientific processes within institutions. And again we mentioned a lot of these things in passing but you let you know what what woke political ideology did to Scientific communication during the
Democratic was awful and was really corrosive of public, trust, especially on the, on the right for understandable reasons. It was just, it was crazy. Some of the things that were being said, and still is, and these cases are all different, but you take depression, but we just don't know enough about depression for anyone to be that confident about anything, right? And there are many different modalities in which to interact with it as a problem, right? So there's he has Pharmaceuticals, have whatever, promise
They have. But there's there's certainly reason to be concerned that they don't work well for everybody and that's it's obvious. They don't work well for everybody but that they do work for some people.
But again, depression is a multifactorial problem and there are different levels at which to to influence it. And there, you know, the things like meditation there. Things like you just life changes. And, and, you know, the one, the perverse things about depression is that when you're depressed, all of the things, that would be good for you to do or precisely the things. You don't want to do, you don't have any energy to socialize. You don't want to get things done, you don't want to exercise, you don't and all of those things, if you got those up and
They do make you feel better in, you know, in the aggregate. But the reality is that they're you know, there are clinical level depressions that are so bad that it's just we just don't have good tools for them and it's not enough to tell you there's no life change, someone's going to kind of embrace that. It's going to be an obvious remedy for that.
The Pammy pandemics are obviously a complicated problem but I would consider it much simpler than depression in terms of, we know what's on the menu to be the chosen among various choices is less multifactorial logic by which you would make those choices. Yeah, so it's like, we have a virus. We have a new virus, it's some version of bad, you know? It's human. Transmissible we're still catching up. We're catching up to every aspect that we don't know how it is.
Fred's. We don't know how how effective well masks are, what a certain point. We knew it was respiratory but we played by what you have and whether it's spread by fomites, I like all that we were confused about a lot of things and we're still confused. It's been a moving Target this whole time and it's been changing this whole time and our responses to. It have been you know we we ramped up the vaccines as quickly as we as we could but you know too quick for some not as not quick enough for others. We could have done human challenge trials and
I'm out more quickly with with better data and I think that's something we should probably look at in the future because that to my eye, that would make ethical sense to do to do challenge, trials, but and and so much of my concern about covid. Many people are confused about my concern about covid. My concern about covid has for much of the time, not been narrowly focused on covid itself. Had dangerous. I perceive covid to be as a
As a illness, it has been for the longest time even more concerned about our ability to respond to a truly scary pathogen next time. Like what I've for, you know, how outside those initial months, you know, maybe give me the first six months to be quite worried about covid and the unraveling of society. But in a supply of toilet paper, you want to secure a steady supply of toilet paper. But
Beyond that initial period.
When we had a sense of what we were dealing with and we had every hope that the vaccines are actually going to work and we're getting and we knew are getting those vaccines in short order, right? Beyond that. And we had and we knew just how dangerous the illness was and how dangerous it wasn't for years. Now I've just been worrying about this as a failed, dress rehearsal for something much worse. Right. I think what we proved to ourselves at this moment in history is that. We have built informational tools
We do not know how to use and we have made ourselves. We've basically enrolled all of human society into a psychological experiment that is
deranging us and making it virtually impossible to solve coordination problems. That we absolutely have to solve next time when things are worse. Do
you understand? Who is at fault for the way this unraveled? The way, we didn't seem to have the distrust in institutions and institutional science that grew like seemingly exponentially, or God or God revealed to this process who's at fault here.
And what's the
fix so much blame to go around. But so much of it is not a matter of bad people, conspiring to do bad things. It's a matter of
incompetence and misaligned incentives and just just ordinary, you know, L plain vanilla dysfunction. But my problem was
that people like you people like Brett was done, people like that. I look to for reasonable difficult conversations, on difficult topics have a little bit lost, their mind became emotional and dogmatic in style of conversation. Perhaps not in the depth of actual ideas but there are you
You know, at least something of that nature and that bout you but just it feels like the pandemic made people really more emotional than before. And then Kimball musk responded. I think something I think you probably would agree with maybe not. I think it was the combo of trump and the pandemic Trump triggered the far left to be way more active than they could have been without him and then depend emic handed. Big government Nanny State left. He's a huge platform on a silver platter. I want to punch in here we
are.
I would agree with some of that. I'm not sure how much to read into the nanny State concept,
but, but yet like, basically got people on the far left really activated. Yeah. And then gave control to, I don't know if you say Nanny state, but just control to government that when executed poorly has created a complete distrust in
government, my fear is that there was going to be that complete distrust. Anyway, given the nature of the information space given the level
Evil of conspiracy thinking given the gaming of of the these tools by an anti vax cult. I mean there really is an anti vax cult that that just ramped up its energy during this moment. But it's a small one, it's not to say that. Everything every concern about vaccines is a species of it was born of misinformation or born of this cult but there is a cult that is just you know and you know and
The core of trumpism is a cult to mitigate a Q&A on is a cult. And so there's a lot of line and there's a lot of confusion. You know, there are, it's almost impossible to exaggerate how confused, some people are, and how fully their, their lives are organized around that confusion. I mean, there are people who think that the world is being run by pedophile cannibals and that, you know, Tom Hanks and Oprah Winfrey and Michelle Obama are among those cannibals. I mean, like there,
Adjacent to the pure crazy. There's the semi crazy and adjacent to the semi crazy, there's the grifting opportunist asshole and and the, the layers of bad faith are, you know, hard to fully diagnose. But the problem is
All of this is getting signal boosted by a an outrage machine that is preferentially spreading misinformation, it has a business model. That is guaranteeing. That is preferentially sharing misinformation.
Okay, actually just a small tangent. Yeah. How do you defend yourself against the claim that you're a pedophile cannibal?
It's difficulty has the case I would make because I don't think you can use reason. I think you have to use empathy, you
have to understand For What. But what, like part of it. I mean, I, I find it very difficult to believe that anyone believes these things. I mean, I think that there's and there's I'm sure there's some number of people who are just pretending to believe these things, because it's just, again, that it's, this is sort of like the 4chan application of everything. It's just, it's just a, there's good. It's just Pepe the Frog, right? Like, none of this is what it seems.
They're not signaling and an alliance with white supremacy or neo-nazism, but they're not not doing it. I like they just don't fucking care. It's just cynicism overflowing. Its banks rise just fun to to wind up the normies, right? Like look at all the normies. Don't understand that. A green frog is just a green frog, even when it isn't just a green frog, right? It's like they're just it's just gumming up. Everyone's cognitive bandwidth with bullshit, right? I get that. That's fun. If you're a teenager and you just want to vandalize,
These are our new sphere but at a certain point we have to recognize that real questions of human welfare and play, right? There's like they're really there is this, their war is getting fought or not fought, and there's a pandemic raging, and there's medicine to take or not take, but when to come back to this issue of covid, I don't think my, I don't think I got so out of balance around covid. I think people are quite confused about
Out, what I was concerned about, I mean, like I said there was a yes, there was a period where I was crazy, because anyone who has taken it seriously was crazy because they had no idea what was going on. And so it's like, yes, I was wiping down packages with, with alcohol wipes, right? Because people thought it was true. Missing its resident transmissible by touch, right? That's so then when we realize that was no longer the case I stopped doing that. But, so there again, it was a moving Target and a lot of things. We
In hindsight around Mass gain and school closures looks fairly
dysfunctional. Right? But necessary, I think the criticism that people would would say about you're talking about covid and maybe you can correct me. But you were skeptical, you were against skepticism of the safety net efficacy of the vaccine. So people who get nervous about
The vaccine but don't fall into the usual anti-vaccine Camp, which I think there was a significant. Yeah, there were enough number. They're asking they're getting nervous. I mean especially after the war in Afghanistan Iran. Iraq. I too was nervous about anything where a lot of money could be made and you start that you just see how the people who are greedy, who come they come to the surface, all of a sudden and a lot of them that run into
the juice is actually really good human beings. I know a lot of them but it's hard to know how those two combined together when there's hundreds of billions trillions of dollars to be made. And so that skepticism, I guess you the sense was that you weren't open enough to
the skepticism. I understand that people have that sense, I'll tell you how I thought about it and think about it one. Again, it was a moving Target. So there was a point in the timeline where it was totally rational to expect that.
The vaccines were were both working but both, they were, they were reasonably safe and that. And that covid-19, reasonably dangerous. And that the trade-off for basically everyone was it was rational to get vaccinated given how many given the level of testing and how many people have been vaccinated before you given what we were seeing with covid, right? That, that was a forced choice. Are you thinking that you're eventually going to get covid? And the question is, do you want to be vaccinated when
you do right at there was a period where that forced choice, where it was just obviously reasonable to get vaccinated in. Especially because there was every reason to expect that while it wasn't a perfectly sterilizing vaccine, it was going to knock down transmission a lot, and that matters. And so it wasn't just a personal choice, you were actually being a good citizen when you decided to run whatever risk you, you were going to run to get vaccinated.
Because there are people in our society who can't actually can't get vaccinated. And I know people can't take any vaccines. They're so they're so allergic to me. They they in their own person seemed to justify all of the fears of the anti-vaccine cult. I mean, it's like they're the kind of person who Robert Kennedy jr. Can point to and say C vaccine survival will fucking kill you, right? Because because of the experience that and they and War still, they I know people have kids who fit that description. Right? So
We should all feel a civic responsibility to be vaccinated against egregiously. Awful and transmit, transmissible diseases for which we have relatively safe vaccines, to keep those sorts of people safe. And there was a period of time when it was
thought that the vaccine could stop transmission.
Yes. And so, again, all of this is has begun to shift. I don't think it has shifted as much as Brett Weinstein thinks it's shifted, but, yes, there are,
Our safety concerns around the MRNA vaccines, especially for young men, right? As far, as far as I know, that's the, that's the purview of the actual heightened concern, but also there's there's now as a lot of natural immunity out there. A lot of basically everyone who was going to get vaccinated has gotten vaccinated, the virus has evolved to the point in this context, where
It seems less dangerous, you know? Again I don't I'm going more on the sea means that on Research that I've done at this point but I'm certainly less worried about getting covid, I've had it once. I've been vaccinated, I've like, it's like so you ask me now, how do I feel about getting the next booster?
I don't know that I'm going to get the next booster, right? So so I was somebody who was waiting in line at four in the morning, you know, hoping to get get a some overflow vaccine when it was first available and I that was at that point given what we knew given? What I thought I knew based on the best sources I could consult and based on, you know, based on anecdotes that were too Vivid to ignore, you know, both data and and personal experience
It was totally rational for me to want to get that vaccine as soon as I could. And now I think is totally rational for me to to do a different kind of cost benefit analysis and wonder listen do I really need to get a booster right you know like a how many of you how many of these boosters am I going to get for the rest of my life? Really and how safe is the MRNA vaccine for a man of my age, right? And do, I need to be worried about my carditis for you.
All of that is completely rational to talk about now. My concern is that at every point along the way.
I was the wrong person and, and Bret Weinstein was the wrong person. And there's many other people I could add to this list to have strong opinions about any of the stuff.
I just disagree with that, I think. Yes, in theory, I agree 100%. But I feel like experts failed at communicating not a doing. They did? I, and I just feel like you and Brent Weinstein, actually have the tools with the internet, given the engine you have in your brain.
Reign of thinking for months at a time, deeply about the problems that face our world that you actually have the tools to do pretty good thinking here. It's the problem I have with
ethics but there would be deference to expert. Yes, pseudo experts behind all of that. Well,
the papers you would stand on the shoulders of giants, but you can serve those shoulders better than the Giants
themselves you. We were going to disagree about the, I like Ike. I saw his podcast where he brought on these experts who had many of them, had the right credentials, but
For variety of reasons, they didn't pass the smell test for me, baby the one larger problem. This goes back to the problem of how we rely on Authority and science is that you can always find a PhD or an MD to Champion any crackpot idea where you could mean, it is amazing, but you could find phds and MDS who would sit up there in front of Congress and say that they thought smoking was not addictive. You know, are there was not harmful to those know.
No direct link between smoking and lung cancer. You can always find those people and you can end, but, you know, some of the people Brett found were people who had obvious tells to my point of view I to my I am it and I saw them on some of the same people were on Rogan's podcast, right? And and it's hard because if the person does have the right credentials and they're not and they're not saying something floridly mistaken and
Talking about something where it's their genuine unknowns, right? Like how how much do we know about the safety of these vaccines, right? It's at that point, not a whole hell of a lot. I mean we have no long-term data on mRNA vaccines but to confidently say that millions of people are going to die because of these vaccines and to confidently say that Ivermectin is a Panacea, right? Ivermectin is the thing that prevents covid, right? There was no good reason to say either of those things at that moment.
Aunt and that's and that. And so given that, that's where Brett was. I felt like there was there was just no, it was nothing to debate. We were both the wrong people to get be getting into the Weeds on this. We're both going to defer to our chosen, experts, his experts look like crackpots to me and or at least the ones who are most vociferous on those most of those edgiest points that seem most in your experts
seem like, what is the term Mass hysteria? I forgot
that what? Well, it's no but it's like
It's like with in a climate scientist. Is this old. It's received as a Canard for in half our society now, but the claim that 97% of climate scientists agree that human caused climate change is a thing, right? So do you go with the 97% most of the time? Or do you go with the three percent most of the time? It's obvious, you go with a 97 percent, most of the time for anything that matters, it's not to say that the three percent are always wrong. Again the
There are things. Get overturned. And yes, as you say, I've spent much more time worrying about this on my podcast. I've spent worrying about covid. Our institutions have lost trust for good reason, right? And and it's it, it's an open question. Whether
We can actually get things done with this level of transparency and, and pseudo transparency. Given our information ecosystems like, can we fight a war, really fight a war that we may have to fight? Like the next Nazis can we fight that war when everyone with an iPhone is showing just how awful it is that with that little girls get blown up when we drop our bombs, right? Like could we could we as a society do what we might have to do.
To get actually get necessary things done when we're living in this, this panoptix on of just, you know, everyone's a journalist, right? Everyone's a scientist. Everyone's an expert. Everyone's got direct contact with the facts or some or semblance of the facts. I don't
know, I think yes. And I think voices like yours, exceptionally important and I think there's certain signals you send in your ability to steal me on the other side in your empathy essentially. So
That's the fight. That's the mechanism by which you resist.
The dog, the dog went to some of these the this binary thinking and then if you become a trusted person that's able to consider the other side, then people will listen to you. As as the aggregators the communicator of expertise because the virologist haven't been able to be good communicators, I still to this day, don't really know. What is the what am I supposed to? Think about the safety and efficacy of them vaccines today as
Dance today. What are we supposed to think? What are we supposed to think about testing? What are we supposed to think about the effectiveness of masks or lockdowns? Where's the great communicators on this topic that consider the all the other conspiracy theories, all the other, all the communication that's out there and actually aggregated together. And be able to say, this is actually what's most likely the truth. And also some of that has to do with humility, epistemic humility, knowing that you can't.
Really know for sure. Just like with depression, you can't really know for sure. And who wears the, I'm not seeing those Communications being effectively done even still today?
Well, I mean, the jury is still out on some of it. And again, it's a moving Target and and some of it it's complicated. Some of it's a self-fulfilling Dynamic. We're like, so, like lockdowns in theory, lockdowns, a lockdown would work. If we could only do it, but we
Really do it. And there's a lot of people who won't do it because they're convinced that it's, this is the totalitarian boot, you know, on finally, on the neck of of the good people who are always having their interests here at reduced by the elites, right? So like this is if you have enough people who think the lock down for any reason in the face of any conceivable illness, right? Is just code for the new world order coming to fuck you over.
And take your guns, right? Okay, you have a society that is now immune to reason, right? Because they're absolutely certain pathogens that we should lock down for next time. Right? And and and it was completely rational in the beginning of this thing to lock down, given to attempt to lock down, we never really locked down.
To attempt, some semblance of a lockdown, just to quote, bend the curve, to spare, our Healthcare System. Given what we're seeing happening in Italy, right? Like that moment was it was not hard to navigate. I at least, in my view, it was obvious at the time in retrospect. My views on that haven't changed except for the fact that I recognize, maybe it's, it's just impossible, but given the nature of people's response to that kind of Demand, right? We live in a society that
Is not going to lock down unless the pandemic is much more deadly,
right? So that's a point I made, which, you know, was maliciously. Clipped out from some other podcast, someone's trying to make it look like. I want to see two children died look as a Pity more children, didn't die from covid, right? This is is actually the same person who met the other thing that got. So poisoned here, it's like that person, this this psychopath, or effective psychopath, who's creating these clips of me on podcast. The
End clip of me seeming to say that I wish more children died during covid-19 but it was it was so, I was. So, it was so clear in context. What I was saying, that even the clip betrayed the contact, so it didn't actually work this psycho. And again, I don't know whether he actually is a psychopath, but he's behaving like one because of the incentives of Twitter, this is somebody who Brett signal boosted as a as a very reliable source of information, right? He kept retweeting this guy,
Guy at me against me. Right? And this guy at one glance, I knew how unreliable this guy was right. But I think I
I'm not at all set. One thing I think I did wrong, one thing that I do regret, one thing I have not sorted out for myself, is how to navigate the, the professional and personal pressure that gets
applied at this moment where you have a friend or an acquaintance or someone, you know,
Who's behaving badly in public, or, or Behaving Badly, who is behaving in a way that you think is bad in public. And they have a public platform where they're influencing a lot of people and you have your own public platform where you're constantly getting asked to comment on what this this friend or or acquaintances or colleague is doing
I haven't known what I think is ethically, right about the choices that seem forced on us and at moments like this. So like I've criticized you in public about the your interview with Kanye. Now in the case in that case I reached out to you in private first and told you exactly what I thought and then when I was going to get asked in public or when I was touching that topic on my podcast, I more or less at the same thing that I said to you in private right now that was how I navigated that moment.
I do the same thing with with Ilan, at least on the beginning.
You know, this, we have we have maintained Good Vibes, that which is, which is not what I know that you Lon, but
I don't think I had disagree with you because Good Vibes in the moment. There's a deep core of Good Vibes, that persist through time between you and Ilan. And I would argue probably between some of the other folks, you
mentioned I think with Brett, I failed to reach out in private to the degree that I should have and we never really had it.
We had tried to set up a conversation in private that never happened, but there was some communication, but it would have been much better for me to have made more of an effort in private than I did before. It's built out into public and I would say that's true with other people as well.
What kind of interaction in private? Do you think you should have with Brett? Because my case would be beforehand. And now still the case I would like in this part of the criticism.
You sent my way. Maybe it's useful to go to that direction. Actually, let's go to that direction because I think I disagree with your criticism as you stated publicly but
this is correct your of your kind of
the thing. You criticize me for is actually the right thing to do with Brett. Okay you you said Lex could have spoken with Kanye in such a way as to have put produced a useful document, he didn't do that because he has a fairly naive philosophy about the power of
love.
Let's see if you can maintain that philosophy in the Press has go for this. Is he see it? No is
beautiful. He seemed to think that if he just got through the Minefield to the end of the conversation or the two of them, still were feeling good about one another and they can hug it out. That would be by definition of success. So let me make the case for this Power of Love philosophy, right? And first of all, I love you, Sam. You're still inspiration and somebody I deeply admire, okay?
Okay, I got you the to me in the case of Kanye.
It's not only that you get to the conversation and have hugs. It's that the display the you're willing to do, that has power. So even if it doesn't end in hugging the actual, the turning the other cheek, the act of turning. The other cheek itself, communicates both the Kanye later and to the rest of the world that we should have empathy and compassion towards each other, there's power to that I
B, that is naive but I believe in the power of that. So it's not that I'm trying to convince Khan. Yeah. There's some of his ideas are wrong but I'm trying to illustrate. That just the act of listening truly trying to understand the human being that is opens people's minds to actually questioning their own beliefs more. It takes them out of the dogmatism D, escalates the kind of dogmatism that I've been seeing. So in that sense I would say the power of love.
Is is that is the philosophy. You might apply to Brett because the right conversation you have in private is not about. Hey, listen. You're, you know, the experts you're talking to they seem credential but they're not actually as good as soon as they illustrating their not grounding their findings in actual meta-analyses and papers and so on like making a strong case like what are you doing? It's gonna get a lot of people in trouble, but instead just saying like being a friend in the dumbest of ways,
Being liked.
respectful sending love their way and just having a conversation outside of all of this outside like basically showing that like
Removing the emotional attachment to this debate, even though you are very emotionally attached because in the case of covid specifically, there is a very large number of lives at stake but removing all of that and remembering that you have a friendship.
Yeah. Well so the I think these are highly non analogous cases, right? So your conversation with Kanye misfired from my point of view for a very different reason, it was at it was
It has to do with Kanye and it's a Kanye, I don't know, I've never met Kanye, so obviously don't know him, but I think he's either obviously in the midst of a mental health crisis or he's a colossal asshole or both. I mean, exactly, those aren't mutually exclusive. So one of three possibilities either mentally ill, he's an asshole or he's a, he's mentally ill and an
asshole. I think all three of those possibilities are possible for
The both of us as
well. Known moment, I would argue. None of those are likely for either of us but possible, not to say we don't have our moments but so the reason not to talk to Kanye so you I think you should have had the conversation you had with him in private that's great. And there's no, I have got no criticism of what you said, had it been in private in Pub. I just thought
You're not doing him a favor if he's mentally ill, right? He's in the middle of a manic episode or you know I'm not a clinician but I've you know I've heard it said of him that he is bipolar. You're not doing him a favor sticking a mic in front of him and letting him go off on the Jews or anything else. Right. We know what he thought about the Jews. We know that there's not much illumination going to. It's going to come from him on that topic.
And if it is a symptom of his mental illness that he thinks these things, well then it's you're not doing him a favor making that even more public if he's just an asshole and he's just an anti-semite and it an ordinary you know, garden-variety anti-semite. Well then there's also not much to say unless you're really going to dig in and kick the shit out of him in public and I'm saying you can do that with love and that's the other thing here is that
I don't agree that compassion and love. Always have this patient embracing a quiescent phase right eye. They don't always feel good to the recipient right. There is a sort of wisdom that you can wield compassionately in moments like that where someone's full of shit and you just make it absolutely clear to them and to your audience that they're full of shit and it's no, there's no hatred. Being communicated, in fact,
Could just it's like list. I'm going to do everyone a favor right now and you know just take your foot out of your mouth and and
and the truth is you know I wouldn't I just wouldn't have aired the conversation like I just don't think it was a document that had to get out there, right? I get that many people. This is not a signal you're likely to get from your audience right. I get the many people in your audience thought. Oh my God, that's awesome. You're talking to Kanye and you're doing it in Lex style where it's just love and you're not treating him like a pariah. And you know, you're holding this tension between these, this creative genius, who we was work. We love and yet, he's having this moment that's so painful and what of tightrope-walking?
I can do, I get that maybe 90% of your audience saw that way, they're still wrong and I still think that was not on balance, not a good thing to put out into the world,
you don't think it opens up the mind and heart of people that
listen to that just have it seeing it because it's LED. If it's opening up in the wrong direction, we're just gale-force nonsense is coming in, right? I think we should have an open mind and an open heart, but there's some clear things here that
We have to keep in view. One is the mental illness component is its own thing. Yeah. I don't pretend to understand what's going on with him so but insofar as that the reason he's saying what he's saying. Do not put this guy on camera and let note I had to
sign that point real quick. I had a bunch of conversation with them offline and I didn't get a sense of mental illness. That's why I chose to sit down and I didn't get it. I mean, mental illness is such a
but when he shows up in a gimp, put on Alex Jones is podcast. That means it's either. That's more you know, genius performance in his world or its he's violent traveling further. I
wouldn't put that under mental illness. I have to, I think there's another conversation to be had about how we treat artists, right? Because they're, they're weirdos, they're very, I mean we, you know, taking taking words
Words from a Kanye is if he's like Christopher Hitchens or something like that like very eloquent researched you know written many books on history and politics and Jill Politics on psychology Connie didn't do any of that. He's an artist just spouting off and so there's a different style conversation and a different way to treat the words that are
coming out as well. Leave that mental illness in size with, if we're going to say that, there's no reason to think he's mentally ill and this is just him being
And Brilliant and opinionated. Well, then that falls into the asshole bucket. For me, it's like then then he someone and honestly, the most offensive thing about him in that interview from my point of view is not the anti-Semitism which, you know, we can talk about because I think there are problems, just letting him spread those memes as well, but the most offensive thing is just how delusionally egocentric he is. Or was coming off in that interview and in me and in others, like he
He has an estimation of himself as this Omnibus genius derive, not only two rival Shakespeare to exceed Shakespeare, right? And he's like he's the greatest mind that has ever walked Among Us and he's explore less explicit on that point. And yet he manages to talk for hours without saying anything, actually interesting or insightful or factually Illuminating, right? So it's complete delusion of a very trumpian. Sort is like, it's like, you know, when Trump says, he's a genius to understand.
Everything is a but nobody takes him. Seriously. It one wonders whether Trump takes himself. Seriously, Kanye seems to believe. He seems to believe his own press. He actually thinks he's he's, you know, just a Colossus, and he may be a great musician, you know. I'm not, you know, I've certainly not my wheelhouse to compare him to any other musicians, but
One thing is patently obvious in from your conversation is he's not who he thinks he is intellectually or ethically or in any other relevant way. And so when you couple that to the anti-Semitism he was spreading, which I was genuinely noxious, and ill-considered and has potential knock-on effects in the black community. I mean, there's there's a, there's an ambient level of anti-Semitism in the black community that is worth worrying about. And
Talking about. Anyway, there's a bunch of guys, you know, playing The Knockout game and Brooklyn just punching Orthodox Jews in the face and I think letting Kanye are his anti-Semitism that publicly only raises the, the likelihood of that rather than
diminishes. I don't know. So, let me say just a couple of things. So one my belief that the time was it, doesn't it decreases? It showing empathy while pushing back decreases the likelihood of that, it does might, it might on the surface look like it's
It. But that's simply because the anti-Semitism or the hatred in general, is brought to the surface and then people taught talk about it. But I should also say that you're one of the only people that wrote to me, privately criticizing me and like out of the people, I really respect and admire and that was really valuable that I had to painful because I had to think through it for a while, I'm still it still haunts me because the other kind of criticism. I got a lot of people basically said,
Ted thinks towards me based on who I am that they hate me. Just you
just you mean anti-semitic things or are you ready somatic this? I just hate the word, any
synthetic. It's a it's like
racist what? But here's the reality. So I'm someone so I'm Jewish, you know, although obviously not religious, I have never taken, you know, I've been a student of the Holocaust. Obviously, I know a lot about that, and, and there's reason to
To be a student of the Holocaust, but in my lifetime, and in my experience, I have never taken anti-Semitism. Very seriously. I'm have not worried about it. I have not made a thing, a bit. I've done exactly one podcast, on it had very wise on my podcast when the book came out, but
It really is a thing and it's it's something we have to keep an eye on societally because it's the it's a unique kind of hatred, right? It's Unique in that it seems It's knit together with it's not just ordinary racism. It's knit together with lots of conspiracy theories that never seem to die out. It's it can buy turns equally animate the left and the right politically. I mean what's so
Perverse about anti-Semitism. It look in the American context with the far right, you know, with white supremacists, Jews aren't considered white. So they hate us. And this from The Same Spirit, in which they hate black people, or brown, people, or anyone who's not white, but on the left Jews are considered extra white and where were the extra beneficiaries of white privilege, right? And in the black community that is often the case, right? We're a minority that has thrived and so and and it seems to stand as a
To point to all of the problems of other minorities suffer in particular, you know, African-Americans in the American context. And he Asians are now getting a little bit of this, you know, like the the model minority issue but Jews have had this going on for centuries and Millennia and it never seems to go away. And this is again this is something that I've never focused on but this has been at a slow boil.
For as long as we've been alive and there's no guarantee it can't suddenly become much, much uglier than we have any reason to expect it to become Even in our society. And so there's this, there's kind of a special concern at moments like that where you have an immensely influential person in a community, who already has a checkered history, with respect to their own beliefs, about the Jews, and the conspiracy is and all the rest. And
Is just messaging, you know, not especially fully opposed by you and anyone else who's given him a, the microphone at that moment to the world and that so that that, you know, made my Spidey
Sense and yeah, it's complicated. It's the stakes are very high and I, somebody has been obviously family and also reading a lot about World War Two. And it's just, this whole period is a very difficult conversation. But I say, I believe in the power, especially
Ali given who I am of, not always, but sometimes often turning the other cheek.
Oh, yeah. And again, things change when there for public consumption, you know, when your sites like the cut for me that, you know, has just the use case. I keep stumbling upon is the kinds of things that I will say on a podcast like this or giving a public lecture.
Versus the kinds of things. I will say a dinner with strangers or with friends, like if you're in an elevator, like if I'm in an elevator with strangers, I do not feed and I hear someone say something stupid. I don't feel a an intellectual responsibility to turn around in that, you know, in the comment in the confines of that space with them and say, listen, that thing you just said, about X Y, or Z is completely false and here's why, right? But, if somebody says it in front of me, on some public Dyess where I'm actually,
The talking about ideas. That's when, you know, there's a different responsibility comes online. That's a question, is how
you say it? How you
say, or even whether you say anything in those their moments there, they're definitely moments to privilege civility, or just to pick your battles. It's sometimes, it's just not worth it to get into it, with somebody out out in, in real
life. I just believe in the power of empathy both in the in the elevator and when a bunch of people are listening.
So that when they see you willing to consider another human beings perspective, it just gives more power to your to your words after
well, yeah, but until it doesn't like, if you because you can, you can write, you can about them charity too far, right? You can like, it can be absolutely obvious. What someone's motives really are and they're, they're, you know, dissembling about that, right? And so, then your
Taken at face value their representations begins to look like you're just being duped and you're not, you're not actually doing the work of of putting pressure on a bad actor, you know. So it's and again, the whole the mental illness component here, makes, makes it very difficult to think about what you should, or shouldn't have said to Konya. So, I think the
topic of platform is pretty interesting, like, what's your view on platform and controversial people? Let's, let's start with the the old. Would you interview Hitler?
On your podcast. And how would you talk to him? Oh, and follow-up question, would you interview them in 1935?
41 and then like
45, well, we have an uncanny valley problem with respect to this issue of whether or not to speak to bad people, right? So if a person is sufficiently bad, right? If they all the way out of the valley, then you can talk to them and it's just, it's totally unproblematic to talk to them because you don't have to spend any time signaling to your audience, that you don't agree with them if you're interviewing Hitler.
You don't have to say, listen, I just got to say before we start. I don't agree with the whole, you know, genocide thing and, you know, I just think you're killing, you know, killing mental, patients, and vans and all that. All that was all bad as a bad look at all. Is he? You just it can go without saying that you don't agree with this person and you're not platform in them to signal boost their their views, you're just trying to a if they're sufficiently evil, you can go into it very much as
an anthropologist would
Just, you just want to understand the nature of evil. I just want to understand this phenomenon. Like how is this person? Who they are? Right? And that strikes me as a intellectually, interesting, and, and morally necessary thing to do, right? So yes, you I think you always interview Hitler.
Go. Hey, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait,
well. When he won, you know, once he's hit
by Wendy, you know it once he's legitimately. Well, when do you know it is we are genocide really.
Annie
yeah, yeah, 42 43. So if you're on the cusp of it where it's just he's someone who's gaining power and you don't want it, you don't want to help facilitate that. Then there's a question of whether you can you can undermine him in ball while pushing back against him in that interview, right? So they're people, I wouldn't talk to just because I don't want to give them oxygen and I don't think that in the in the context of my interviewing them, I'm going to be able to take the wind out of their sails at, all right? So it's
Like, for whatever either because in asymmetric Advantage, because I just know that they can do something that they within the span of an hour that I can't. That I can't correct for. You know, it's like they can they can light many small fires and it just takes too much time to put the
best more like on the top of the vaccines. For example, having a debate on the efficacy of vaccines.
Yeah, it's not that I don't think sunlight is usually the best disinfectant. I think it is even the these asymmetries aside. I mean there are
It is true that a person can always make a mess faster than you can clean it up. Right? But still their debates worth having even given that limitation and they're the right people to have those specific debates. And there's certain topics where, you know, I'll debate. Someone just because I'm the right person for the job and it doesn't matter how messy they're going to be. I, it's just, it's just worth it because I can make my points land at least 4 to the right part of the audience
to some of it is
Just your own skill and competence, and also interest in preparing correctly.
Well yeah, yeah. And the nature of the subject matter and, and but that, yeah. But, there are other people who just by default, I would say, well, there's no reason to give this guy a platform and there are also people who are so confabulate. Ori that
They're making such a mess with every sentence that you insofar, as you're even trying to interact with what they're saying, you're going to your by definition going to fail and you're going to seem to fail to a nun. Invest sufficiently large uninformed audience, where it's going to be a net negative for the for the cause of truth. No matter how good you are. So like, for instance, I think
Talking to Alex Jones on any topic. For any reason is probably a bad idea because I just think he's, he's just neurologically wired to just under a string of sentences. He'll get 20 sentences out Each of, which has to be each, which is, you know, contains more lies than the last and
There's just there's not time enough in the world to run down and certainly not time enough in the span of a conversation to run down each of those leads to to bedrock. So as to falsify it and maybe he'll just make shit up. I just and or and or make shit up. And then then, then weave it in with, with, you know, half-truths and and, and micro truths that make give some sense semblance of credibility to somebody out there. I mean, apparently millions of people out there,
And there's just no way to to untangle that in real time with him.
I have noticed a, you have an allergic reaction to confabulate terrorization.
Yeah, confabulation
coming, confabulation, that if somebody says something a little micro untruth, it really stops your brain
here. I'm not talking about micro Andrews, I'm just talking about, making up things out of whole cloth, just like it if someone says something like, well, what about
Out. And then the thing they put at the end of that sentence is just a set of pseudo facts, right? That you can't possibly authenticate or not in the span of that conversation. They will you know whether it's about UFOs or anything else, right? They will seem to make you look like an ignoramus when. In fact, everything they're saying is specious, right, whether they know it or not, I mean, there's some people who are just crazy and there's some people
who are who are just bullshitting and they're not even tracking, whether it's true, just feels good. And there's some people are consciously lying about things,
but don't you think that's just the kind of jazz Masterpiece of untruth? They should be able to just a wave off by saying, like well, none of that is backed up by any evidence and just almost like take it to the humor place.
We and then with the thing is, it's okay, just the place I'm familiar with doing this and not doing this is is
On specific conspiracies, like 9/11 truth, like the Nile out. So, I, because of my, because of what 911 did to my intellectual life and made really just, you know, it sent me down a path for the better part of a decade like, I became a Critic of religion. Well, I don't know if I was ever going to be a Critic of religion, right? Like, but that, like, it happened to be in my wheelhouse because I spent so much time studying religion on my own, and
I was also very interested in the the underlying spiritual concerns of every religion. And so I was, I was, you know,
I devoted a full more than a full decade of my life, to just, you know, what is, what is real here? What is possible? What is, what is the nature of subjective reality? And how does it relate to reality at large? And is there anything to, you know, who it was? Who was someone like Jesus or Buddha? And are, they, are these people frauds are they, are they are. There's just these just myths or is there really a Continuum of insight to be had here? That is interesting. So I spent a lot of time on that.
Question through might want the full decade at my 20s
and that was launched in part by 9/11 truther.
No. But then, when 9/11 happened, I had spent all this time. Reading reading religious books, understand it, and empathically, understanding the motivations of religious people, right? Knowing just how fully certain people believe what they say. They believe, right? So I took religious convictions very seriously
And people started flying planes into our buildings. And I so I knew that there was something to be said about the allegedly the core doctrines of Islam. Exactly. So I went down so that was that became my wheelhouse for a time. You know, terrorism and Jihad is MM and related topics. And so the 9/11 truth conspiracy thing kept, you know, getting aimed at me.
And the question was will do. I do I want to debate these people write like Alex Jones, perhaps. Yeah. I made yesterday, Alex Jones. I think was an early purveyor of it. Although, I don't think I knew who he was at that point and soap, and privately. I had some very long debates with people who, you know, the one person in my family went way down that rabbit hole and I just, you know, every six months or so I'd literally write the to our e-mail, you know, that would try to try to deprogram him.
However, in effectually. And so I went back and forth for years on that topic. With, with, in private with people, there's a but I could see the structure of the conspiracy. I could see the nature of how
Of how impossible it was to play whack-a-mole sufficiently well. So, as to so, as to convince anyone of anything who was, who was not seeing the problematic structure of that, way of thinking, I mean, it's not actually a thesis. It's a, it's a proliferation of anomalies that don't, you can't actually connect. All the dots that are being pointed to, they don't connect in a coherent way, there's they're incompatible.
He's that are not and their incompatibility is not being acknowledged, but they're, they're running this algorithm is of things, are things are never what they seem. There's always malicious conspirators, doing things perfectly that we see all that. We see evidence of human incompetence everywhere else. No one can tie their shoes, you know, expertly anywhere else. But over here, people are perfectly competent. They're perfectly concealing. They like the thousands of
Eople are collaborating, you know. Inexplicably. I mean incentivized by what? Who knows? They're collaborating to murder thousands of their neighbors. And no one is breathing a peep about it. No one's getting caught on a on camera. No one's. No one's breathe. A word of it, to a journalist. And so
I've dealt with that style of thinking and I know what it's like to be in the weeds of a conversation like that. And and the personal say, okay well but what do you make of the fact that all those f-16s were flown 800 miles out to sea on the morning of 9/11 doing an exercise. That hadn't even been scheduled for that day, but it was. And now, all of these are I dimly recall some thesis of that kind, but I'm just making these things up now.
All right, so like that that detail hadn't even been scheduled for that day as inexplicably run that day. Like it was a what how long would it take to track that down? Right the idea that this is anomalous like there was an F-16 exercise run on it and it was even supposed to be been run that day, right? Someone like Alex Jones, their speech pattern is to pack as much of that stuff in as possible at the highest velocity.
The person can speak and unless you're knocking down each one of those things to that audience, you appear to just be uninformed. You appear to just not be. You don't know if he didn't know about the f-16s. Yeah, sure. He doesn't know that project Mockingbird you haven't heard about project Mockingbird. I just made up project Mockingbird. I don't know what it is but that's the kind of thing that comes at tumbling out in a conversation like that. That's the kind of thing. Frankly. I was worried about in the covid.
Because not that someone like Brett would do it consciously, but someone like, Brett is swimming in a sea of misinformation on social people. Living on Twitter, getting people sending the blog post and the study from from, you know, the Philippines that showed that in this cohort, Ivermectin did X right and
And not like to actually run anything to ground, right? You have to actually do the work journalistically and scientifically and run it to ground, right? So if sir many that for some of these questions, you actually have to be a statistician to say. Okay. They were they use the wrong statistics in this experiment right now? Yes, we could take all the time to do that or we could at
Sage along the way.
In a, in a context, where we have experts, we can trust go with 90. So what 97% of the experts are saying about X. We about the safety of mRNA about the transmissibility of covid about whether to wear masks or not wear masks and I completely agree that that broke down
unacceptably in the over the last few years and that but I think that's largely a social media and blogs and and the efforts of podcasters and sub stack writers.
Were not just a response to that. It was a I think it was a it was a symptom of that and a cause of that, right? And I think we're living in a an environment where
People, we've basically do, we have trained ourselves. Not to be able to agree about facts on any topic, no matter how urgent. Right, what's float, what's flying in our Sky. You know, what is, you know? What is what's happening in Ukraine is is Putin, just Dean ossifying Ukraine. I mean like they're people who we respect.
Who are spending time down that particular Rabbit Hole? Like this is, this is, you know, maybe there are a lot of Nazis in Ukraine, and that's the real problem, right? Maybe Putin's may be put into the not the bad actor here, right? How much time do I have to spend?
Empathizing with Putin to the point of thinking, well, maybe Putin's got a point and it's like, what about the polonium and the nerve agents in the killing of journalists, and the navalny and like, does that count with no less? I'm not paying so much attention to that because I'm following all these interesting people on Twitter and they did give me some pro-putin material here. And there is a, there are some Nazis in Ukraine. It's not like they're no Nazis in your crane. How am I going to wait these things?
I think people are being driven Crazy by Twitter. Yeah,
but you're kind of speaking to conspiracy theories that pollute everything, and then but every example you gave us kind of a bad faith style of
conversation, but it's not necessarily knowingly. Bad faith by million people. The people who are, who are worried about Ukrainian Ukrainian Nazis to my, I mean, there's some of the same people, they're the same people who are worried about
Ivermectin, got suppressed like Ivermectin is really the Panacea, but it got suppressed for because there's no one could make billions on it. It's the same. It's literally the it's in many cases, the same people and the same efforts to unearth those.
You're saying, it's very difficult to have conversations with those kinds of people. What about conversation with Trump himself? Would you do a podcast, which one
No, I don't think so. I don't think I'd be learning anything about him. It's like with with Hitler and I'm not comparing Trump to Hitler but Clips guy, every chance you got this one with certain world historical figures. I would just feel like okay this is an opportunity to learn something that I'm not going to learn. I think Trump is among the most superficial people we have ever laid eyes on her like he is. He is in
qlikview, right? And I'm sure I'm sure there's some distance between who he is in private who he is in public but it's not going to be the kind of distance that's going to blow my mind. And I think
So, I think the liability of has, so I, for instance, I think Joe Rogan was very wise, not to have Trump on his podcast. I think all he would have been doing is he would have put himself in a situation where he couldn't adequately contain, the damage Trump was doing and he was just going to make Trump seemed cool to a whole new, you know, potentially new cohort of his massive audience, right? They would have they would have had a lot of laughs Trump's funny.
The entertainment value of things is so influential. I mean that was that one debate where Trump, you know, got a massive laughs on the you know his line only Rosie O'Donnell right. The truth is, we're living in a political system where if you can get a big laugh during a political debate, you win doesn't matter who you are. Like, like that's the
Level of you know, it doesn't matter how uninformed you are. Doesn't matter that half the debate was about what the hell we should do about about you know a threat of nuclear war or anything else. It's we're monkeys. Right? And we like to
laugh. Well, because he brought up Joe. He's somebody like you. I look up to. I've learned a lot from him because I think
Who he is privately as a human being. Also, his, he's kind of the voice of curiosity to me. He inspired me that look unending open-minded curiosity. Much like you are the voice of reason. They recently, the podcast, Joe had written the podcast to Jordan Peterson and I have brought you up saying they still have a hope for you. Yeah. Any chance you want to clip any chance, you talked to Joe again and reinvigorate your
friendship?
Up.
Yet why I reached out to him privately when I saw that
the use the power of
love Joe knows I love him and consider him a friend, right? So there's no, there's no issue there. He also knows I'll be happy to do his podcast when we get that together, you know? So there's no, I've got no policy of not talking to Joe or not doing this podcast.
I met I think we're we got a little sideways along these same lines where you know we've talked about bread and Elon and other people, it was never to that degree with Joe because
Chosen very different Lane, right? He's in consciously. So I mean, Joe is a stand-up comic who interviews who just is interested in in everything interviews, the widest conceivable variety of people and just lets his interests collide with their expertise or you know, lack of expertise. I mean he's again it's a super wide variety of people. He'll talk about anything and he can always pull the ripcord saying
And you know, I don't know what the fuck I'm saying. I'm a comic, I'm stoned. We're we just drank too much, right? Like, it's very entertaining. It's all in, you know to my eye. It's all in good faith. I think Joe is an extraordinarily. Ethical good person
also doesn't use Twitter doesn't really affect
yeah. Now the crucial difference does it because he
Is.
An Entertainer first I mean I'm not saying he's not smart and doesn't understand things. He gave me the what's confused potentially confusing and she's very smart and he is also very informed as he his full-time job has taught, you know, when he's not doing stand-up, we're doing color commentary for the UFC.
His full-time job is talking to lots of very smart people at Great length. So he's gay. He's created a, you know, the Joe Rogan University for himself and he's gotten a lot of information crammed into his head so it's not that he's on informed but he can always when he feels that he's not informed or when it turns out he was wrong about something. He can always pull the ripcord and say, I'm just a comic, we were stoned. It was fun, you know, don't don't take medical advice from
me. I don't play a doctor on the internet, right?
I can't quite do that, right? You can't quite do that, that weird in different Lanes. I'm not saying you want you. And I aren't exactly the same Lane. But for much of Joe's audience, I'm just this establishment shil is just banging on about, you know, the university is in medical journals and and it's not true but that would be the perception. And as a Counterpoint to a lot of what's being said on Joe's podcast or, you know, certainly Brett's podcast on these topics, I can see how they they would form that opinion. But
in reality, if you listen to me long enough, you hear that?
I've said as much against the woke nonsense as anyone even any lunatic on the right, who's can only keep that bright shining that bright shiny object, in view, right? So there's nothing that Candace Owens is said about woke knows that I haven't said about Wellness as far as insofar as she's speaking rationally about Wellness but
We have to be able to keep multiple things in view, right? If you if you could only look at the problem of woken has and you couldn't acknowledge the problem of trump and trumpism and Q and on and and the explosion of irrationality that was happening on the right and bigotry that was happening on the right. You just, you were just disregarding half of the landscape. And many people took half of the problem in recent years. The last five years is a story of many people.
Taken half of the problem and monetizing that half of the problem and and getting captured by an audience. That only wanted that half of the problem talked about in that way. And this is the larger issue of of audience capture, which is very I'm sure it's it's an ancient problem but it's a very helpful phrase that I think comes to us courtesy of our mutual friend, Eric Weinstein. And
audience captures a thing and I believe I've witnessed many casualties of it and if there's anything I've been on guard against in my life, you know, professionally it's been that and when I noticed that, I had a lot of people in my audience who didn't like my criticizing Trump,
I really leaned into it. And what I noticed that a lot of the other cohort in my honest didn't like me, criticizing the far left and woke knows I thought I was, you know, exaggerating that problem I leaned into it because I thought those parts of my audience were were absolutely wrong and I didn't care about whether I was going to lose those parts of my audience there. P. There are people who have created, you know, knowingly or not. They're people who create a different incentives for themselves because
How they've monetize their podcast. And because of the kind of signal they've responded to In Their audience, and I worry about, you know, Brett would consider this a totally invidious ad hominem thing to say, but I really do worry that that's happened to Brett. I think, I think I cannot explain how you do a hundred with all the things in the universe to be interested in and of all the things he's competent to speak intelligently about. I don't know how you do it.
Good podcast in a row on on covid, right? It's just, it makes no sense. You
think in part audience capture can explain that
I absolutely think again. Yeah. What about
do you like for example do you feel pressure to not admit that you made a mistake on covid or made a mistake on Trump? I'm not saying you feel that way, but do you feel this pressure? So you've entire audience capture within yourself, within the way you do stuff. So you don't feel
As much pressure from the audience but within your own
ego eimi, again the people who think I'm wrong about any of these topics are going to think, okay? If you're just not admitting that you're wrong but then now we're having a dispute about specific facts. There are there things that I believed about covid or worried might vary might be true about covid. Two years ago that I know
no longer believe or I'm not so worried about now and and vice versa. I mean, they like the things of flipped certain things of flipped upside down.
The question is, was I wrong? So here's a, here's a cartoon version of it. But this is something I said, probably 18 months ago and it's still true. You know, when I saw what Brett was doing on covid, let's call it two years ago.
I said even if he is right, even if he turned, if it turns out that Ivermectin is a Panacea and the MRNA vaccines kill millions of people, right? He's still wrong right now. His reasoning is still flawed right now. His facts still stuck right now, right? And his and his confidence is is unjustified. Now, that was true, then that will always be true. Then,
Right. And, and so, and not much has changed for me to revisit any of my time points along the way. Again, I will totally can see that if I had teenage boys and their Dot and their schools were demanding that they be vaccinated with the MRNA vaccine, I would I would be powerfully annoyed, right? I like I would I wouldn't know what I was going to do and I would be I would be doing more research about about
Myocarditis. And I'd be badgering. Our doctors and I would be worried that we have a medical system and a pharmaceutical system, and a Health Care system and a public health system. That's not incentivized to look at any of this in A fine grain way and they just want one blanket, admonition, to the entire population. Just get just take the shot, you idiots, I view that largely as a result of panic response to the
Misinformation explosion that happened and the public the populist resistance animated, but misinformation that just made it impossible to get anyone to cooperate, right? So it's just part of it is again, a pendulum swing in the wrong direction, somewhat analogous to the woke response to Trump and the trumpets response to woke, right? So there's a lot of people have just gotten pushed around for bad reasons, or, but understandable reasons. But yes,
It's there are there are caveats to my things have changed about my view of covid. But the question is, if you roll back the clock 18 months was I wrong to want to platform Eric Topol, you know, a very well-respected, cardiologist on this topic or, you know, Nicholas christakis to talk about the network effects of, you know, whether we should close schools,
Right. He's written a book on covid. He's you know, Network effects or his wheelhouse as it both as an MD and as a sociologist
There was a lot that we believed we knew about the efficacy of closing schools during pandemics, right during the, you know, during the Spanish Flu, pandemic and others, right? But there's a lot we didn't know about covid. We didn't know, we didn't know how negligible the effects would be on kids, compared to older people. We didn't know like so
my, my problem I really enjoyed your conversation with Eric Topol but also didn't. So he is one of the Great
Communicators in many ways on Twitter like distillation of the current data, but he I hope I'm not overstating it. But there is a bit of an arrogance from him that I think could be explained by him being exhausted by being constantly attacked by conspiracy theory like anti-vaxxers. Yeah, to me the same thing happens with people that start drifting to being right wing
Is to get it done so much by the left, they become almost a rational and arrogant in their beliefs and I felt your conversation with Eric Topol did not sufficiently empathize with people that have skepticism but also did not sufficiently. Communicate uncertainty, we have so like many of the decisions you made. Many of the things you were talking about. We're kind of saying there's a lot of uncertainty, but this is the best thing we could do now.
Well, it was a forced choice, you're going to get covid-19.
What do you want to be vaccinated when you get it right? That was always in my view and easy choice and it's up until you start breaking apart the cohorts. And you start saying, okay wait a minute, there is this myocarditis issue in in young men, let's talk about that.
when that switch before, that story emerged, it was just, it was just clear
that this is
if it's not if it's not knocking down transmission, as much as we had hoped, it is still mitigating severe illness and death
and
I still believe that it is the current view of the of most people competent to analyze the data that we lost something like 300,000 people unnecessarily in the u.s. because of because of a vaccine
hesitancy, but I think there's a way to communicate with
The D about the uncertainty of things that would increase the vaccination
rate, I do believe that it is rational and sometimes effective.
To, to Signal impatience with certain bad ideas, right? And certain conspiracy theories and certain forms of misinformation think so, because it's just, I just think it makes you look good douchebag, most times. Well, certain people are persuadable. Certain people are not not persuadable, but it's not because there's not enough, it's the opportunity cost of not, everything can be given a patient hearing, so you can't have a physics conference and
Then let people in to just trumpet their pet theories about in the grand unified vision of physics when they're obviously crazy. Or they're obviously half crazy or they're just not, you know, the, the people like you begin to, you begin to get a sense for this it when it is your wheelhouse, but there are people who
Kind of declare their there.
Irrelevance to the conversation fairly quickly, without knowing that they have done it, right? And and the truth is, I think I'm one of those people on the topic of covid, right? Like I, it's like, it's not. It's never that I felt. Listen, I know exactly what's going on here. I know these mRNA vaccines are safe. I know exactly. I know, I know exactly how to run a lockdown. I know this is
This is a situation where you want the actual Pilots to fly the plane, right? We needed experts who we could trust and insofar as our experts got captured by by all manner of things and some of them got captured by Trump, some of them were made to look ridiculous. Just standing next to Trump while he was bloviating about you know whatever that you know it's just going to go away. There's 15 people you know the 15 people in the cruise ship and is just going to go away. There's going to be no problem or it's like when he said he
You know, many of these doctors think I understand this better than them. They're just amazed at how I understand this and you've got doctors real doctors, the heads of the CDC and NIH standing around, just ashen-faced while he is talking. You know, all of this was deeply corrupted of the Public Communication of science on bolt. And then again, I've banged on about the depredations of woke miss. The woke thing was a disaster. I still is a disaster, but
Doesn't mean that. But the thing is, there's a big difference between me and bred. In this case, I didn't do a hundred podcast on covid. I did like to podcasts on covid, the measure of my concerned about covid can be measured in how many podcasts I did on it, right. It's like once we had a sense of how to live with covid, I was just living with covid, right? Like okay, you get facts or don't get bakst wear a mask or don't wear a mask travel or don't travel like you got a few things to decide, but
My kids were stuck at home on iPads you know for too long. I didn't agree with that. It was obviously not functional. Like I criticize that on the margins but there was not Much Ado About It But the thing I didn't do is make this my life and just browbeat people with one message or another. We need a public health regime where we can trust what confident people are saying to us about, you know, what medicines are safe to take and
In the absence of that craziness is going to put, even in the presence of that craziness is going to proliferate given the tools we've built. But in the absence of that, it is going to proliferate for understandable reasons, and that's going to. It's it's not going to be good next time when when something orders of magnitude more dangerous hits us. And that's I spend a, you know, insofar as I think about this issue, I think much more about next time than this time.
Before this covid thing you and Brad had some good conversations. I would say we're friends. What's your what do you admire most about Brett outside of all the criticism of had about this covid topic?
What I think Brett is very smart and he's a very ethical person who wants good things for the world and I have no reason to doubt that. So the fact that we're on you know we're crosswise on this issue is not does not mean that I think he's a bad person. I mean the thing that worried me about what he was doing when this was true of Joe. And this was true of elon's. The true of many other people is that once your messaging,
At scale to a vast audience. You incur a certain kind of responsibility not to get people killed. And I do, I did worry that. Yeah, people were people are making decisions on the basis of the information that was getting share there and that's why I was, I think fairly circumspect. I just said, okay. Give me the the center of the Fairway expert opinion at this time, point. And at this time point, and at this time,
I'm point and then I'm out, right? I don't have any more to say about this. I'm not an expert on covid. I'm not an expert on the safety of mRNA vaccines.
If something, if something changes. So, as to become newsworthy, then maybe I'll do a podcast. So I just did a podcast on lab lie, right? I was never skeptical of the lab Lake hypothesis. Brett was very early on saying, this is, this is a lab leak, right? At a point where my only position was, who cares. If it's a lab Lake write like this that there's the thing. We have to get straight As what do we do? Given the nature of this
pandemic but also we should say that you've
Actually stated that it is a possibility. Oh yeah, just said it
doesn't, doesn't quite didn't mean it the time to figure that out. Now, I've actually I have had my my podcast guest on this topic, changed my view of this because, you know, one of the guests, Atlanta Chan made the point that no actually the best time to figure out the origin of this is immediately, right? Because in the air but you lose touch with the evidence and I hadn't really been thinking about that. Like I didn't if you come back after a year
You know, there are certain facts, you might not be able to get in hand, but I've always felt that it didn't matter. For two reasons. One is we had the Genome of the virus and and we could design, we're very quickly. Designed immediately, designing vaccines against that genome. And that's what we had to do. And then we had to figure out how to vaccinate and to, and to mitigate and to develop treatments and all of that. So the origin story didn't matter.
Generically speaking either origin story was politically inflammatory and made the Chinese look bad, right? And the Chinese response to this, look bad, whatever. The origin story, right? They're not cooperating, they're letting their stopping their domestic flights. But letting their international flights go. I mean it's just they were bad actors and they should be treated as such regardless of the origin. Right. And you know, I would argue that the wet Market
Origin is even more politically invidious than the lab leak origin. I mean, why do you think because lab leak for to my eye, the lab. Lee could happen to anyone. Right. We're all running all these Advanced countries are running these dangerous Labs. That's a practice that we should be worried about, you know, in general, we know lab leaks are a problem. There have been multiple lab leaks of even worse things, but that haven't gotten out of hand in this way. But, you know, worst
Ins.
We're we're wise to be worried about this and on some level it could happen to anyone right? The wet Market makes them look like barbarians live in another Century like it. You got to clean up those wet markets. Like what they used. What are you doing? Puttin a bat on top of a Pangolin, on top of a duck? It's like, get your shit together. So like if anything the wet Market makes them look worse in my view. Now I'm sure there's I'm sure that what they actually did, too.
Sealab league. If it was a lab ligament all of that's going to look, odious. Do you think we'll ever get to the bottom of that? I mean,
one of the big negative
I would say failures of Anthony fauci and so on is to be transparent and clear. And it's a good communicator, but I'll get in function, research, the dangers of that, the sixth, like, you know why? It's a useful way of research, but it's also dangerous, right? You know, just being transparent about that, as opposed to just coming off really shady. Of course, the conspiracy theorist and the politicians are not helping, but this just created and giant mess. Yeah, I know.
Degree that says that exchange with fauci and Rand Paul that went viral. Yeah, I would agree that fauci looked like he was taking refuge in a kind of very lawyered language and not giving a straightforward account of what we do and why we do it and so yeah I think it looks Shady, it played shady and it probably was shady I'm at and I don't know how personally entangled he is with any of this but yeah.
the gain-of-function research is something that
I think we're wise to be worried about, and it's so far as I judge myself. Adequate to have an opinion on this. I think it should be banned, right? Like, I'm probably a podcast. I'll do, you know, if you or somebody else doesn't do it in the meantime, you know, I would like a virologist on to defend it against a virologist who, who would criticize it forget about
Just the gain-of-function research. I don't even understand virus hunting. At this point. It's like, I don't know. I don't even know why you need to go into a cave to find this next virus that could be circulating among bats that made a jump zoonotic lie to us.
Why do that? When we can make, when we when we can sequence in a day and make vaccines, and in a weekend might like like, what kind of Head Start, do you think you're getting? That's a
surprising new thing. How quickly, you can develop
a vaccine exactly.
That's, yeah, that's, that's really interesting, but the shadiness around lab
leak. I think the point I didn't make about Brett style of engage in. This issue, is people are using the fact that he was early on Lab Lake to suggest that he was right about Ivermectin.
In and about mRNA vaccines and all the rest like know that, that's none of that connects and it was possible to be falsely confident. Like, you shouldn't have been confident about lab, but no one should have been confident about lab leak, early, even if it turns out to be loudly, right? It was always plausible. It was never definite, it still isn't definite. Zoonotic is is also quite plausible. Certainly was super plausible. Then both
They're politically uncomfortable, both were both at the time were inflammatory to be banging on about when we were trying to secure some kind of cooperation from the Chinese, right? So this is a time for these things and and it's possible to be right by accident, right? That's the thing is
It met your reasoning, the style of reasoning matters, whether you're right or not you know it's like because your style of reasoning is dictating what you're going to do on the next
topic.
Sure. But this is a this multivariate situation here. It's really difficult to know what's right on covid. Given all the uncertainty, all the calves especially when you step outside the pure biology biology of it and you started getting to policy here
it's really yeah there's just trade-offs. Yeah like
transmissibility of the virus.
Sure of actually just knowing if 65% of the population is vaccinated, what effect would that have? Just even knowing those things. Just modeling all those things. Given all the other incentives, let me Pfizer.
But you know what to think. I had the CEO of Pfizer on your podcast. Did you leave that conversation? Feeling like this is a person who is consciously
Reaping windfall profits on a dangerous vaccine and putting everyone at intolerable risk. Or do you think this person or did you think this person is was making a good faith attempt to save lives and had no
no bat, no, taint of bad incentives or something.
The thing I sensed and I felt in part. It was a failure on my part.
But I sense that I was talking to a politician so it's not thinking of those malevolence there or benevolence. There was a
he just had a job,
he put on a suit and I was talking to a suit, Not a Human Being. Now he said that his son was a big fan of the podcast which is why he wanted to do it. So I thought it would be talking to a human being and I ask challenging questions but I thought the internet thinks otherwise every single question in that interview.
Was a challenging one but it wasn't grilling, which is what people seem to want to do with pharmaceutical companies. There's a deep distrust of pharmaceutical
companies, but what was the alternative? I mean, II, totally get right that at windfall profits at a time of Public Health, Emergency looks bad. It's a bad. It is a bad look right now. But yeah, what do, how do we reward and return Capital to Risk Takers?
Who are, who will spend a billion dollars to design, a new drug for a disease, that may be only harms of, you know, a single-digit percentage of the population is like, what, what do we want to encourage? And, and who do we want to get rich? And said, look the person who cures cancer, do we want that person to get rich or not? We want the, we want the person who gave us the iPhone to get rich, but we don't want the person who who cures cancer to get rich. Me, what, what
are we trying? Is a very gray area. So what we
Is the person who declares that they have a cure for cancer to have authenticity and transparency. This like I think we're good now as a population smelling bullshit and there is something about the visor CEO, for example, just CEOs of pharmaceutical companies in general. Just because there's so lawyered up so much marketing or PR people that they are. You just smell bullshit. You're not talking to real human that. They just it just feels like
None of it is transparent to us as a public. So like this whole talking point that Pfizer's only interested in helping people just doesn't ring true. Even though it very well, could be true. It's the same thing with Bill Gates who seems to be at scale, helping a huge amount of people in the world. And yet there's something about the way he delivers that message, what people like
He seems suspicious what's happening underneath this, right? There's certain kinds of communication styles that seem to be more service better Catalyst for conspiracy theories. And I'm not sure what that is because I don't think there's an alternative for capitalism in delivering drugs that help people. But also at the same time, there seems to need to be more transparency. And plus like regulation that actually makes sense versus it seems like
Pharmaceutical companies are susceptible to
corruption.
Yeah, I worry about all that but I also do think that most of the people go into those fields and most of the people going into government, they want to do that, doing it for good and they're non Psychopaths trying to get good things done and trying to solve hard problems and they are not trying to get rich. I mean, many of the people are, it's like bad incentives or, er, something again. I feel better that phrase 30 times on the spot.
Cast, but it's it's just almost everywhere. It explains, normal people, creating terrible harm, right? It's not that there are that many bad people. It, and yes, it makes it makes the truly bad people that much more remarkable and worth paying attention to, but the bad incentives and the bad and the and the the power of bad ideas, do much more harm because
I mean, that's what that what that's what gets good people running in the wrong direction, or, or
Doing things that are that are clearly creating unnecessary
suffering.
You've had I hope still have a friendship with Elon Musk especially over the topic of a I have a lot of interesting ideas that you both share concerns. You both share. Well, let me first ask. What do you admire most about you on?
Well, you know, I had a lot of fun with you on. I like Elon a lot. I mean the Ilan I knew as a friend. I like a lot and you know, obviously you know it's it's not going to surprise anyone me. He's done and he's continuing to do amazing things and I think he's
You know, I think it'll fit many of his aspirations are realized the world would be a much better place. I think it's just it's amazing to see what he's built and what he's attempted to build and what he may add build. And
so would Tesla SpaceX
with. Ya know, I'm a fan of almost all of that. I mean, there there are wrinkles to a lot of that, you know, or some of that
and it was a full of
wrinkles. There's something very trumping about how he's acting on Twitter. I meet with
I think, Twitter's Dre, he doesn't. He thinks Twitter's great. He bought the place because he thinks it's so great. I think Twitter is driving him. Crazy right. I think he's, I think he's needlessly complicated in his life, and harming his reputation, and creating a lot of noise, and, and harming a lot of other people. I mean, so like he the thing that I objected to with him on Twitter is not that he bought it and made changes to it. I mean, that was not again, I remain agnostic as to whether or not he can improve the platform, it was how he was
personally behaving on Twitter, not just toward me, but toward the world I think when you
You know, forward, an article about Nancy Pelosi's husband being attacked not as he was by some lunatic, but that is to some gay gay gay tryst gone awry, right? Is Not What It Seems and you link to a website that previously claimed that Hillary Clinton was dead and that a body double was campaigning in her place. That thing was exploding in trumpets tan as if conspiracy theory, right? And it was having its effect
It matters that he was signal, boosting it in front of 130 million people. And so it is with saying that your you know, your your former employee, you'll all Roth is a pedophile right? At me like that has real consequences. It appeared to be complete bullshit and now you can this guys getting inundated with death threats, right? And he Lon, that's all that's totally predictable, right? And he's so he's behaving quite recklessly and there's a long list of things like the like that, that
He's done on Twitter, it's not ethical, it's not good for him, it's not good for the world, it's not serious. It's just it's it's it's a very adolescent relationship to real problems in our society. And so my problem with how he's behaved is that he's he's purported to touch real issues by turns like okay, do I give the satellites to Ukraine or not? Do I do I minimize their use of them or not? Is this?
Should I publicly worry about World War 3 or not? Right. He's doing this shit on Twitter, right? And at the same moment, he's doing these other very impulsive ill-considered things and he's not showing any willingness to really clean up the mess. He makes he brings Kanye on, knowing he's an anti-semite. Who's got mental health problems? And then kick them off for a swastika which I probably wouldn't have kicked him off for us.
Why stickers like that's that's even like can you really kick people off her Spa stickers? Is that something that you get banned for? Are you a free speech absolutist? If you can't let us watch sticker, show up, I'm not even sure that's enforce it and enforceable terms of service, right? There's their way their moments to use Wast occurs that are not conveying hate and not raising the risk of violence clip that. Yeah any but so much of what he's doing, given that he's again scale matters, he's doing this in front of 130 million people as very different than a
And people. And that's very different than 100,000 people as. And so when I went off the tracks with Ilan, he was doing this about covid. And again this was a situation where I tried to privately mitigate a friend behavior and it didn't work out very
well. Do you try to correct him? Sort of highlighting things? He might be wrong on. Yeah. Or did you use the Lux power? Love method. I should, I should write, like a pamphlet for Sam
Harris.
Well, no, but it was it was totally coming from a place of love because I was concerned about his reputation. I was concerned about what are you? I've been there was a two-fold concern, I could see what was happening with the tweet, and he had this original tweet. That was, I think it was panic panic over covid is dumb or something like that, right? This is way. This is then March is early March, 20 2008, super lead, a super early. So when nobody knew anything, but we knew we saw what was happening in Italy, right? Was totally kicking
off.
God those a wild time. That's when the total wipers,
totally wild, but that became the most influential, tweet on Twitter for that week. I mean, I've had more engagement than any other tweet more than any crazy thing, Trump was tweeting. I mean, it was just went off again. Like it was it just a nuclear bomb of information. And I could see that people were responding to it, like,
Wait a minute. Okay, here's this. Genius technologists. Who must have inside information about everything, right? Surely he knows something that is not on the surface about this pandemic. And they're reading, they were reading into it. A lot of information that I knew, wasn't there, right? And I at that the time I didn't even I didn't think he had any reason to be suggesting that I think he was just firing off a tweet, right?
So, I reached out to him in private and I mean, because it was a private text conversation. I'm I won't talk about the details, but I'm just saying that's the case, you know, among them in the many cases of friends who have public platforms and who did something that I thought was dangerous and ill-considered. This was a case where I I reached out in private and tried to, to help a genuinely help, because it was just
I thought it was harmful in every sense because it was being misinterpreted, and I was like, okay, you can say that panic over anything is dumb fine. But this was not the how this was Landing. This was like non-issue conspiracy. There's going to be no covid in the u.s. it's going to Peter out it's just going to become a cold. I mean that that's how this was getting received. Whereas at that moment it was absolutely obvious. How big a deal. This was going to be not every or that it was going to add minimum going to be a big deal.
I don't know if it was obvious but it
It was obvious that it was a significant probability that it could be a big. I remember in my it was unclear like how big because there are still stories of it. Like it's probably going to like the big concern. The hospital's my overfilled it's going to be I am getting like 2 months or something.
Yeah, we don't know but it was there was no way we weren't going to have
Tens of thousands of deaths at a minimum at that point and and it was and it was everywhere. It was totally rational to be worried about hundreds of thousands and when Nicholas christakis came on my podcast very early. You know he predicted quite confidently that we would have about a million people dead in the u.s. right? And that didn't seem you know it was you know, I think appropriately hedged but it made was still it was just like okay it's just going to you just look at the we're kind of ride in this.
essential and where and it's going to be a be very surprising not to have that order of magnitude and not something much much less and
So anyway, I mean, again to close the story on Elon.
I could see how this was being received and I tried to get him to walk that back. And then we we had a fairly long and detailed exchange on this issue and that so that intervention didn't work and it was not done, you know, I was not an asshole, I was not, I was just concerned, you know for him for the world for and
And, you know, and then there are other relationships where I didn't take that again. That's an example, were taking the time didn't work right privately, there are the relations where I thought, because it's just going to be more trouble than it's worth, and I just just ignored it, you know, and there's a lot of that. And I Frank again, I'm not comfortable with how this is all netted out because I don't know if you know, I'm not, you know,
I'm not comfortable with how much time in this conversation with spent talking about these specific people. Like what good is it for me to talk about Elon or bread or anything? There's a lot of good because
those friendships, listen, as a fan, these are the conversations that I loved loved as a fan, and it feels like covid is robbed the world of these conversations because you are exchanging back and forth on Twitter, but that's not what I mean by.
I conversations, like, long-form discussions like a debate about covid, like a normal to this, but there's
no, there's no Ilan and I shouldn't be debating
covid. You should be. Here's the thing with humility. Like basically saying, we don't really know like the Rogan method, right? We don't we're just a bunch of idiots. Like one is an engineer, you're a neuroscientist but like it just kind of okay. Here's the evidence and be like normal people. That's what everybody was doing. The whole world was like trying to figure out what the
He'll
what? Yeah, but the issue was that at that. So at the moment I had this Collision, we on certain things were not debatable, right? Was just, it was absolutely clear where this was going. It wasn't clear how far it was going to go or how quickly we would mitigate it. But it was absolutely clear that it was going to be an issue, right? The, the the train and come off the tracks. In Italy. We knew we weren't going to seal our borders.
There were already people, you know, they're already cases known to many of us personally in the US at that point.
and,
He was operating by a very different logic that I couldn't engage with
sure what their logic represents a part of the population. And there's a lot of interesting topics that have a lot of uncertainty around them like the effectiveness of masks.
Like but no but where things broke down was not at the point of others. A lot to talk about a lot to debate is all very interesting and who knows what's what it broke down very early at this is, you know,
We there's nothing to talk about here, I get like like either there's a water bottle on the table or there isn't right? Like
it was technically there's only one fourth of
water bottle.
So what defines a lot of bottles of the water inside? The water bottle, is that the water bottle? Well, I'm giving you an example of it's worth a conversation.
This is difficult because this is we had an exchange in private and I want to make sure I want to honor, not not exposing the
Tails of it. But you know the details convinced me that there was not a follow-up conversation on that topic
on this topic that said, I hope and I hope to be part of helping that happen that the friendship was rekindled because one of the topics I care a lot about artificial intelligence. Your you've had great public and private conversations about this topic and
yes and Ilan was very formative in my taking that
At issue, seriously. I mean, he and I went to that initial conference in Puerto Rico together and it was only because he was going and I found out about it through him and I were just rode his coattails to it. You know, that I that I got dropped in that side of the pool to hear about these concerns at that point,
it would be interesting to hear how is your conserved concern?
Evolved with the coming out of Chad GPT and these new large language models that are fine-tuned was reinforcement learning and seemingly to be able to do some incredible human like things. There's two questions. One, how is your concern in terms of AGI and superintelligence evolved and how impressed that you would charge you be t as a student of the human mind and mind in general?
Well my concern about AGI is unchanged
So I am I did a I've spoken about it, a bunch of my podcast but you know I did a TED Talk in 2016 which was the kind of summary of what that conference and and you know various conversations I had her after that did to my my brain on this topic.
Basically that once superintelligence is achieved, there's a take off, it becomes exponentially smarter, and in a matter of time.
There's just where ants and their
gods. Well yeah and unless we find some way of permanently tethering
A self a super intelligent, super intelligent self-improving AI to our value system. And I, you know, I don't believe anyone has figured out how to do that or whether that's even possible in principle. I may know people like, Stuart Russell who I just had on my podcast are.
Oh, really Kevin Have You released the
album, release it? Yeah, I'll go. He's been on previous podcast but we just recorded this week
because you haven't done an app I guess in a while. So yeah wait yeah. So just is a good person to talk about alignment with.
Yeah so Stewart
Stewart is has been probably more than anyone. My Guru on this topic. I might let you just reading his book and doing like I've done to podcast with him. At this point
his rods of the control problem or something
like that. His is his book is human compatible, human capital way, he talks about the control problem. And yeah, so I just think the idea that we can define a value function in advance that permanently tethers a self-improving soup.
Intelligent AI to our values as we continue to discover them. Refine them, extrapolate them in an open-ended way.
I think that's a tall order and there, I think there are many more ways. There must be many more ways of Designing superintelligence that is not aligned in that way, and it's not ever approximating our values and that way. So it's Stewart's idea to put it in a very simple way, is that he thinks you don't want to specify the value function up front, you don't want to imagine. You could ever write the code in such a way as to admit of no loophole.
You want to make the AI uncertain as to what human values are and perpetually uncertain and always trying to ameliorate that uncertainty by hewing more and more closely to what our professed values are. So like it is, it's always interested in saying, oh no, that's not what we want. That's not what we intend stop doing that, right? Like no matter how smart it gets. All it wants to do is more perfectly, approximate human values. I think there are
A lot of problems with that, you know, at a high level, I'm not a computer scientist. So I'm sure there are many problems at a low level that I don't understand. Or
like how do we enforce the human into the loop? Always, no
matter what there's that and like what humans, get a vote and just was just, what is show? What do humans value? And what is the difference between what we say we value and are revealed preferences? Which if you just if you were a super intelligent AI, that could look at
Manatee. Now, I think you could be forgiven for concluding that what we value is driving ourselves crazy with Twitter and living perpetually on the brink of nuclear war. And, you know, just watching, you know, hot girls in yoga pants on Tick Tock again. And again, again it's like when you're saying that is not this is this is this is all revealed preference and it's what is an AI to make of that really well and what should it optimize like? So part of the this is
Is also Stewart's observation that one of the Insidious things about like the YouTube algorithm is, it's not that it just caters to our preferences. It actually begins to change Us in ways those to make us more predictable. If I could finds ways to make us a better reporter of our of our preferences and to trim our preferences down so that it can can further train to that signal. So the main concern is that
most of the people in the field seem not to be taking intelligence seriously like as they design more and more intelligent machines and as they profess to want to design true AGI,
They're not.
Again, the they're not spending the time that stewardess pending trying to figure out how to do this safely above all.
they're just assuming that these these problems are going to solve themselves as we as we make that final stride into the end zone, or they're saying very
You know, pollyannish things like, you know, an a.i. would never form a motive to harm human like with the why would it ever form a motive to to be malicious toward Humanity, right? Unless we put that mode of in there, right? And that's, that's not the concern. The concern is that in the presence of of vast, disparities and competence and in certainly in a condition where the machines are improving themselves, are improving their own code.
They could be developing goal, instrumental goals that are antithetical to our well-being without any without any intent to harm us, right? It's analogous to what we do too.
Every other species on Earth. I mean, you and I don't consciously form the intention to harm insects on a daily basis but there are many things we could intend to do. That would in fact, harm insects because you know, you decide to repave your driveway or whatever it whatever you're doing, you'd like you're not you're just not taking the the interest of insects into account because there's so far beneath you in terms of your cognitive Horizons. And
and so that the real challenge here is that
If you believe that intelligence, you know, scales up on a Continuum to toward Heights that we can only dimly imagine. And I think there's every reason to believe that this is no reason to believe that we're near the summit of intelligence. And you can do, you know, defined, maybe maybe there is maybe there's some forms of intelligence for which this is not true, but
For for many relevant forms, you know? Like the top hundred things we care about cognitively. I think there's every reason to believe that many of those things. Most of those things are a lot like chess or go where a once the machines get better than we are. They're going to stay better than we are. Although there. I know if he's caught the recent thing with go, we're in this actually came out of stores loud. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. One time a human betta Machining and
they found a hack for that. But anyway, in the
Play. It's good. There's going to be no looking back. And then the question is,
what do we do in relate in relationship to these systems that are more competent than we are in every relevant respect? Because it will be a relationship. It's not like it's the people, the people who think we're just going to figure this all out without thinking about it in advance. It's just going to be the solutions are just going to find themselves.
Seemed not to be taking the prospect of really creating autonomous superintelligence. Seriously like a what does that mean? It it's every bit as independent and ungovernable ultimately as us having created. I mean, just imagine if we created a race of people that were 10 times smarter than all of us like how would we live with those people? They're ten times smarter than us, right? Like they begin to talk about things, we don't
Stand. They begin to want things. We don't understand. They begin to view us as obstacles to them. There are solving those problems or gratifying those desires, we become the chickens or the monkeys in their presence and
I think that.
It's your but for some amazing solution of the sort that Steward is imagining that we could somehow anchor their reward function permanently no matter how intelligent scales. I think it's it's really worth worrying about this. I do that. I Do by the the the Sci-Fi notion that this is an existential risk. If we don't do it. Well,
I worry though, we don't notice it. I'm deeply impressed with Chad.
You beauty. And I'm worried that it will become super intelligent. These language models, have become super intelligent because they're basically trained in the collective intelligence of the human species and then it'll start controlling our Behavior. If they're integrated into our algorithms, the recommender systems and then we just won't notice that there's a super intelligence system that's controlling our Behavior.
Well, I think that's true. Even before far
Before superintelligence, I even before general intelligence and I think just the narrow intelligence of these algorithms and of what something like, you know, chechi PT. Can you can do
I mean it's just far short of it, developing its own goals and the is there at Cross purposes with ours, just the just the unintended consequences of using it in the ways, we're going to be incentivized to use it and you know the money to be made from scaling this thing and what it does to to our information space and our sense of just being able to get to ground truth.
Both of on any facts. It's yeah, it's super scary and it was its
do you think it's a giant leap in terms of the development towards a GI? Chad you beauty or we still is this. Just an impressive little toolbox. So like what do you think? The singularity is coming.
Or whatever. Is it to you as a matter? I've got
Julie I have no intuitions on that front apart from the fact that if we continue to make progress it will come right? So it's just you just have to assume we continue to make progress. There's only two assumptions you you have to assume substrate Independence. So there's no reason why this can't be done in silico. It's just, we can build arbitrarily intelligent machines. There's nothing magical about having a having this done in
In the wetware of our own brains. I think that is true and I think that's a, you know, scientifically parsimonious to think that that's true. And then you just have to assume we're going to keep making progress, doesn't have to be any special rate of progress. Doesn't have to be Moore's Law, it can just be which keep going at a certain point. We're going to be in relationship to Minds leaving Consciousness, conscious decide. I don't, I don't have any reason to believe that they'll necessarily be conscious by virtue of being.
Diligent. And that's its own interesting. Ethical question, but leaving conscience decide they're going to be more. They're going to be more competent than we are. And then that's like you know the aliens have landed. You know that's literally as an encounter with again leaving aside the possibility that something like Stewart's path is is actually available to us but it
it is hard to picture.
If what we mean by intelligence All Things Considered and it's truly General. If that scales and
You know, begins to build upon itself. How you maintain that perfect slavish devotion Until the End of Time the tether. No systems at elegy humans. Yeah.
I think my gut says that that tethers not there's a lot of ways to do it. So it's not this increasingly
impossible problem, right guy. So I have know you know you know as you know I'm not
Not a computer scientist. I have no intuitions about his algorithmically how you would approach that and was somewhat spot?
My main intuition is may be deeply flawed but the main dish is based on the fact that most of the learning is currently happening on human knowledge so you can charge your booties just trained on human data, right? I don't see where the take-off happens, where you completely go above human wisdom, the current impressive, aspect of tragedy,
He's that's using collective intelligence of all of us.
From what I gleaned from again from people who know much more about this than I do. I think we have reason to be skeptical that these techniques of deep learning are actually going to be sufficient to push us into a GI, right? So it's just another not, they're not generalizing in the way they need to. They're not, certainly not learning like human children and so there,
There's brittle and strange ways there there. It's not to say that the human path is the only path, you know, and you know, and maybe there's, we might learn better lessons by ignoring the way brains work, but we know that they don't generalize and use abstraction the way we do. And so although they have strange holes and they're competent,
but the size of the holes is shrinking every yeah.
And that's so the intuition starts to slowly fall apart, you know, the intuition is like, surely can't be this simple to achieve threat intelligence. Yeah but it's becoming simpler and simpler so I don't know. I don't, the progress is quite incredible. I've been extremely impressed with Chad Djibouti and the new models and there's a lot of financial incentive to make progress in this regard. So it's going to be living through some very interesting times.
In raising a question that I'm going to be talking to you. A lot of people brought up this topic, probably because Eric Weinstein talked to Joe Rogan recently and said that he and you were contacted by folks about UFOs. Can you clarify the nature of this contact here? Yeah, that you are back about. I've
got very little to say on this and he has much more to say. I think he, I think he went down this Rabbit Hole further than than I did. Which wouldn't surprise
Prize anyone, he's got much more of a taste for this sort of thing than I do, but I think we're contacted by the same person. It wasn't clear to me who this person was or how this person got that, my cell phone number, they didn't seem it didn't seem like we were getting punked. I mean, it's the person seem credible to me
and there were talking to you about the release of different videos on your
fee. And this is when there's a flurry of activity around this. So there was like, there's a big New Yorker.
Article on on UFOs. And there was there was a rumors of couldn't Congressional hearings, I think, come in and and then with the videos that were being debunked or not,
And so this person contacted both of us, I think around the same time and I think he might have contacted Rogan or other, but Eric is just the only person I've spoken to about it? I think, who I know was contacted and
The.
What happened is this person kept, you know, writing a check that he didn't cash, like he kept saying, okay. Next week I'm going to, you know, I understand this is sounding spooky. And, you know, you have no reason to really trust me. But next week I'm going to, I'm going to put you on a zoom call with people who you will recognize and they're going to be, you know, former heads of the CIA. And, you know, people who just you're going to within five seconds of being on the zoom call, you'll, you'll know this is not a hoax. So great just let me know.
No, just send me the zoom link, right? And I went that happened, maybe three times, you know, it was just one phone conversation and then it was just text, you know, that just a bunch of texts and I think Eric spent more time with this person and I'm not, I haven't spoken about, I know he spoke about it publicly but
So I, you know, it's not that my bullshit detector ever really went off in a big way is just the thing never happened and I'd so I lost interest.
So you made a comment just interesting that you ran the which I really appreciate that. You ran the thought experiment of saying, okay, maybe we do have alien spacecraft or you just a thought experiment. The aliens did visit your and then this very kind of nihilistic sad thought that it wouldn't matter.
It wouldn't affect your life. Can you, can you explain that?
Well, no, I always, I think many people noticed this. I mean, this was a sign of how crazy the news cycle was at that point, right? Like, we had covid weird Trump and I forget when this, the UFO thing was really kicking off, but it just seemed like no one had the bandwidth even be interested in this. It's like I was amazed to notice in myself.
That I wasn't more interested in figuring out. What was going on. It's like a and I considered. Okay, wait a minute. This is if this is true, this is the biggest story in anyone's lifetime, make contact with alien intelligence is by definition. The biggest story in anyone's Lifetime and in human history. Why isn't this just totally captivating? And it would not only was it, not totally,
It in, it was just barely rising to the level of my, being able to pay attention to it. And I view that one as a
To some degree a and understandable defense mechanism against the the bogus claims that have been made about this kind of thing in the past. You know, the general sense is probably bullshit or probably, probably has some explanation that is purely terrestrial and not surprising. And there was there's there. Is somebody who was his name? Is Mick. West. I forget, is the YouTuber. Yes. Yeah. He debunked stuff. Yeah, he does. I mean you know, I
I have since seen some of those videos and now this is going back. Still, at least a year, but some of those videos seem like, fairly credible debunk Ian's of some of the, the optical evidence and I'm surprised we haven't seen more of that. Like there was a fairly credulous, 60 Minutes piece that came out around that time, looking at some of that video. And it was a very video that he was debunking on YouTube and you know, his video only had like 50,000 views on it or whatever.
But again, it seemed like a fairly credible debunk and I haven't seen debunking of his Duncan's. But
I think there is, but he's basically saying that there is there is possible explanations for, right? And usually in these kinds of context, if there's a possible explanation even if it seems unlikely is going to be more likely than an alien civilization visiting
us. Yeah, it's the extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence principle which I think is generally true.
Well with aliens I think.
Generally, I think it should be some humility about what that would look like when they show up, but I tend to think they're already
here. The amazing thing about this AI conversation, that was that we're talking about a circumstance, where we would be designing, the aliens and they would. And there's every reason to believe that eventually this is going to happen. Like I so I'm not at all skeptical about the, the coming reality of the aliens that we're going to build
them. Now, here's the thing, it does this? Apply to one?
Super intelligence shows up, will this be trending on Twitter for a day? And then we'll go on to complain about something some Harris. Once again, Senator Funke aspects there you tend to tell trend on Twitter
he even though you're not on Twitter which is great. Yeah, I don't I haven't noticed I'm I did I did notice when I was on but you have this concern about
AGI, basically. Same kind of thing that we would just look the other way. There's something about this time where even like World War 3 which has been throwing around very casually concerning Lee. So even that the new cycle wipes that
away, yeah, why I think we have this
This General problem that we can't
make
certain information even, you know, unequivocally certain information.
Emotionally, Salient, like, we respond quite readily to certain things and as we talked about, we respond to the little girl, who fell down a. Well, I mean that just that gets 100% of our emotional resources, but the abstract probability that of nuclear war, read even a high probability, even just even an intolerable probability, even if we put it at thirty percent, right? You know, like
Like it's just like that's that's Russian roulette with a, you know, gun with three chambers. And you know, it's aimed at the heads, not only your head but your kids head and everyone's kids head and it's just 24 hours a day and
and I think people who have this pre Ukraine, I think the people who have made it their business to
professionally to think about the risk of nuclear war and to mitigate it in a people like Graham Allison or William Perry or
And I think they were putting a, the, the ongoing risk not just the risk that we're going to have a proper nuclear war. It's some point. And then, you know, the Next Generation people were putting it at in something like 50%, right there, we're living with this Sword of Damocles over our heads. Now, you might wonder whether anyone can have reliable intuitions about the probability of that kind of thing, but the status quo
Oh is truly alarming. I mean we've got you know we've got icbms on, leave aside smaller exchanges and tactical nukes and how that could how we can have a World War. You know based on incremental changes we've got
The biggest bombs aimed at the biggest cities in both directions, and it's old technology, right? And it's you know, and it's vulnerable to some lunatic deciding to launch or misreading, you know, bad data. And we know we've been saved from nuclear war I think at least twice by, you know, so
Soviet submarine commanders, deciding. I'm not going to pass this up. The change a chain of command, right? It's like this is this is almost certainly an error is and it turns out it was an error. It's like and we need people to a man that particular case like he saw I think it was five what seemed like five missiles launched from the u.s. to Russia and he reasoned if the if America was going to engage in a first strike, they launched more than five missiles, right? So this
This has to be fictional and then he waited long enough to decide that it was fictional but the probability of a nuclear war Happening by mistake or some other species of inadvertence, you know. Misunderstanding technical malfunction. That's intolerable. Forget about the intentional use of it by people who are, you know, Driven Crazy.
Buy some ideology
and more and more Technologies are enabling a kind of scale of Destruction
and misinformation plays into this picture in a way that is, especially scary. I mean, once you can get a deep fake of
You know, the any current president of the United States claiming to have launched a first strike, you know? And just you know send that everywhere
but they can change the nature of Truth and then we that might change the the engine we have for skepticism is sharpen it. The
more you keep it really might have ai and and digital watermarks that help us maybe will not trust any information that hasn't come through.
Specific channels, right? I mean so the in my world,
It's like I no longer feel the, the need to respond respond to anything other than what I put out in, in my channels of information. It's like there's so much there. So many people who have clipped stuff of me. That shows the opposite of what I was actually saying in context. And we the people have like, re-edited, my podcast audio to make it seem. Like I said, the opposite of what I'm saying, it's like, unless I put it out, you know, you can't be sure that I actually said it, you know? I mean it's
it's just
but I don't know what it's like to live like that for all forms of information and me Strangely, I think it may require a
A greater siloing of information in the end, you know, it's like it it it's we're living through this sort of wild west period, where everyone's got a newsletter and everyone's got a Blog and everyone's got an opinion. But once you can fake
everything, there might be a greater value of expertise. Yeah, for a sports but a more rigorous system for identifying who the experts are.
Yeah, or just an hour just knowing that you know it's going to be an arms race to authenticate information. So it's
If you can never trust a photograph, unless it has been vetted by Getty Images because only Getty Images has the resources to authenticate the provenance of that photograph and a test that hasn't been meddled with by Ai. And again, I don't even know if that's technically possible. I may be the whatever the tools available for this will be you know, commodified and and the cost will be driven to zero.
So quickly that everyone will be able to do it. You know, it could be like encryption but,
and it would be proven and tested most effectively first, of course, as always in porn. Yeah, which is where most of human innovation. Technology happens first, well, I have to ask because Ron Howard, the director asked us on Twitter since we're talking about the threat of nuclear war. And otherwise, he asked, I'd be interested in both your expectations for Human Society. If when we move Beyond Mars,
With those societies, be industrial-based, how will it be governed? How will criminal infractions, be dealt with when you read or watch Sci-Fi? What comes closest to sounding logical? Do you think about our society beyond Earth? If we colonize Mars, if colonize space?
Yeah, well, I think I have a pretty
Humbling picture of that movie. So because we're still going to be the Apes that we are. So when you, when you imagine colonizing Mars, you have to imagine a first fistfight on Mars. You have to imagine first murder on Mars
also
infidelity. Yeah, somebody extramarital Affairs on Mars, right? So it's going to get really homely and boring really fast. I think you know it's like only the space suits or whatever the other
extension series of just living in that atmosphere or lack thereof, will limit how badly we can behave on Mars.
But do you think most of the interaction will be still in meatspace versus digital? Do you think there will be? Do you think we're like living through a transformation of a Kind where we're going to be doing more and more interaction than digital space?
Like everything we've been complaining about Twitter. Is it possible that Twitter's just the early days of a broken system, that's actually giving birth to a better working system? That's ultimately digital.
I think we're going
to.
Experience a pendulum swing back into the real world. And I think many of us are experiencing that now. Anyway, I'm just just wanting to
Have face-to-face encounters and spend less time on our phones and less time online. And I think you know, maybe everyone isn't going in that direction but
I do notice it myself and I notice, I mean, well, once I got off Twitter, I then I noticed the people who are never on Twitter, right, and then, and the people who are never basically, I know I have a lot of friends who are never on Twitter. Yeah. They and they actually never understood what I was doing on Twitter. It's like they just like it wasn't that they were seeing it and then reacting to it. They just didn't know it's like
It's like being on riff. I'm not on Reddit either but I don't spend any time thinking about not being on Reddit. Right. So I just I'm just not on Reddit.
Do you think the pursuit of human happiness is better? Achieved more effectively achieved outside of Twitter
world.
Well I think all we have is our attention in the end and we just have to notice what these various tools are doing to it and it's just it became very clear to me that it was an unrewarding use of my attention. Now it's not to say there isn't some digital platform that's conceivable that would be useful but and rewarding but
Yeah we did. We just have in our life is doled out to us in moments and we have and we're continually solving this riddle of what is going to suffice to make this moment engaging and meaningful and aligned with who I want to be now and how I want the future to to look right where I am is that we have this tension between being in the present and becoming in the future.
And, you know, it's a seeming Paradox. Again, it's not really a paradox but it can see it. Like I do think the ground Truth for personal well-being is to find a motive being where you can pay attention to the present moment. And this is, you know, meditation by another name, you can pay attention to the present moment with sufficient gravity that you recognize that that
Just Consciousness itself in the present moment, with no matter. What's happening is already a circumstance of freedom and and contentment and and Tranquility like you can be happy now. Before anything happens before this, next desire gets gratified before this next problem gets solved there's our there's this kind of ground truth that you're free. It Consciousness is free and open and unencumbered by really any problem until you get lost in thought about.
All the problems that may yet be real for you.
So, the ability to catch and observe Consciousness that in itself is a source of
happiness, it without being lost in thought. And, and so, what this have this happens haphazardly for people who don't meditate because they find something in their life, that's so captivating. It so pleasurable is so thrilling. It can even be scary but it can be even being scared is captivated like it's it gets its it gets their attention, right? Whatever it is.
Like you know Sebastian, Junger was wrote a great book about people's experience in war here, you know, it's like you can strange, they can be the best experience anyone's ever had because everything, it's like, only the moment matters, right? Think the bullet is whizzing by your head. You're not thinking about your, your 401k or that thing that you didn't say last week to the person you shouldn't have been talking about. You're not thinking about Twitter, it's like you're just fully immersed in the present moment.
Meditation is the only way. I mean the that word can mean many things to many people. But what I mean by meditation is simply the discovery that there is a a way to engage, the present moment directly, regardless of what's happened and you'll need to be in a war. You don't need to be having sex, you don't need to be on drugs, you don't need to be surfing. The only nothing it has just have to be a peak experience, it can be completely ordinary, but you can recognize that
In some basic sensors only this and and everything else is something. You're thinking, you're thinking about the past, you're thinking about the future, and thoughts themselves. Have no substance, right? It's fundamentally mysterious. That any thought ever really common deers, your sense of who you are and, and makes you anxious or afraid, or angry, or whatever it is. And the more you discover that the half-life of all these negative emotions
Ins that blow all of us around get much much shorter, right? And you can, you can literally just, you know, the anger that would have kept you angry for hours or days last, you know, four seconds because you just the moment it arises you recognize it and you can get off that, you can decide at minimum, you can decide whether it's useful to stay angry at that moment. And, you know, obviously, usually isn't
and the illusion of Free Will is one of those
thoughts. Yeah, it's all just happening.
Really even the Mindful and meditative response to this is just happening it happening. It's just like even the moments where you recognize or not recognize, it's just happening. It's not that the this does open up a degree of freedom for a person but it's not a freedom that gives any motivation to the notion of free will. It's just a new way of being in the world.
Is there a difference between intellectually knowing Free? Will, is an illusion and really experiencing it. Yeah. What's the?
What's the longest you've been able to experience the escape? The illusion of Free Will?
Well, it's always, I, it's always obvious to me when I pay attention, when I whenever I'm mindful, this is the term of jargon we in the Buddhist and and increasingly, you know, outside the Buddhist context is mindfulness, right? But there are different levels of mindfulness and there's there's different
Degrees of insight into this. But yeah. So I mean, what I'm calling evidence of lack of Free Will and lack of, you know, like of the self and the, like a two sides of the same coin. There's a sense of being a subject in the middle of experience to whom all experienced refers sense of I, the sense of me and that's almost everybody starting point when they start to meditate, and it's, that's almost always, the place people live most of their lives from. I do think that gets
Wrapped it in ways that get unrecognized, I think people are constantly losing the sense of I, they're losing the sense of subject object distance, but they're not recognizing it. And, and meditation is the mode in, which you can recognize. You can you can both consciously precipitate it. You can look for the self and fail to find it and then recognize its absence. And that's the, just the flip side of the coin of free will. I mean, the, the feeling of having free will is
Is what it feels like to feel like a self who's thinking his thoughts and doing his actions and intending his intentions and the Man in the middle of the boat who's Rowan? That's the start. That's the false starting point when you find that, there's no one in the middle of the boat, right? Or in fact there's no boat. There's just the river. There's just the flow of experience and there's no Center to it and there's no place from which you would control it again. Even
When you're doing things, this does not negate the difference between voluntary and involuntary behaviors. Like I can voluntarily reach for this, but when I'm paying attention, I'm aware that everything is just happening. Like, just the intention to move is just a risin, right? And I'm in no position to know why didn't arrive arise a moment before, or a moment later or a moment we or, you know, 50% stronger or weaker or, you know, the so is to be in
Active or to be doubly effective where I lurched for it versus I move slow. I mean not I'm a not I can never run the counterfactual zai can never buy all of this opens the door to a
and even more disconcerting picture along the same lines, which is subsumes this conversation about Free Will, and it's the question of whether
Anything is ever possible. Like what if this is a question? I am I haven't thought a lot of about it but it's been a few years. I've been kicking this question around.
I mean, what if only the actual is possible? What if there was no, what if it was do we live with this feeling of possibility? We live with the sense that
So, you know, I have two daughters. I could have had a third child, right? So what does it mean to say that I could have had a third child? All right. So, do you don't have kids? I don't think
so. Not that I know of, yes, so the possibility might be right. So what
do we mean when we say you could have had a child or you might, you might have a child in the future. Like what, what, what is the space in real? Well.
the relationship between possibility and actuality and reality, is there a reality in which
Non actual things are nonetheless real and so there, we have other categories of like non concrete things. We have things that don't have spatial temporal Dimension but they're nonetheless. They nonetheless exist. So like you know in the integers, right? So numbers there is a there's a reality there's an abstract reality, two numbers and this is this philosophically interesting to think about these things. So they're not like
In some sense there.
They're they're real and they're just they're not merely invented by us their discovered because they have structure that we can't impose upon them, right. It's not like they're not fictional characters like you know my Hamlet and Superman also exist in some sense but they exist at the level of our own fiction and abstraction but it's like they're true. They're true and false statements, you can make about Hamlet their true and false statements, you can make about Superman because are fictions
Fictional worlds, we've created have a certain kind of structure, but again, this is all abstract. It's like it's all abstract table from any of his concrete, instantiations, it's not just in the comic books and just in the movies, it's in our, you know, ongoing ideas about these characters, but natural numbers or the integers. Don't
Function quite that way. I mean, they're similar but they also have a structure that's purely a matter of Discovery is not, you can't just make up whether numbers are prime, you know, if you give me two integers, you know of a certain size to let's use mention two, enormous integers. If I were to say okay well between those two integers there exactly 11 prime numbers, right? That's a very specific claimed about which I can be right or wrong at whether or not anyone knows I'm right around. Like that's just
There's a domain of facts. There, these are abstract, is an abstract reality, that relates in some way that's philosophically. Interesting in a metaphysically, interesting, to what we call real reality, you know, this the spatial temporal order, the physics of things but possibility at least in my view, occupies a different space and this is something again I my thoughts on this are pretty in co-ed and I think I need to talk to
A philosopher of physics and and or physicist about how this may interact with, with things like the many-worlds, interpretation of quantum says that, that's an
interesting way. Right? Exactly. So I wonder if discoveries in physics, like further proof were more concrete proof that many-worlds interpretation of quantum. Mechanics has some validity right if that completely starts to change
things but even at that that's just more.
Actuality. So if I took that seriously, sure, that's that's a case of
And Truth is that happened even even if the many-worlds interpretation isn't true, but we just imagine we have a physically infinite Universe, the implication of infinity is such that things will begin to repeat themselves. You know, the farther you go in space, right? So the, you know, if you just head out in One Direction eventually you're going to meet two people, just like us having a conversation, just like this, and you're going to meet them an infinite number of times in every, you know, infinite.
E of permutations slightly different from this conversation, right? So, I mean Infinity is just so big that our intuitions of probability completely breakdown. But what I'm suggesting is
Maybe probability isn't a thing right? Maybe there's only actuality if there's oh maybe there's only what happens. And at every point along the way, our notion of what could have happened or what might have happened is just that it's just a thought about what could have happened or
might as a snow. So it's a fundamentally different thing. If you can imagine a thing that doesn't make it real so they because that's, that's where that possibility exists is in your imagination. All
right? Yeah and
Possibility itself is a kind of spooky idea because it it too has a sort of structure, right? So like the fight if I'm going to say,
You know, you could have had a daughter right last year.
So we're saying that's
possible
but not actual, right? That is a claim the things that
Are true and not true about that daughter. I like that it has a kind of structures like feel like there's a lot of fog
around that the possibility. It feels like almost like a useful
narrative, but what does it mean? So like what does it mean? If we say, you know, I just did that. But I'm it was conceivable that I wouldn't have done that, right? Like it's possible that I just threw this cap but I might not have done
that. So you're taking a very
Really close to the original like what would appear as a
decision whenever we're saying something is possible, but not actual write like this thing, just happened, but it's conceived. It's possible that it wouldn't have happened, where they would have happened differently in, what does that possibility consist, like, where is that what it did for that to be real for the possibility to be real? What are we? What claim are we making about?
The
universe. Well, isn't that an extension of the idea that Free Will is an illusion that all we have is actuality that the
possibility isn't, right? Yeah, I'm just extending it Beyond. Is there some an action? Like it's because this goes to the physics of things. It's just everything. Like we're always telling ourselves a story and that includes possibility.
Possibility is really compelling for some reason
we yet what? Because it's I mean so this yeah I mean this could sound just academic but
Every backward-looking regret or disappointment and every forward-looking worry.
Is completely dependent on this notion of possibility like every regret is based on the sense that something else I could have done something else. Something something else could have happened. Every disposition to worry about the future is based on the feeling that there's this range of possibilities. It could go either way and
You know, I know whether or not there's such a thing as possibility, you know, I'm convinced that worry is almost never psychologically appropriate because the reality is that in any given moment, either you can do something to solve the problem you're worried about or not. So if you can do something just do it, you know, and if you can't you're worrying is just causing you to suffer twice over, right? You're going to you know, you're going to get, you're going to get the medical procedure next week. Anyway how much time between now and next week, do you want to spend?
Worried about it, right? It's going to it's the worry. The worry doesn't accomplish
anything. How much do physicists think about possibility?
Well, I think about in terms of probability more often, but probability just describes
And again, this is a place where I'm might be out of my depth and need to talk to somebody to, to debunk this but the
do therapy with a
physicist. Yeah. But probability, it seems just describes a pattern of actuality that we've observed right. Me. We have their certain things we observe and those are the actual things that have happened and we have this additional story about probability. It means that we have the frequency with which things happen have happened in the past.
You know, I can flip a Fair coin and know I know in the abstract that I have a belief that in the limit, those flips, those tosses should Converge on, 50% heads, and 50% Tails, I know I have a story as to why it's not going to be exactly 50% within any arbitrary time frame.
But in reality, all we ever have are the observed tosses.
Right? And then we have an additional story that so it came up heads but it could have come up tails.
Why do we think that?
About that last toss.
What and what do we claiming is true about the physics of things if we say it could have been otherwise,
I think we're claiming that probability is true.
That that just allows us to have a nice model about the
world gives us. Hope me out the world. Yeah, it seems that possibility has to be somewhere to be effective. It's a little bit, like, what's happening with the laws of there's something metaphysically interesting about the laws of nature, to it, because the laws of nature. So, the laws of nature impose their their work on the world, right? We see their evidence, but they're not reducible to any specific set of
Is right? So there's some structure there, but the structure isn't just a matter of the actual things with the actual billiard balls that are banging into each other. All of that actuality can be explained by what actual things are actually doing. But then we have this notion that in addition to that, we have the laws of nature that are making their explaining this act. But but how are the laws of nature an additional thing in addition to just the actual things that are actually affect costly and it,
If they're, if they are additional thing in, how are they effective if they're not among the actual things that are just actually banging around? Yeah, and so, to some degree for that
possum, possibly has to be hiding somewhere for the laws of nature to be possible
like anything to be possible. It has to be, it has, how
was it somewhere? I'm sure. It's where all the
possibility go, it has to be attached to something. So
you don't think many worlds is that what
was me?
It was it still exists? Because we're in this strand of that. Multiverse. Yeah, right. So it's still still. You have just a local instance of what is actual? Yeah. And then if it proliferates elsewhere where you can't be affected by it, many worlds as
well you can't really connect with the
other. Yeah. Yeah and so many worlds are just a statement of
Basically everything that can happen happens somewhere and that's you know, and that's I mean maybe that's not entirely kosher formulation of it, but it seems pretty close. So so but there's whatever happens, right? In fact there's, you know, relativistically there's a
There's a, you know, the the Einsteins original notion of a block Universe seems to suggest this. And I, it's been a while since I've been in a conversation with a physicist where I've got a chance to ask about the standing of this concept in physics. Currently, I don't hear it discuss much but the idea of a block universe is that, you know, space-time exists as a totality just like in our sense that we are traveling through space time, where there's a real difference between the past and the future that
Is an illusion of just are, you know?
you know, weird, the weird weird slice, we're taking of this larger object but on some level
It's like, you know, you're reading a novel. The last page of the novel exists just as much as the first page you when you're in the middle of it. And they're just, you know, if that's if we're living in anything like that, then there's no such thing as possibility. I would, it would seem this just what is actual? So as a matter of our experience moment to moment,
I think it's totally compatible with that being true that there is only what is actual and that sounds to the naive ear. That sounds like it would be depressing and disempowering and confining but as anything but it's actually it's a circumstance of pure Discovery. Like you have no idea what's going to happen next. You don't know who you're going to be tomorrow. You're only by tendency seeming to resemble yourself.
Cough from yesterday and there's way more freedom, and all of that, then then it's seems true to many people. And yet the basic Insight is that you're not, you're not in the real, freedom, is the recognition that you're not in control of anything. Everything is just happening, including your thoughts, and intentions and moves.
So, life is a process of continuous
Discovery, your part of the universe. Yeah, you are. You are just
This it's it's the miracle that the the universe is illuminated to itself as itself where you sit and you're and you're continually discovering what your life is and then your you have this layer at which you're telling yourself a story that you already know what your life is, and you know, exactly, you know who you should be and what school, you know, what's about to happen, or you're struggling to form a confident opinion about all of that. And yet there,
Is this fundamental mystery to everything. Even the most familiar experience, we're
all NPC's in a most marvelous video game.
Maybe I'll do my game. My sense of gaming is, does not run as deep as to know what I'm committing to. There is an on button on plane character.
You're more. Yeah, not the
whole. Yes, they're more. You're more of a Mario Kart guy. Yeah, I went that I wasn't an original video gamer, but it's been a long time since I. I'm I was I was there for pain.
I remember when I saw the first pong in a restaurant and I think was like Benihana's or something, they had a bong and it table and that was an amazing was that amazing moment when
he's you Sam Harris my live from pong to the invention and deployment of a super intelligent
system. Well that happened fast. If it happens any time in my lifetime from from pong
to a GI, what kind of things do you do purely for fun to others might consider a waste of time.
Purely for fun because
meditation doesn't count. Because most people would say that's not a waste of time. Is there something like pong? That's a deeply embarrassing thing you would never admit.
I don't that well, I mean once or twice a year, I will play a round of golf which many people would find embarrassing. They might even find my play embarrassing but
it's do you find it
embarrassing? No, I mean I love a golfers takes way too much time.
So I can only squander a certain amount of time on it and I do love it. It's a lot of fun.
We have no control over your actual perform as your ever
discovering. I do I do have a control over my mediocre performance but it's a I don't have enough control is to make it really good, but happily I don't I I'm in the perfect spot because I don't invest enough time and it to care how I play. So I just have fun and play.
Well, I hope they'll be a day where you play around golf with the former President, Donald Trump. And I
would
Love you, I would bet on him. If we play golf I'm sure he's in Better golfer
amidst the chaos of human civilization in modern times as we've talked about what gives you hope about this world in the coming year in the coming decade in the coming hundred years, maybe a thousand years. What's the source of Hope for you?
Well, it comes back to a few things we've talked about, Matt. I think I'm, I'm hopeful that I know that most people are good and are mostly converging on the same core values rights, like, we're not surrounded by Psychopaths and
The thing that finally convinced me to get off Twitter was how different life was seeming through the lens of Twitter. It's like, I just got the sense that there's one other way. More psychopaths are effective Psychopaths and I realized and then I thought. Okay, that's this isn't real. This is this is either a strange context in which actually decent people are behaving like Psychopaths or it's you know it's a bot army or something. That I know if it takes
Seriously. So yeah, I just think most people.
If we can get the, if we can get the incentives, right? I think there's no reason why we can't really Thrive collectively, like there's enough wealth to go around. There's enough, you know, that there's no
there's no effective limit, you know, I mean, even within the limits of what's physically possible, but we're nowhere near the limit on abundance, you know on this forget about going to Mars on this the one rock rights like we we could make this place incredibly beautiful and stable if we just did enough work to
Solve some, you know, you know, rather long-standing political problems
in the problem of incentives. So the to you that the basic characteristics of human nature, such that will be okay if the incentives are okay, we'll do it. We'll do pretty good.
I'm worried about the asymmetry is that it was easier to break things into fix them. It's easier to to light a fire, then to put it out and
I do worry that, you know, as technology gets more and more powerful, it becomes easier for the minority, who wants to screw things up to effectively, screw things up for everybody, right? So it's easier is like a thousand years ago. It was simply impossible for one person to deranged the lives of millions much less billions.
Now that's getting to be possible. So, on the assumption that we're always going to have a sufficient number of crazy individuals or
Malevolent individuals. It's it's that as we have to figure out that asymmetry somehow. And so there's some cautious exploration of emergent technology that we need to get our head screwed on straight about it. So, like so gain-of-function research, like just, how much do we want to democratize? You know, all the relevant Technologies there and do we want really, really want to give everyone the ability to order.
Nucleotides in the mail and and give them the blueprints for viruses online because of, you know, you're free speech absolutist. And you think all PDFs need to be, you know, exportable everywhere, I'm so much more. So this is where. Yeah so there are limits to how many people are confused about my take on Free Speech because I've come down on on, on the unpopular side of some of these questions, but
It's been my overriding concern is that, in many cases, I'm worried about the free speech of individual businesses or individual platforms, or individual media people to decide that they don't want to be associated with certain things, right? So like if you own Twitter, I think you should be able to kick off the not so you don't want to be associated with because it's your platform. You want it, right? That's your free speech, right? That's the side of my free speech concern for Twitter, right? It's not that every Nazi has
Right to, to be to algorithmic, speech on Twitter. I think if you own Twitter you should you or the, you know, whether it's just Ilan, or in the world where it wasn't Ilan, just the people who own Twitter, the, and the board and the shareholders and the employees, these people needed can should be free to decide what they want to promote, or not, their public eye, view them as Publishers more, you know, more than a Platforms in the end and
that has other implications but I do worry about this problem of misinformation and algorithmically and otherwise, you know, supercharged misinformation and
I think I do think we have it. We're at a bottleneck. Now I'm I guess it's could be the hubris of every present generation to think that their moment is especially important, but I do think with the emergence of these Technologies were some kind of bottleneck where we really have to figure out how to get this, right? And if we do get this right, if we figure out how to not drive ourselves Crazy by giving people access to all the all possible and information misinformation at all times.
I think, yeah we could there's no limit to how happily we could collaborate with billions of creative fulfilled people. You know it's
just and trillions of robots, some of them sex robots,
but there's another just robots that have running the right algorithm, whatever that algorithm is
whatever you need in your life to make you happy. So I'm I was the first time we talked is one of the huge honors of my life. I've been a fan of yours for a long time.
I'm the few times you were respectful but critical to me means the world and thank you so much for helping helping me and caring enough and caring enough about the world and for everything you do. But I should say that the few of us that try to put love in the world on Twitter. Miss you on Twitter but
this enjoy yourselves. Don't break don't break anything else. Have a good party without me. Thanks a lot. Very, very happy to do this. Thanks, thanks for the invitation. Thank you, great to
see you again.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Sam Harris. Support this podcast, please. Check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Martin Luther King jr. Love is the only Force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
