Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs | Lex Fridman Podcast #365

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 Moral Landscape, Lying, the Free Will, and Waking Up. In this conversation, besides our mutual fascination with AGI and free will, we do also go deep into controversial, challenging topics of Donald Trump, Hunter Biden, January 6, 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 have become friends of mine somehow in an amazing life trajectory that I do not deserve in any way and in fact believe is probably a figment of my imagination. And if it's alright, please allow me to say a few words about this personal aspect of the conversation of discussing Joe Elon 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 stopped 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, they start being friends again, they start noticing the humanity that connects them that 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 am 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 and mainstream, sometimes with humor, sometimes with brutal honesty, always pushing for 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 of conventional thinking that made the solutions to these problems seem 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, from which I always learn a lot and always appreciate. Most importantly, there is respect and love for each other as human 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 deride. 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. In whatever way I know how, I love you all. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Sam Harris. 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 are at least two kinds of empathy. There's the cognitive form, which is, I would argue, even a species of reason. It's just understanding another person's point of view. You understand why they're suffering or why they're happy, or you have a theory of mind about another human being that is is accurate and so 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 a kind of emotional contagion, right? Like you feel depressed and I begin to feel depressed along with you because it's contagious, right? We're so close and I'm so concerned about you and you. 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, this is something I have more or less learned from Paul Bloom, the psychologist who wrote a book on this topic titled Against Empathy. The emotional social contagion piece is a bad guide rather often for ethical behavior and ethical intuitions.

Oh boy.

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. So if I tell you this is the classic case of the little girl who falls down a well. 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. This was 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 72 hours or whatever it was of continuous coverage of just 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 marshals 100% of our compassion and altruistic impulse. Whereas if you hear that there's a genocide raging in some country you've never been to and never intend to go to and the numbers don't make a dent and we find the story boring, will change the channel in the face of a genocide. Right. It doesn't matter. And it literally, perversely, it could be 500,000 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 empathy 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 valuing 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 tangents 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'd rather live in a world where you care about maybe your daughter and son, more than a hundred people that live across the world. Something like this, where the calculus is not always perfect, but somehow it makes sense to live in a 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. So the opposition is between an ethic that's articulated by someone like the Dalai Lama or really any exponent of classic Buddhism would say that the ultimate enlightened ethic is true dispassion with respect to friends and strangers, so that you would. Would the mind of the Buddha would 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 failure to fully actualize compassion in the limit or enlightened wisdom in the limit, to care more or even much more about your kids than the kids of other people and to prioritize your. Your energy in that way. So you spend all this time trying to figure out how to Keep your kids healthy and happy and you'll attend to their minutest concerns and however superficial. And again, there's a genocide raging in 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 laws and other structures that force us to be dispassionate, where that matters. So when I go to. When my daughter gets sick and I have to take her to a hospital, I really want her to get attention. 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've bribed the guy at the door or whatever, or the guy's a fan of my podcast or whatever. The thing is, you don't want starkly corrupt, unfair situations. And when you sort of get pressed down the hierarchy of Maslow's needs, you know, individually and societally, a bunch of those variables change and they change for the worse, understandably. But yeah, when everyone's corrupt and you're in a state of collective emergency, you know, you've got a lifeboat problem. You're scrambling to get into the lifeboat. Yeah. Then fairness and norms and 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'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, too. And we know that, generally speaking, just in game theoretic terms, we're all going to tend to be better off in a fair system than a corrupt one.

One of the failure modes of empathy is our susceptibility to anecdotal data. Just a good story will get us to not think clearly. But 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, red and blue, half the population believes 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, trying to understand where they're coming from, not just in the explicit statement of their idea, but the entirety of the roots from which their idea stems. That kind of empathy, while you're discussing ideas, what is in your pursuit of truth? Having empathy for the perspective of a large number of other people versus raw.

Mathematical reason, I think it's important, but it only takes you so far, right? It doesn't get you to truth. Right. Truth is not decided by democratic principles. And certain people believe things for understandable reasons, but those reasons are nonetheless bad reasons. Right? They don't scale, they don't generalize, they're not reasons anyone should adopt for themselves or respect epistemologically. And yet their circumstance is understandable and it's something you can care about. So, yeah, I think there's many examples of this that you might be thinking of, but one that comes to mind is 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 patently obvious who he was. If there had been any doubt initially, there was no doubt when we have a sitting president who's not agreeing to a peaceful transfer of power. 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 might just be able to change things because he's so unconventional and so his heart is in the right place. He's really a man of the people, even though he's a 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 many other current trends, it's understandable that they would be confused and not see the liability of electing a grossly incompetent, morbidly narcissistic person into the the presidency. Which is to say that I don't blame. There are many, many millions of people who I don't necessarily blame for the Trump phenomenon, but I can Nonetheless, bemoan the phenomenon as indicative of very bad state of affairs in our society. So there's two levels to it. 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, are likely to happen or not. But then you can recognize that people have very different life experiences. And yeah, I mean, I think empathy, and probably the better word for what I would hope to embody there is compassion. Right. To really wish people well and to really wish strangers well, effortlessly wish them well. I mean, to realize that there is no opposition between, at bottom, there's no real opposition between selfishness and selflessness because wise selfishness really takes into account other people's happiness. I mean, 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 pushback, the other perspective on this, because you said bought the myth of Trump as a great businessman, there 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 chaos agent, Trump, who speaks off the top of his head, yeah, he's flawed in all this number of ways. He's a more comedian than he is a presidential type of figure. And, 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 they got running on everybody else. So that's, yeah, that's the 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. So I haven't bought the myth that it's a truly representative democracy in the way that we might idealize. And on some level, I mean, this is a different conversation, but on some level, I'm not even sure how much I think it should be. Right. 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 are 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. 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 aside the viability of democracy, I'm under no illusions that all of our institutions are worth preserving precisely as they have been up until the moment this great orange wrecking ball came swinging through our lives. But it was a very bad bet to elect someone who is grossly incompetent and worse than incompetent, genuinely malevolent in his selfishness. And this is something we know based on literally decades of him being in the public eye. Right. He's not a public servant in any normal sense of that term. And he couldn't possibly give an honest or sane answer to the question you asked me about empathy and reason and what should guide us. I genuinely think he is missing some necessary moral and psychological tools. And 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 knowing what all that's about, that's really the good stuff in life. And I think he's missing a lot of that. But I think we don't want to promote people to the highest positions of power in our society who are far outliers in pathological terms. We want them to be far outliers in the best case, in wisdom and compassion and some of the topics you've brought up, I mean, 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 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's like, just take honesty as a single variable. Right. I think you want. Yes, it's 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. It's 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, arguably, there's never been a person that anyone could name in human history who's lied with that kind of velocity. I mean, he was just a blizzard of lies, great and small, pointless and effective. But. 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 half of the society who didn't see it that way. And that's going to sound elitist and smug or something for anyone who's on that side listening to me, but it's genuine. I mean, I understand that I barely have the, I'm like one of the luckiest people in the world and 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. So how much less bandwidth is somebody who's working two jobs or a single mom who's raising multiple kids? Even a single kid? It's unimaginable to me that people have the bandwidth to really track this stuff. And so then they jump on social media and they get inundated by misinformation and they see what their favorite influencer just said and now they're worried about vaccines. And it's just we're living in an environment where the information space has become so corrupted and we've built machines to further corrupt it. We've built a business model for the Internet that it further corrupts it. So it is just, it's chaos in informational terms. And I don't fault people for being confused and impatient at their wit's end. And yes, Trump was an enormous fuck you to the establishment. And 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 and I would love you to steel man the case for it. And against that Trump broke Sam Harris's brain, that there is something is disproportionately to the actual impact that Trump had on our society. He had an impact on the. On the ability of balanced, calm, rational minds to see the world clearly, to think clearly. You being one of the beacons of that. Is there. Is there a degree to which he broke your brain? Well, otherwise known as Trump derangements medical condition.

Yeah, I think Trump Derangement syndrome is a. Is a very clever meme because it, it just throws the problem back on the person who's criticizing Trump. But in truth, 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 to not. And 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. If that wasn't a bright line for you, you have been deranged by something, because that was, you know, that was one minute to midnight for our democracy, as far as I'm concerned, and I think it really was, but for the integrity of a few people that we didn't suffer some real constitutional crisis and real emergency, you know, after January 6th. I mean, if Mike Pence had caved in and decided to not certify the election. Right. Literally, you can count on two hands the number of people who held things together at that moment. So it wasn't for want of trying on Trump's part that we didn't succumb to some real, 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, but you didn't. And so, you know, the fact that you're adrenalized and you're thinking, you know, oh, boy, that was dangerous. I probably shouldn't, you know, you know, wander 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 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, against the number of podcasts I devoted to other topics. But there are people who look at Trump and just find him funny, entertaining, not especially threatening. It's just good fun to see somebody who's just not taking anything seriously, and it's just putting 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? It doesn't really matter if we don't support NATO. It doesn't really matter if he says he trusts Putin more than our intelligence services. I mean, none of this. It doesn't matter if he's, on the one hand, saying that he loves the leader of North Korea, and on the other, threatens to bomb them back to the Stone Age, right? On Twitter. It all can be taken in the spirit of kind of reality television. It's like, 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 the deeper concern that we're in the process of entertaining ourselves to death, that we're just not taking things seriously. And this is a problem I've had with several other people we might name who 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.

And.

And we need, you know, it's not to say 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. The fact that trust has eroded for good reason, right? That they have become less trustworthy. You know, they've become infected by, you know, political ideologies that are not truth tracking. I mean, I worry about all of that, but I just think the. 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 on 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, and I try to telegraph that a fair amount with people. So, yeah, I mean, but it's, 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 in 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 strong opinion, that was this counter to the expert you have in front of you, it's 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 read 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 at some point unravel that, because it's the basis for a lot of public confusion. And frankly, it's the basis for a lot of criticism I've received on these topics where people think that I'm against free speech or I'm an establishment shill, or it's like, I just think I'm a credentialist. I just think People with PhDs from Ivy League universities should run everything. It's not true, but there's a ton of conf. 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 intensity 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 that our democracy is actually pretty fragile and that 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 in 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 pushback with Trump is he was doing none of that. He was creating what he's very good at, creating drama, sometimes for humor's sake, sometimes for drama's 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, I don't think he's a truly scary, sinister Putin like, or much less Hitler like figure. Not at all. I mean, 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 totalitarian. Right.

He's more Brave new world than 1984.

This is what Eric Weinstein never stops badgering me about. But he's still wrong. Eric. My analogy for Trump was that he's an evil Chauncey Gardner. I don't know if you remember the, the book or the film, being there with Peter Sellars, but Peter Sellars is this gardener who really doesn't know anything. But he gets recognized as this wise man and he gets promoted to immense power in Washington because he's speaking in a semblance of wisdom. He's got these very simple aphorisms or what seem to be aphorisms. He's just talking. All he cares about is garden. And 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, will bloom and people read into that some kind of genius, you know, insight politically. And so he gets promoted. And so that's the joke of the film for me. Trump has always been someone like an evil Chauncey Gardner. I mean, he's, he's, it's not to say he's totally. 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 a kind of self promotion that only works if you actually are truly shameless and don't care about having a reputation for anything that I or you would want to have a reputation for. Right. It's like it's the pure pornography of attention and he just wants more of it. I think the truly depressing and genuinely scary thing was that we have a country that 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 obviously doesn't know what he should know to be president and who's obviously not a good person, who obviously doesn't care about people, can't even pretend to care about people, really, in a credible way. And so, I mean, if there's a silver lining to this, 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, I think we are. We really dodged a bullet. Yes. Someone far more competent and conniving and ideological could have exploited our system in a way that Trump didn't. 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. I mean, one of the things we realized, and I think nobody knew. I mean, 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.

Yeah. Civility, almost.

Yeah. It's just like, it's quite possible that he never did anything illegal, you know, truly illegal. I mean, 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 was just 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 illegal for a sitting president to say, no, I'm not going to commit to a peaceful transfer of power. We'll wait and see whether I win. If I win, the election was valid. If I lose, it was fraudulent. Right.

But aren't those humorous 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 discussions.

That wasn't a humorous perturbation because he did everything he could. Granted, he 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 not be counted. As the evening wore on, knowing that they were going to be disproportionately Democrat votes because of the, you know, 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 that crashed into, you know, Four Seasons landscaping. Right. And you got Rudy Giuliani with his hair dye, and you got Sidney 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 largely Republican election officials and Republican judges. It 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 competent. So he didn't do everything he could.

Well, no, he did everything he could. He didn't do everything that could have been done by someone more competent.

Right. But the tools you have as a president, you could do a lot of things. You can declare emergencies, especially during 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 ways to.

Well, but he tried to do things, and he would have to have done those things through other people. And they're people who refuse to do those things. They're people who said they would quit, they would quit publicly. Right. I mean, there are multiple books written about the last hours of this presidency, and the details are shocking in what he tried to do and tried to get others to do. And it's awful, right? I mean, it's just awful that we were that close to something, to a true unraveling of our political process. I mean, it's the only time in our lifetime that anything like this has happened. And it was deeply embarrassing. Right on the world stage. It's just like we looked like a banana republic there for a while, and we're the lone superpower. It's not good. And so we shouldn't. The people who thought, well, we just need to shake things up, and this is a great way to shake things up. And having people storm our capital and smear shit on the walls, that's just more shaking things up. It's all just for the lulls. There's a nihilism and cynicism to all of that, which, again, in certain people, it's understandable, frankly, it's not understandable if you've got a billion dollars and you have a compound in Menlo park or wherever, it's like there are people who are 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 in New Zealand if everything goes to shit. Right. So there's a cynicism to all of that that I think we should be deeply critical of.

What I'm trying to understand is not and analyze is not the behavior of this particular human being, but the effect it had in part on the division between people. As to me, the degree the meme of Sam Harris's 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 personality cult of Trumpism. There's nothing that I'm going to say to. There's no conversation I'm going to have with Candace Owens say about Trump that's going to converge on something reasonable. Right.

You don't think so?

No. I haven't tried with Candace, but I've tried with many people who are in that particular orbit. 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, because when you operate in the space of reason. Yes, but I think there's a lot of power in you, showing in you, Sam Harris, showing that you're willing to see the good qualities of Trump publicly showing that. I think that's the way to win over.

But he has so few of them. He has fewer good qualities than virtually anyone I can name. Right. So he's funny. I'll grant you that. He's funny. He's a good entertainer.

There's others. Look at just policies and actual impacts he had.

I've admitted that. No, no. So I've admitted that many of his policies. I agree with many, many of his policies. So probably more often than not, at least on balance, I agree. So I agree. I agreed with his policy that we should take China seriously as an adversary. Right. And I think, again, there's a lot of fine print to a lot of this, because the way he talks about these things and many of his motives that are obvious are things that I don't support. But take immigration, I think it's obvious that we should have control of our borders. 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 didn't necessarily think it was a priority to build the wall, but I never criticized the impulse to build the wall because if tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people are coming across that border and we are not in a position to know who's coming, that seems untenable to me. And I can recognize that many people in our society are, on balance the victims of immigration. And there is in many cases a zero sum contest between the interests of actual citizens and the interests of immigrants. So I think we should have control of our borders. We should have a sane and compassionate immigration policy. We should let in refugees. Right. So I did, 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 I 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 fundamental way.

The issue is largely what you said it was. It's 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 sullying and compromising the integrity of almost anyone who comes into his orbit. I mean, so you looked at these people who served as chief of staff or in various cabinet positions. People had real reputations for probity and level headedness, whether you shared their politics or not. I mean, these were real people, these were not, some of them were goofballs, but many people who, 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 bad for them and it was bad for our system. And, but none of that discounts the fact that we have a system that really needs proper house cleaning. Yes, there are bad incentives and entrenched interests. And I'm not a fan of the concept of the deep state because it has been so propagandized. But yes, there's something like that 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 hugely Important, right? 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, 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's like it predates his presidency. We knew this guy 30 years ago. And. And this is why, to come back to 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 laptop is that there is, 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? I mean, 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 scale of corruption can't possibly balance out between the two of them. If you show me that Joe Biden has this secret life where he's driving a Bugatti and he's living like Andrew Tate, right, And 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 realize. Maybe there is some deal in Ukraine or with China that is just like, this guy's 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 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 not at all what it seems, but on the assumption that having looked at this guy for literally decades, right, and knowing that every journalist has looked at him for decades, just how many affairs is he having, just how many drugs is he doing, how many houses does he have? What are the obvious conflicts of interest? You hold that against what we know about Trump. And I mean, the litany of indiscretions you can put on Trump's side that testify to his personal corruption, to testify to the fact that he has no ethical compass. There's simply no comparison. So that's why I don't care about what's on the laptop now, if you tell me Trump is no longer running for President in 2024 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 Biden 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 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 that might involve sort of. So the actual quote is, Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in the basement. There's a dark humor to it, right? Which is, I think you speak to. I would not have cared. There's nothing. It's Hunter Biden. 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 that masquerades in the thing we mentioned, which is civility. 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 it has on the world and that, you know, the military industrial complex. Everybody's very nice, everybody's very civil, just very upfront. Here's how we're spending the money. Yeah, it 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. In the meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of civilians die. Hate, 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 Coke on a laptop. So.

Yeah, but it's not just superficial. It is when you, when someone only wants wealth and power and fame, that is their, their objective function. Right. They're 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're just tracking fame and money and whatever can personally redound to their self interest along those lines. And they're not informed about the other risks we're running. Really. I mean, 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 button. Right. I mean, he's got. Somebody's following him around with a bag, waiting to take his order to, to launch. Right. That is a. It's a risk we should never run. One thing Trump has going for him, I think, is that he doesn't drink or do drugs. Right. Although people allege that he does speed. But let's take him at his word. He's not deranging himself with pharmaceuticals at least, but apart from Diet Coke.

But there's nothing wrong. Just for the record, let me push back on that. There's nothing wrong.

There's nothing wrong with Diet Coke. Yeah.

Very large amounts.

I occasionally have some myself.

There's no medical, there's no scientific evidence that I observed the negatives of, you know, all those studies about aspartame and all that. This. No, I don't know.

I'd like. I hope, I hope you're right. Yeah. I mean, everything you said about the military industrial complex is true. Right. And 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 Eisenhower. 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? So it's like, at minimum, you want reasonably good people, at least non pathological people 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. 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 successfully incentivized to behave that way. Right. 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 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. You know, more likely a fool's errand. Right. I was like that would, you know, it did not turn out well. 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. I mean, maybe it's just. Maybe that's not the kind of thing that can be done well by anybody, whatever our intentions. But yeah, the move to 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, you know, so. Yes, but my, my sense of the possibility of nation building, my sense of, of, you know, in. So insofar as the, the, the neocon spirit of, of, you know, 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 have to get in there and untangle some of these knots by force rather often, because 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, You're not going to force a change at gunpoint in the culture or 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 war is there's not going to be a strong signal that things are not working. You can just keep pouring money into a thing, a military effort.

Well, also, there are signs of it working, too. 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 religious maniacs. And then we come in there and we stop that. And now girls are getting educated and there's a. And that's all good. And our intentions are good there and I mean, we're on the right side of history there. Good girls should be going to school. You know, Malala Yosef Sai should have the Nobel Prize, and she shouldn't have been shot in the face 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 seventh 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 Jack Dorsey jokingly had for a while, the discussion about banning Donald Trump from Twitter. But does any of it bother you now that Twitter files came out, that this has to do with sort of the Hunter laptop, Hunter Biden laptop story? Does it bother you that there could be a collection of people that make decisions about who to ban or not, and. And that that could be susceptible to bias and to ideological influence?

Well, I think it always will be. Or in the absence of perfect AI, it always will be.

And this becomes relevant with AI as well, because there's some censorship on AI happening. And it's an interesting question there as well.

I don't think Twitter is as 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 it's. I mean, first, let me say it's just an unambiguously good thing, in my experience, to delete your Twitter account. Right. It's like. It is just. Even the good parts of Twitter that I miss were bad in the aggregate. The degree to which it was fragmenting my attention, the degree to which my life was getting doled out to me in periods between those moments where I checked Twitter. Right. And had my attention diverted. And I was not a crazy Twitter addict. I mean, I was probably a pretty normal user. I mean, I was not someone who was tweeting multiple times a day or even every day. Right. I think I probably averaged something like one tweet a day. I think I averaged. But in reality, it was like it'd be like four tweets one day, and then I wouldn't tweet for, you know, the better part of a week. 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 wanted 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. That I would thought I should signal boost. I would tweet. And so all of that seemed good. And like that's all separable from all of the odious bullshit that came back at me in response to this, largely in response to this Hunter Biden thing. But even the good stuff has a downside. And it comes at just this point of your phone is this perpetual stimulus which is intrinsically fragmenting of time and attention. And now my phone is much less of a presence in my life. And it's not that I don't check Slack or check email, 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 and the things that I think, I mean, we all know this phenomenon. We say of someone, that person's too online. What does it mean to be too online? And where do you draw that boundary? How do you know what constitutes being too online? Well, in some sense, just being, I think being on social media at all is to be too online. I mean, given what it does to, given the kinds of information it signal boosts and given the impulse it kindles in each of us to reach out to our audience 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 months 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 somebody did.

What do you do with that thought now?

I just let go of it.

Like, chocolate ice cream is the most delicious thing ever.

It's usually not that sort of thing, but it's just. But then you look at the kinds of problems people create for themselves. You look at the life deranging and reputation destroying things that people do. And I look at the things 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 Decade. So much of it is Twitter. I mean, honestly, in my case, almost 100% of it was Twitter. The controversies I would get into, the things I would think I would have to respond to in a pod, like I would release a podcast on a certain topic. I would see some blowback on Twitter. 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 not something I had to respond to, but yet I would then do a cycle of podcasts responding to that thing that, like taking my foot out of my mouth or taking someone else's foot out of my mouth. And it became this self perpetuating cycle, which, I mean, if you're having fun, great. I mean, if it's generative of useful information and engagement professionally and psychologically, great. But. And there was some of that on Twitter. I mean, there were people who I connected with because I just. One of us DM'd 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 the 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 attacks, 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.

You want it to have debate.

I wanted to actually communicate with people. I wanted to hear from the person. Because again, it's like being in Afghanistan, right? It's like there are the, the potted cases where it's obviously good, right? It's like in Afghanistan, the girl who's getting an education, that is just here. That's why we're here. That's obviously good. I have 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. No, the sane or Sanity preserving way of using it 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. I'm on other social media platforms that I don't even touch. I mean, my team posts 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 not let it affect your mind?

No, that's definitely possible. But the question is, and I did that for vast stretches of time, right? 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 1 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 funhouse mirror of acrimony and dishonesty that is going to. I mean, the reason why I got off is not because I couldn't recalibrate and find equanimity again with all the nastiness that was 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, a 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. Like people, mutual friends of ours who are behaving in certain ways on Twitter, which just seem insane to me. And then that became a signal I felt like I had to take into account somehow. Right. You're seeing people at their worst, both friends and strangers. And 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 themselves or you're seeing people at their worst. And so I felt like, all right, what's being advertised to me here on a, not just a daily basis, an hourly basis, or an increment sometimes of multiple times an hour. I mean, I probably checked Twitter at minimum 10 times a day, and maybe I was checking it 100 times a day on some days where 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 was like. It was. 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 at dinner with and they would never behave this way. And yet they were. They were coming at me on Twitter. And I mean, it's essentially turning ordinary people into sociopaths, right? Like, people are just, you know, it's their analogies that many of us have made. It's 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 and moving at speed. And all of that becomes quite hilarious and obviously dysfunctional when they actually have to stop at the light next to the person they just flipped off and they realized they didn't understand that the person coming out of that car next to them with cauliflower ear 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, realized this. 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, be everything from snarky to downright, yeah, mean, derisive towards each other. It doesn't make any sense. Like this. This is the only place where I've seen people I really admire who have had a calm head about most things, like, really be shitty to other people. It's probably the only place I've seen that. And I. I don't. I tend. I 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 you're going to shoot your friends. Yeah, yeah, you're going to shoot your friends. But you kind of accepted the. 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.

Well, and I think I was guilty of that, definitely. I don't think. 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 snideness somehow, and it's just not healthy. So the reason why I deleted my Twitter account in the end was that it was obviously making me a worse person. And. Yeah. Is there some Way to be on there where it's not making you a 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 use it as a one way channel of communication, just marketing. It's like, here's what I'm paying attention to. Look at it if you want to, and you just push it out and then you don't look at what's coming back at you.

I put out a call 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 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 ask.

I can't imagine this part of it. I mean, one way to solve this is, you know, we got to get rid of anonymity for this.

It's like, let me ask the question. Ask Sam why he sucks was the question.

That's good. Well, one reason why I sucked was Twitter. That was. And I've since solved that problem. So, I mean, touch ball 69. Touch ball 69 should be happy that I suck a little bit less now that I'm off Twitter. I mean, I 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 negative effect is slightly losing faith in the underlying kindness of humanity.

Yeah, that was for me. Yeah.

You can also just reason your way out of it, saying that this is anonymity and this is kind of fun and this kind of just the, the show 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, it's just, that's just trolling and it's, you know, I, I get what's. I, I get. I understand the fun the person is having. On the other side of that, it's like.

Do you though?

I do. Well, I do. I don't. I mean, 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, it's like it could be.

Also an Alticon for Elon. I don't know.

Well, yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. No I'm pretty sure Elon would just tweet that, you know, under his own name at this point, and.

But you know each other. Okay, so the. Do you think. So, speaking of which, now that Elon 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, like, in.

The next five years?

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 were just observing yourself week by week, seeing the effect as on your mind and on how much you're actually learning and growing as a person. And it was negative.

Yeah. And I also seen the negativity in other people's lives. I mean, it's obviously. I mean, he's not going. He's not going to admit it, but I think it's obviously negative for Elon. Right. 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 Funhaus mirror on his side of Twitter, and it was just even more exaggerated. It's like when I was asking myself, why is he spending his time this way? I then reflected on, why was I spending my time this way to a lesser degree and at lesser scale and at lesser risk, frankly. And it was just. So it's not just Twitter. This is, in part, an Internet phenomenon. Like the whole Hunter Biden mess that you explored, that was based on. I mean, I was on somebody's podcast, but that was based on a clip taken from that podcast, which was highly misleading as to the general shape of my remarks on that podcast. I had to then do my own podcast, untangling all of that and admitting that even in the full context, I was not speaking especially well and didn't say exactly what I thought in a way that would have been recognizable to anyone, even someone with. Not functioning by a spirit of charity. But the clip was quite distinct from the podcast itself. The reality is that we're living in an environment now where people are so lazy and their attention is so fragmented that they only have time for clips. 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, doing it quite maliciously. And in this case, the person who made that clip and subsequent clips of other podcasts was quite maliciously trying to engineer, you know, some reputational immolation 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 when it's their friend or someone who's ostensibly their friend in that clip, right? So it's a total failure, an understandable failure of ethics that everyone is so short on time and they're so fucking lazy that they're. And that we now have these contexts in which we react so quickly to things, right? Like Twitter is inviting an instantaneous reaction to this clip that it's just too tempting to just say something and not know what you're even commenting on. And most of the people who saw that clip don't understand 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.

See, 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 and so on, just knowing that you have a sense of humor, you. We 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 use it for virality's sake. But the giving, giving a person benefit of the doubt, that's not even the right term. It's not like I was, it was really like interpreting it in the context of your past.

The truth is, you even need, like, I even give Trump the benefit of the doubt when I see a clip of Trump, because there are 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 were good people on both sides scandal around his remarks after Charlottesville, the clip that got exported and got promoted by everyone, you know, left of center from Biden on down, you know, the New York Times, cnn. There's nobody that I'm aware of who has honestly, you know, apologized for what they did with that clip. He did not say what he seemed to be saying in that clip about the Nazis at Charlottesville. Right. And I 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 for bad reasons. I think we should be honest about what they actually meant in context. Right. And this goes to anyone else, we might talk about where the case is much more confusing. But, yeah, so everyone's. It's just so. And then I'm sure we're going to get to AI, 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 to even figure out whether they're in the presence of something real. Forget about being divorced from context. There was no context. I mean, that's a misinformation apocalypse. That is, we are right on the cusp of. And, you know, it's. That's terrifying.

Or it could be just a new world, like we're Alice going to Wonderland, where humor is the only thing we have and it will save us. Maybe in the end, Trump's approach to social media was the right one. After all, nothing is true and everything's absurd.

Yeah, but we can't live that way. People function on the basis of what they assume is true. Right. They think people have functioned to do anything. It's like, I mean, you have to know what you think is going to happen, or you have to at least give a probabilistic weighting 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 gratified. 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, it's going to matter. Because it comes down to, like, what medicines do you give your children? Right. Like, we're going to be manufacturing fake journal articles. I mean, this is. I'm sure someone's using ChatGPT for this as we speak. And if it's not credible, if it's not persuasive now to most people, I mean, honestly, I don't think we're going to. This is. I'll be amazed if it's a year before we can actually create journal Articles that would take, you know, a PhD to debunk that are completely fake. And there are people who are celebrating this kind of, you know, coming cataclysm, but it's just they're the people who have anything to lose who are celebrating it or just are so confused that they just don't even know what's at stake. And then there are the people who have met the few people who we could count on a few hands who have managed to insulate themselves or at least imagine they've insulated 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 actually that returns us to experts. Do you think experts can save us? Is there such thing as expertise and experts in something? How do you know if you've achieved it?

I think it's important to acknowledge up front that there's something paradoxical about how we relate to authority, especially within science. And I don't think that paradox is going away and it doesn't have to be confusing and 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, within rationality generally, I mean, just whenever you're making, 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. So it doesn't matter if you're a Nobel laureate, you can be wrong. The thing you could, the last sentence you spoke could be total bullshit. And it's also possible for someone who's deeply uninformed to be right about something, or to be right for the wrong reasons, or someone just gets lucky. And there are middling cases where you have a backyard astronomer who's got no credentials, but he just loves astronomy and he's got a telescope and he spends a lot of time looking at the night sky and he discovers a comet that no one else has seen, not even the professional expert astronomers. I got to think that happens less and less now, but some version of that keeps happening, and it may always keep happening in every area of expertise. 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. So, and expertise really is a thing. Right. And 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 we should tweak these controls, right? You want someone who's a trained pilot and that training gave them something, it gave them a set of competences and intuitions and they know what all those dials and switches do, right? And I don't, I shouldn't be flying that plane. So when things really matter, you know, and Putting this at 30,000ft in a storm sharpens this up, we want real experts to be in charge, right? And we are at 30,000ft a lot of the time on a lot of issues, right? And whether they're public health issues, whether it's a geopolitical emergency like Ukraine, climate change, I mean, just pick your topic. There are real problems and the clock is rather often ticking and their solutions are non obvious, right? And so expertise is a thing. And deferring to experts much of the time makes a lot of sense. At minimum it, it prevents spectacular errors of incompetence and just foolhardiness. But even in the case of some where you're talking about someone, I mean people like ourselves who are like, we're well educated, we're not the worst possible candidates for the Dunning Kruger effect. When we're going into a new area where we're not experts, we're 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 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 is when times are good. I view as an invitation to waste your time pointlessly 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 perversely won't admit they were wrong when they in fact are demonstrated to be wrong. We've got institutions that have been captured by political ideology. That's not truth. Tracking this whole woke encroachment into really every place, whether it's universities or science journals or government, that is, that has been genuinely deranging. So there's A lot going on where experts and the very concept of expertise has 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 has 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, I have a PhD in neuroscience, so I can read a medical journal article and understand a lot of it. So I'm just fairly conversant with medical terminology and I understand its methods. And I'm alert to the difference because in neuroscience, I've spent hours and hours in journal clubs diagnosing, analyzing the difference between good and bad studies. I'm alert to the difference between good and bad studies in medical journals, right? And I understand that bad studies can get published and, you know, et cetera, 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 gets 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 problem 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 out and start. I don't start reading in journals of oncology and try to really get up to speed as an oncologist because it's one is a bad and very likely misleading use of my time, right? And it's. If I decide, if I had. If I had a lot of Runway, if I decided, okay, it's really important for me to know everything I can at this point. 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, 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 intuitions 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 my family member. I'm gonna, you know what? I'm. What I'm not advocating. I'm not advocating 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. Who's telling you that you got it because you got a vaccine. Right? It's just we're swimming in a sea of misinformation where you've got people who are moving the opinions of millions of others who should not have an opinion on these topics. There is no scenario in which you should be getting your opinion about vaccine safety or climate change or the war in Ukraine or anything else that we might want to talk about from Candace Owens, right? It's just like she's not a relevant expert on any of those topics. And what's more, she doesn't seem to care, Right? And she's living in a culture that has amplified that not caring into a business model and an effective business model. Right? So it's just. And there's something very Trumpian about all that. That's the problem. The problem is the culture. It's not these specific individuals. So the paradox here is that expertise is a real thing and we defer to it a lot as a labor saving device and just based on the reality that it's very hard to be a polymath and specialization is a thing. 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 guy or gal is. And those differences matter. But it's also true that when you're talking about facts, sometimes 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 going to prove this point. And they prove it, right? So somebody like the doctor who believed that stomach ulcers were not due to stress, but were due to H. Pylori infections, right? So he just drank a vial of H. Pylori bacteria and proved that and quickly got an ulcer and convinced the field that at minimum, H. Pylori was involved in that process. Okay? So, yes, everyone was wrong. That doesn't disprove the reality of expertise it doesn't disprove the utility of relying on experts most of the time, especially in an emergency, especially when the clock is ticking, especially when 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. 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 posts that describe to you exactly the flaws in the different papers they make up the meta, meta analysis, they. And you can read a lot of those blog posts that are conflicting with each other. And you can take that information in and in a short amount of time you can start to make good faith interpretations. For 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 and a doctor that prescribes you some medication.

Yeah.

But you could also challenge some of those ideas and seeing like what are the different medications, what are the different side effects, what are the different solutions to depression, all that kind of stuff. And I think depression is 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 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 everybody. 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 in asking questions. And then there's a difference between experts, virologists, 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 pandemic, or politicians or political type of science 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 there, incentives that you've mentioned is you can become quite popular by being contrarian, by saying everybody's lying to you, all the authorities are lying to you, all the institutions are lying to you. So those are the waters you're swimming in. 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. I'm not saying that you shouldn't be informed about an issue. I'm not saying you shouldn't read articles on whatever the topic is. And yes, if I got cancer or someone close to me got 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 making a virtue of ignorance and of blind obedience to authority. And again, I recognize that authorities can discredit themselves or they can be wrong. They can be wrong even when there's no discredit. There's a lot we don't understand about the nature of the world. But still, this vast gulf between truly informed opinion and bullshit exists. It always exists. And conspiracy thinking is rather often, most of the time, a species of bullshit. But it's not always wrong, right? There are real conspiracies and there really are just awful corruptions born of bad incentives within our scientific processes, within institutions. And again, we've mentioned a lot of these things in passing, but what woke political ideology did to scientific communication during the pandemic was awful. And it was really corrosive of public trust, especially on the right, for understandable reasons. It was crazy, some of the things that were being said and still is, and these cases are all different. You take depression. We just don't know enough about depression for anyone to be that confident about anything. And there are many different modalities in which to interact with it as a problem. So there's. Yes, pharmaceuticals have whatever promise they have, but there's certainly reason to be concerned that they don't work well for everybody. It's obvious they don't work well for everybody, but they do work for some people. But again, depression is A multifactorial problem. And there are different levels at which to influence it. And there are things like meditation, there are things like just life changes. And one of the perverse things about depression is that when you're depressed, all of the things that would be good for you to do are 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. And all of those things, if you've got those up and running, they do make you feel better in the aggregate. But the reality is 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 there's no life change, someone's going to embrace that. It's going to be an obvious remedy for that. I mean, pandemics are obviously a complicated problem, but I would consider it much simpler than depression in terms of what's on the menu to be chosen among the various choices.

Just less multifactorial, the 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, it's human transmissible. We're still catching up. We're catching up to every aspect of.

We don't know how it spreads, we don't know how effective masks are.

Well, at a certain point we knew it was respiratory, but whether it's spread by fomites, 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 we ramped up the vaccines as quickly as we could, but too quick for some, not quick enough for others. We could have done human challenge trials and got them out more quickly with better data. And I think that's something we should probably look at in the future because to my eye, that would make ethical sense to do challenge trials. And so much of my concern about COVID I mean, 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. How dangerous I perceive Covid to be as a illness it has been for the longest time. Even more concern about our ability to respond to a truly scary pathogen next time. Outside those initial months, give me the first six months to be quite worried about COVID and the unraveling of society.

And the 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 knew we were getting those vaccines in short order, beyond that, 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. I think what we prove to ourselves at this moment in history is that we have built informational tools that 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's at fault for the way this unraveled, the way we didn't seem to have the distrust in institutions and the institution of science that grew, like, seemingly exponentially or got revealed through this process. Who is a fault here and what's to 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 ordinary, just plain vanilla dysfunction.

But my problem was that people like you, people like Bret Weinstein, people 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 I, you know, tweet something of that nature. Not about 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 the pandemic handed big government nanny state lefties a huge platform on a silver platter. A one, two punch. And 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 of conspiracy thinking, given the gaming of these tools by an anti vax cult. I mean, there really is an anti vax cult that just ramped up its energy during this moment.

But it's a small one.

It's not to say that 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. I mean, QAnon is a cult. And so there's a lot of lying and there's a lot of confusion. You know, there are. It's almost impossible to exaggerate how confused some people are and how. And how fully they're. Their lives are organized around that confusion. I mean, there are people who think that the world's being run by pedophile cannibals and that Tom Hanks and Oprah Winfrey and Michelle Obama are among those cannibals. I mean, adjacent to the pure crazy, there's the semi crazy, and adjacent to the semi crazy there's the grifting opportunist asshole. And the layers of, of bad faith are hard to fully diagnose. But the problem is all of this is getting signal boosted by an outrage machine that is preferentially spreading misinformation. It has a business model that is guaranteeing, that is preferentially sharing misinformation.

Can I actually just on a small tangent, how do you defend yourself against the claim that you're a pedophile? Accountable. Here's 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.

But part of it, I mean, I find it very difficult to believe that anyone believes these things. I mean, I think that there's, and I'm sure there's some number of people who are just pretending to believe these things because it's just, again, this is sort of like the 4chanification of everything. It's just Pepe the frog, right? Like, none of this is what it seems. They're not signaling an alliance with white supremacy or Neo Nazism, but they're not not doing it. They just don't fucking care. It's just cynicism overflowing its banks, right? It's just fun to wind up the normies, right? Like, look at all the normies who don't understand that a green frog is just a green frog, even when it isn't just a green frog, right? 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 our noosphere. But at a certain point, we have to recognize that real questions of human welfare are in play. Right? There's like, there are wars getting fought or not fought, and there's a pandemic raging and there's medicine to take or not take. But I mean, to come back to this issue of COVID I don't think I got so out of balance around Covid. I think people are quite confused about what I was concerned about. I mean, yes, there was a period where I was crazy because anyone who was taking 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 alcohol wipes, right. Because people thought it was transmissible by touch. Right. So. And then when we realized that was no longer the case, I stopped doing that. But so again, it was a moving target. And a lot of things we did in hindsight around masking and school closures looks fairly dysfunctional. Right. But unnecessary.

I think the criticism that people would say about your talking about COVID and maybe you can correct me, but you were skeptical or you were against skepticism of the safety and efficacy of the vaccine. So people who get nervous about the vaccine but don't fall into the usual anti vax camp, which I think there was a significant enough number they're asking, they're getting nervous. I mean, especially after the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, I too was nervous about anything where a lot of money could be made. And you just see how the people who are greedy, they come to the surface all of a sudden. And a lot of them that run institutions, actually really good human beings, I know a lot of them, but it's hard to know how those two combine together when there's hundreds of billions, trillions of dollars to be made. And so that skepticism, I, I guess you, the, 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 1. 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 Covid was reasonably dangerous. And that the trade off for basically everyone was it was rational to get vaccinated, given the level of testing and how many people had been vaccinated before you, given what we were seeing with COVID Right. That that was a forced choice. You're eventually gonna get Covid. And the question is, do you wanna be vaccinated when you do? Right. There was a period where that forced choice where it was just obviously reasonable to get vaccinated. 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 actually can't get vaccinated. I mean, I know people who can't take any vaccines they're so allergic to. I mean, they in their own person seem to justify all of the fears of the anti vax cult. I mean, it's like they're the kind of person who Robert Kennedy Jr. Can point to and say, see, vaccines will fucking kill you. Right. Because of the experiences. And I know people who have kids who fit that description. Right. So we should all feel a civic responsibility to be vaccinated against egregiously awful and 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 has begun to shift. I don't think it has shifted as much as Bret Weinstein thinks it's shifted. But yes, there are safety concerns around the MRNA vaccines, especially for young men. Right. As far as I know, that's the purview of actual heightened concern. But also there's now a lot of natural immunity out there. Basically everyone who's going to get vaccinated has gotten vaccinated. The virus has evolved to the point in this context where it seems less dangerous. Again, I'm going more on the seemings than 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. 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 I was somebody who was waiting in line at four in the morning hoping to get some overflow vaccine when it was first available. And that was at that point, given what we knew, or given what I thought I knew based on the best sources I could consult and Based on anecdotes that were too vivid to ignore, 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 it's totally rational for me to do a different kind of cost benefit analysis. And wonder, listen, do I really need to get a booster? 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 myocarditis? 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 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 this stuff.

I just disagree with that. I think, yes, in theory, I agree 100%. But I feel like experts failed at communicating, not at doing.

They did.

And I just feel like you and Bret Weinstein actually have the tools with the Internet, given the engine you have in your brain 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. The problem I have with experts, but.

There would be deference to experts and pseudo experts behind all of that.

Well, the papers you would stand on the shoulders of giants, but you can surf those shoulders better than the giants themselves.

Yeah, but I knew we were going to disagree about that. 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, maybe one larger problem. This goes back to the. The problem of how we rely on authority in science is that you can always find a PhD or an MD to champion any crackpot idea. I 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 or that it was not harmful. There was no direct link between smoking and lung cancer. You can always find those people and you can end. But some of the people Brett found were people who had obvious tells to my point of view, to my eye. And I saw them on some of the same people were on Rogan's podcast. Right. 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 we're talking about something where they're genuine, unknowns Right. Like, 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. And so given that that's where Brett was, I felt like there was just. No, there was nothing to debate. We're both the wrong people to be getting into the weeds on this. We're both going to defer to our chosen experts. His experts look like crackpots to me. Or at least the ones who are most vociferous on those edgiest points that seem most.

And your experts seem like, what is the term? Mass hysteria? I forgot the term.

Well, no, but it's like with climate science. I mean, this old. It's received as a canard 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 3% most of the time? It's obvious you go with the 97% most of the time for anything that matters. It's not to say that the 3% are always wrong. Again, things get overturned. And yes, as you say, and I've spent much more time worrying about this on my podcast than I've spent worrying about COVID Our institutions have lost trust for good reason. Right. And it. It's an open question whether we can actually get things done with this level of transparency 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 little girls get blown up when we drop our bombs? Right. Could we as a society do what we might have to do to actually get necessary things done when we're living in this panopticon of just everyone's a journalist, everyone's a scientist, everyone's an expert, everyone's got direct contact with the facts or semblance of the facts? I don't know.

I think, yes. And I think voices like yours are 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 dogmatism of this binary thinking. And then if you become a trusted person that's able to consider the other side, then people would listen to you as the aggregator, as the communicator of expertise because the virologists haven't been able to be good communicators. I still to this day don't really know what am I supposed to think about the safety and efficacy of the vaccines today as it stands 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 all the other conspiracy theories, all the other, all the communication that's out there and actually aggregate it 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. 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 some of it, I mean, it's complicated, some of it's a self fulfilling dynamic where like, so like lockdowns, in theory, lockdowns, a lockdown would work if we could only do it, but we can't 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 finally on the neck of the good people.

Who.

Are always having their interests traduced by the elites. So if you have enough people who think the lockdown for any reason, in the face of any conceivable illness 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 there are absolutely certain pathogens that we should lock down for next time. And it was completely rational in the beginning of this thing to lock down, given to attempt to lock down. We never really lockdown, to attempt some semblance of a lockdown, just to quote, bend the curve to spare our healthcare system. Given what we were seeing happening in Italy, that moment was not hard to navigate, 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 just impossible, given the nature of people's response to that kind of demand. We live in a society that's just.

Not going to lock down unless the pandemic is much more deadly.

Right? So that's a point I made, which was maliciously clipped out from some other podcast where someone's trying to make it look like I want to see children die. It's a pity more children didn't die from COVID Right? It was actually the same person who. That's the other thing that got so poisoned here. It's like that person, this psychopath or effective psychopath who's creating these clips of me on podcasts. The second clip of me seeming to say that I wish more children died during COVID but it was so clear in context what I was saying, that even the clip betrayed the context. 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 very reliable source of information. Right? He kept retweeting this guy at me, against me. And this guy. At one glance, I knew how unreliable this guy was. But I think I'm not at all sad. 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 behaving badly, 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 friend or acquaintance or colleague is doing. I haven't known what I think is ethically right about the choices that seem forced on us at moments like this. So I've criticized you in public about your interview with Kanye. Now, 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 said the same thing that I said to you in private right now. That was how I navigated that moment. I did the same thing with Elon, at least on. At the beginning. You know this. We have. We have maintained good Vibes, which is not what I.

But I don't think I disagree with you, because good vibes in the moment. There's a deep core of good vibes that persists through time between you and Elon, 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. 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 spilled 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 your. Of your.

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 produced a useful document. He didn't do that because he has a fairly naive philosophy about the power of love. Hmm.

Let's see if you can maintain that philosophy in the presence of criticism.

He. See, no, it's beautiful. He seemed to think that if he just got through the minefield to the end of the conversation, where the two of them still were feeling good about one another and they can hug it out, that would be, by definition, a 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 an inspiration and somebody I deeply admire.

Okay, back at you.

The. To me, in the case of Kanye, it's not only that you get through the conversation and have hugs, it's that the display that 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 to Kanye later and to the rest of the world that we should have empathy and compassion towards each other. There is power to that. Maybe that is naive, but I believe in the power of that. So it's not that I'm trying to convince Kanye that some of his ideas are wrong, but I'm trying to illustrate that just the act of listening and 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, de escalates the kind of dogmatism that I've been seeing. So in that sense, I would say the power of love is the philosophy you might apply to Brett, because the right conversation you have in private is not about, hey, listen, you're the experts you're talking to. They seem credentialed, but they're not actually as credentialed as they illustrating they're not grounding their findings in actual meta analysis and papers and so on. Like making a strong case, like, what are you doing? This is going to get a lot of people in trouble. But instead just saying, like being a friend in the dumbest of ways, being like 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 lies at stake, but removing all of that and remembering that you have a friendship.

Yeah, well, so 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 has to do with Kanye. I mean, so Kanye, I don't know. I've never met Kanye, so obviously I 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, actually those aren't mutually exclusive. So one of three possibilities. He's either mentally ill, he's an. Or he's mentally ill and an.

I think all three of those possibilities are possible for the both of us as well.

No 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. 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 public. I just thought you're not doing him a favor if he's mentally ill. Right. If he's in the middle of a manic episode or. I'm not a clinician, but 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 that'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 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 in an ordinary 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. I mean, that's the other thing here, is that I don't agree that compassion and love always have this patient embracing, acquiescent face. Right? They don't always feel good to the recipient. There is a sword 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 there's no hatred being communicated. In fact, you could just like, listen, I'm going to do everyone a favor right now and just take your foot out of your mouth. And the truth is, I just wouldn't have aired the conversation. I just don't think it was a document that had to get out there. I get that many people this is not a signal you're likely to get from your audience. I get that 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're holding this tension between he's this creative genius whose work we love, and yet he's having this moment that's so painful and what a tightrope walk. And I get that maybe 90% of your audience saw it that way. They're still wrong. And I still think that was, 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 a person, if it's opening up in the wrong direction, where just gale force nonsense is coming in, I think we should have an open mind and an open heart. But there's some clear things here that, that we have to keep in view. One is the mental illness component is its own thing. I don't pretend to understand what's going on with him, but Insofar as that's the reason he's saying what he's saying. Do not put this guy on camera and let.

No, sorry on that point. Real quick. I had a bunch of conversation with him 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 hood on Alex Jones's podcast, I mean, either that's more, you know, genius performance in his world, or it's. He's unraveling further.

I wouldn't put that under mental illness. I. We 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 from Kanye as if he. He's like Christopher Hitchens or something like that. Like, very eloquent, researched, you know, written many books on history, on politics and geopolitics, on psychology. Kanye didn't do any of that. He's an artist just spouting off. And so it's a different style of conversation and different way to treat the wars that are coming out of his life.

Let's leave the mental illness aside. So if we're going to say that there's no reason to think he's mentally ill and this is just him being creative and brilliant and opinionated, well, then that falls into the asshole bucket for me. It's like, then he's someone. And honestly, the most offensive thing about him in that interview, from my point of view, is not the anti Semitism, which 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 others. He has an estimation of himself as this omnibus genius not only to rival Shakespeare to exceed Shakespeare. Right. I mean, he is the greatest mind that has ever walked among us. And he's more or 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. It's like when Trump says he's a genius who understands everything, but nobody takes him seriously. 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 just a colossus. And he may be a Great musician. It's certainly not my wheelhouse to compare him to any other musicians. But one thing that's patently obvious 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 antisemitism he was spreading, which was genuinely noxious and ill considered and has potential knock on effects in the black community. I mean there's an ambient level of antisemitism in the black community that is worth worrying about and talking about. Anyway. There's a bunch of guys playing the knockout game in Brooklyn just punching orthodox Jews in the face. And I think letting Kanye air his antisemitism that publicly only raises the likelihood of that rather than diminishes it.

I don't know. So let me say just a couple things. So one, my belief at the time was it doesn't. It decreases it. Showing empathy while pushing back decreases the likelihood of that. It might on the surface look like it's increasing it, but that's simply because the antisemitism or the hatred in general is brought to the surface and then people talk 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 like 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 thinks towards me based on who I am, that they hate me.

Just. You mean anti Semitic things or that you anti Semitic?

Because I just hate the word anti Semitic. It's, it's like racist.

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 there's reason to, to be a student of the Holocaust. But in my lifetime and in my experience, I have never taken antisemitism very seriously. I have not worried about it. I have not made a thing of it. I've done exactly one podcast on it. I had Barry Weiss on my podcast when her book came out. But it really is a thing and it's something we have to keep an eye on societally because it's a unique kind of hatred. It's unique in that it seems.