The following is a conversation with Sam Harris, his second time on 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, 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 6th, Vaccines, LabLeak, 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, 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 stop talking to each other as
often, with respect, humility, and love, when the world needed those kinds of conversations the most.
My hope is that they start talking again, 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 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 to ride, to turn the other cheek
if needed, to return hate with love. Sometimes people criticize me for being naive, cheesy,
simplistic, all of that. I know. I agree. But I really am speaking from the heart, and I'm trying.
This world is too fucking beautiful not to try, 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 two,
at least two kinds of empathy. There's the cognitive form, which is, you know, I would
argue even a species of reason. It's just understanding another person's point of view.
You understand why they're suffering or why they're happy. You have a theory of mind
about another human being that 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, you know, it's just, it's contagious, right? I, you know, we're so close and
I'm so concerned about you and your problems become my problems and it bleeds through. Right
now, I think both of those capacities are very important, but the emotional contagion piece
and this is not really my thesis, 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.
And I would go, so I'll give you the clear example of this, which is,
we find stories with a single identifiable protagonist who we can effortlessly empathize
with far more compelling than data, right? So if I tell you, you know, this is the classic
case of the little girl who falls down a well, right? You know, this is somebody's daughter
see the parents distraught on television. You hear her cries from the bottom of the well,
the whole country stops. I mean, this was an example of this, you know, 20, 25 years ago,
I think where it was just wall to wall on CNN. This is just the perfect use of CNN.
It was, you know, 72 hours or whatever it was of continuous coverage of 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 a hundred percent
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 attended to go to, and the numbers don't
make a dent and the, and we find the story boring and 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 the 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 dangers 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, you know, peaks on this part of the moral landscape, but
so the opposition is between an ethic that's articulated by someone like the Dalai Lama,
right? Or really any exponent of classic Buddhism would say that the ultimate enlightened ethic
is true dispassion with respect to friends and strangers, right? The mind of the Buddha would be
truly dispassionate. You would love and care about all people equally.
By that light, it seems some kind of ethical failing, or at least a 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 energy
in that way, right? 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, right? So when my daughter gets sick and I have to take her to a hospital,
you know, I really want her to get attention, right? And I'm worried about her more than I'm
worried about everyone else in the lobby, but the truth is I actually don't want a totally corrupt
hospital. I don't want a hospital that treats my daughter better than anyone else in the lobby
because she's my daughter and I have, you know, bribed the guy at the door or whatever, you know,
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're, 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 things are, when everyone's corrupt and it's,
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, you know,
the other vestiges of civilization begin to get stripped off. We can't reason from those
emergencies to normal life. I mean, in normal life, we want justice, we want fairness,
we want, we're all better off for it, even when the spotlight of our concern is focused on
the people we know, the people who are friends, the people who are family, people we have good
reason to care about, we still, by default, want a system that protects the interests of strangers
too. And we know that generally speaking, and 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.
Well, what about empathy in the context of just discussing ideas with other people?
And then there's a large number of people, like in this country, you know, 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 like 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, right? And so, yeah, like, I mean,
just take, I think there's many examples of this that you might be thinking of, but I mean, 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, you know,
patently obvious who he was, you know, if there had been any doubt initially. There was no doubt
when we have a sitting president who's not agreeing to a peaceful transfer of power,
right? So I'm critical of all of that. And yet the fact that many millions of Americans didn't see
what was wrong with Trump or bought into the, didn't see through his con, right? I mean,
they bought into the idea that he was a brilliant businessman who might just be able to change
things because he's so unconventional. And so, you know, his heart is in the right place. You know,
he's really a man of the people, even though he's a 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, you know, 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 presidency. So I don't,
so 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, you know, a very bad state of affairs in our society, right? So there's two
levels to it. I mean, one is, I think you have to call a spade a spade when you're talking about
how things actually work and what things are likely to happen or not. But then you can recognize
that people are, have very different life experiences and yeah, I mean, I think empathy
and, you know, probably the better word for what I would hope to embody there is compassion, right?
Like really, you know, to really wish people well, you know, and to really wish, you know,
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, you know, which do you
want to live in a society where you have everything, but most other people have nothing?
Or do you want to live in a society where you're surrounded by happy, creative, self-actualized
people who are having their hopes and dreams realized? I think it's obvious that the second
society is much better, however much you can guard your good luck.
But what about having empathy for certain principles that people believe, for example,
the pushback, the other perspective on this, because you said bought the myth of Trump as
the 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 more comedian than he is a presidential
type of figure, and he's actually creating the kind of chaos that's going to shake up
this bureaucracy, shake up the elites that are so uncomfortable because they don't want
the world to know about the game they've got running on everybody else. So that's the kind
of perspective that they would take and say, yeah, 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. 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 or what I would be talking about if I had a strong opinion.
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. 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 I just, 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. 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 like, how should we, what should guide us?
I genuinely think he is missing some necessary moral and psychological tools, right? And this
is, I can feel compassion for him as a human being because I think having those things is
incredibly important and genuinely loving other people is incredibly important and knowing what
all that's about is, 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, right? We want them to be far outliers in,
if in the best case, in wisdom and compassion and some of the things you've,
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 in so far as we're going to get normal
mediocrities in that role, which I think 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, I mean, 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, there's, arguably there's never been a person that anyone could
name in human history who's lied with that kind of velocity. I mean, it's just, it was,
he was just a blizzard of lies, great and small, you know, to pointless and effective, but it's
just, 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, like, 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, right? So how much less bandwidth is somebody who's working two jobs or,
you know, a single mom who's, who's, you know, raising, you know, multiple kids, you know,
even a single kid. It's just, it's unimaginable to me that people have the bandwidth to, to really
track this stuff. And so then they jump on social media and they see, they get inundated by
misinformation and they see what their favorite influencer just said. And now they're worried
about vaccines and there, it's just, it's, we're living in an environment where our,
the information space has become so corrupted and we've built machines to, to further corrupt it,
you know, I mean, we've built a business model for the internet that further corrupts it.
So it's, it is just, it's chaos in informational terms. And I don't fault people for being
confused and impatient and at the, at their wit's end. And yes, Trump was a, an enormous fuck you
to the establishment. And that's, that was understandable for many reasons.
To me, Sam Harris, the great Sam Harris is somebody I've looked up to for a long time
as a beacon of voice of reason. And there's this meme on the internet 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
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? Otherwise
known as Trump derangement syndrome, medical condition. Yeah, I mean, I think Trump derangement
syndrome is a, is a very clever meme because it, it just throws the, you know, the, 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, if that wasn't a bright line for you, you have been
deranged by something because that was, you know, the, that was one minute to midnight for our
democracy as far as I'm concerned. And I think it really was, but for the, the integrity of
a few people that we didn't suffer some real constitutional crisis and real emergency,
you know, after January 6th. I mean, if, 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. And so it wasn't, so it wasn't for want of trying on Trump's part that we,
we didn't succumb to some, you know, 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, you're, the fact that you're adrenalized and
you're thinking, you know, well, 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, 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, I'm waiting for the moment where it
requires some thought. I mean, it did, it took up, I don't know how many podcasts I devoted to
the topic. It wasn't that, I mean, it wasn't that many in the end, you know, against the,
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. He's like, not a, you know, just,
it's just good fun to see somebody who's like, who's just not taking anything seriously. And
it's just, just putting a, you know, a stick in the wheel of, of business as usual again and again
and again. And they don't really see anything much at stake. Right. It doesn't really,
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 is, it doesn't matter if he's
on the one hand saying that he loves the leader of North Korea and on the other threatening,
to, you know, bomb them back to the stone age right on Twitter. It's all, it all can be taken
in the spirit of kind of reality television. It's like, this is just, this is the part of the movie
that's just fun to watch. Right. And I understand that I can even inhabit that space for a few
minutes at a time, but there's a deeper concern that we're in the process of entertaining
ourselves to death, right. That we're just not taking things seriously. And this is,
it's a problem I've had with several other people we might name who just, 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 around. And I think they're
really important problems that we have to get our head straight around and we need, you know,
it's not to say that, that institutions don't become corrupt. I think they do. And I think,
and I'm quite worried that, you know, both about the loss of trust in our institutions
and the fact that trust has eroded for good reason, right. That they have become less
trustworthy. I think, you know, they'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. What 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 not, it's different. Like, I mean, you can invite someone onto your
podcast who's an expert about something that 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 a basis for a lot of criticism I've received on
these topics where it's 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 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? 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 then Trump is not a malevolent and ultra competent
malevolent figure, but is simply a jokester. And he just by creating the chaos revealed that it's
all pretty fragile because you're a student 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,
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 revealed 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, you know, totalitarian, right?
I mean, and he's more brave in your world than 1984. This is what, you know, Eric Weinstein
never stops badgering me about, but, you know, he's still wrong, Eric. You know, I can, you know,
my analogy for Trump was that he's an evil Chauncey Gardner. I don't know if you remember
the book or the film Being There with Peter Sellers, but, you know, Peter Sellers is this
gardener who really doesn't know anything, but he gets recognized as this wise man and gets promoted
to immense power in Washington because he's speaking in these kind of, 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 gardening. He's just talking about his garden all the time, but, you know,
he'll say something, but yeah, you know, in the spring, you know, the new shoots will bloom and
people read into that some kind of genius, you know, insight politically. And so he gets promoted
and so that's the joke of the film. For me, Trump has always been someone like an evil
Chauncey Gardner. 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 only, it's a kind of, it's a kind of, you
know, self-promotion that only works if you actually are truly shameless and don't care about
having a reputation for anything that I or you would want to have a reputation for, right? It's
like it's pure, the pure pornography of attention, right? 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, right? Obviously doesn't care about people,
can't even pretend to care about people really, right? In a credible way. And so, I mean, this,
if there's a silver lining to this, it's along the lines you just sketched, it shows us how
vulnerable our system is to a truly brilliant and sinister figure, right? I mean, like, I think we
are, we really dodged a bullet. Yes, someone far more competent and conniving and ideological could
have exploited our system in 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, truly illegal. I think he probably did a few illegal things, but like illegal such that
he really should be thrown in jail for it. 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 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 that,
it's like, it's not illegal for a sitting president to say,
no, I'm not going to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, right? We'll wait and see whether I win.
If I win, it was, 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 not be counted as the evening wore on, knowing that they were going to be disproportionately
Democrat votes because of the position he took on mail-in ballots.
I mean, all of it was fairly calculated. The whole circus of the clown car that crashed into
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 Republican, 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.
But he tried to do things, and he would have to have done those things through other people,
and there are people who refuse to do those things. There are people who said they would
quit. They would quit publicly, right? I mean, you start, again, 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's 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, like, there's no,
there's no, 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, you know, storm our capital and, you know, smear
shit on the walls, that's just more shaking things up, right? 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. You know, frankly, it's not understandable if you've got a billion dollars
and you're, you know, 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. 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, right? Like,
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 mean, I haven't tried with Candace, but I've tried with many people who
are in that particular orbit. I mean, I've had conversations with people who
won't admit that there's anything wrong with Trump, anything.
So I'd like to push for the empathy versus reason, 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 the Candace Owens. Well, 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. I mean,
so probably more often than not, at least on balance, I agreed with his policy that we should
take China seriously as an adversary, right? And I think, I mean, 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 I mean, take immigration. I think it's obvious
that we should have control of our borders, right? Like I don't see the argument for
not having control of our borders. We should let in who we want to let in and we should keep out
who we want to keep out and we should have a sane immigration policy. So I don't, I didn't necessarily
think it was a priority to build the wall, but I didn't, I never criticized the impulse to build
the wall because if, you know, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people are coming across
that border and we are not in a position to know who's coming, that seems untenable to me. So,
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, right? So I think we should have a, we should have
control of our borders. We should have a sane and compassionate immigration policy. We should have,
we should let in refugees, right? So I, 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. 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, you know, as chief of
staff or, you know, in various cabinet positions, people who had real reputations, you know, for,
for probity and, and levelheadedness, you know, whether you share their politics or not, I mean,
these were real people. These are not, you know, some of them were goofballs, but, you know,
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, there's just people bent over backwards
to accommodate his norm violations. And it, it was, it was bad for them and it was bad for our,
our, our system. And, but that, but none of that discounts the fact that
we have a system that really needs a proper house cleaning. Yes, there are bad incentives
and entrenched interests. And I'm not a fan of the concept of, of the deep state,
but because it, you know, has been so propagandized, but yes, there's, there's
something like that, you know, that is not flexible enough to re to respond intelligently
to the needs of the moment, right? So there's a lot of rethinking of government and of institutions
in general that I think we should do, but we need smart, well-informed, well-intentioned people to
do that job. And the well-intentioned part is, is hugely important, right? It's just,
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 was like, it predates his presidency. We knew this guy 30 years ago.
And, and this, and this is what, to come back to the, those inflammatory comments about a
hundred Biden's laptop. The reason why I can say with confidence that I don't care what was on his,
his laptop is that there is, and, and that includes any evidence of corruption on the,
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 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, the, the, the scale of corruption can't possibly balance out between the two of them,
right? We, I, if, 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, he's doing all these things I didn't know
about. Okay. Then I'm going to start getting a sense that, all right, maybe this guy is way more
corrupt than I realized. Maybe there is some deal in Ukraine or with China that is just like,
this guy is not who he seems, he's not the public servant he's been pretending to be. He's been on
the take for decades and decades and he's just, he's as dirty as can be. He's, 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 I haven't 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 much, you know, how many drugs is he doing?
How many houses does he have? Where, you know, what, what, what is, what are the obvious
conflicts of interest? You know, you hold that against what we know about Trump, right? And
I mean, the litany of indiscretions you can put on Trump's side that, that testify to his
personal corruption, to testify to the fact that he has no ethical compass,
there's simply no comparison, right? So that's why I don't care about what's on the laptop when,
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, who, you know,
who lost his laptop. And I just knew that I was going to take Biden in spite of whatever litany
of horrors was going to come tumbling out of that laptop. And 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 is 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 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 war is complicated. And 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 someone only wants wealth
and power and fame, that is 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 risk 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? 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, somebody's following
him around with a bag, waiting to take his order to launch, right? 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?
People allege that he does speed, but let's take him at his word. He's not deranging himself with
pharmaceuticals, at least, apart from Diet Coke. There's nothing wrong, just for the record,
let me push back on that. There's nothing wrong with Diet Coke. I occasionally have some myself.
There's no medical, there's no scientific evidence that I observed the negatives of all those studies
about aspartame and all of that. No, I don't know. I hope you're right. 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 phrase came from Eisenhower.
I mean, so much of what ails us is a story of bad incentives, right? And bad incentives are so
powerful that they corrupt even good people, right? How much more do they corrupt bad people,
right? 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,
right? 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 at best a highly ambiguous and painful exercise, more likely a fool's errand,
right? It did not turn out well. It wasn't for want of trying. I have not done a deep dive on
all of the failures there. And maybe all of these failures are failures in principle. I mean,
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
immediate problem at that moment, Al Qaeda was in Afghanistan and then bounced into Pakistan.
Anyway, so yes, but my sense of the possibility of nation building, my sense of insofar as the
neocon spirit of responsibility and idealism, that 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.
I mean, 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. It 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. If you 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? 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 that's all good. And our intentions are good there. And I mean, we're on the right side of
history there. Girls should be going to school. Malala Yousafzai 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
of Bob Banning, Donald Trump from Twitter. But does any of it bother you now that Twitter files
came out that, I mean, this has to do with 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 and not, and then that could be susceptible to bias and to ideological influence?
Well, I think it always will be, or in the absence of perfect 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. 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. It is just,
even the good parts of Twitter that I miss were bad in the aggregate, in 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, you know, 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 mean, I probably, I think I probably averaged something like one tweet a day. I think I averaged,
but in reality it was like, you know, there'd be like four tweets one day, and then I wouldn't
tweet for the better part of a week. And, but I was looking a lot because it was my newsfeed.
I was just following, you know, 200 very smart people, and I just wanted to see what they were
paying attention to. And they would recommend articles and I would read those articles. And
then when I would read an article, then I would, I 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 of 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 mean, you know, I use it to work, but
my sense of just what the world is and my sense of my place in the world, the sense of where I
exist as a person has changed a lot by deleting my Twitter account. I mean, I had a, and it's just,
it's, and the, and the things that I think, I mean, we all know this phenomenon. We say of
someone that person's too online, right? Like what does it mean to be too online?
And where do you draw that boundary? You know, how do you know what constitutes being too online?
Well, in some sense, just be, I think being on, on social media at all is to be too online. I mean,
given what it does to, given the kinds of information it, it signal boosts and given the,
given the impulse it kindles in each of us to reach out to our audience in,
in specific moments and in specific ways, right? It's like, there are lots of moments now where
I have an opinion about something, but there's nothing for me to do with that opinion, right?
Like there's no Twitter, right? So like there are lots of things that I would have tweeted
in the last 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 some somebody did, right? 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, 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 a hundred percent 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 blow back on Twitter.
You know, it would give me the sense that there was some signal that I really had to respond to.
Now that I'm off Twitter, I recognize that most of that was just, it was totally specious, right?
It was, it was not something I had to respond to, but yet I would then do a cycle of 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, this self perpetuating cycle, which,
I mean, it's, you know, if you're having fun, great. I mean, if it's, if it's,
if it's generative of useful information and engagement professionally and psychologically,
great. But, and, and there, you know, there was some of that on Twitter. I mean,
there were people who I've connected with because, because I just, you know, one,
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 wanted to have debate.
I wanted to actually communicate with people. I want, I wanted to hear from the person because
again, it's like being in Afghanistan, right? It's like there, there, 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,
that's obviously good. I've had those moments on Twitter where it's like, 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, the way the sane or, you know,
sanity preserving way of using it is, is just as a marketing channel. You just put your stuff
out there and you don't look at what's coming back at you. And that's, you know, for, you know,
I'm on other social media platforms that I don't even touch. I 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? And, but then the promise of the platform
is dialogue and feedback, right? So like, so why am I, if I know for whatever reason,
I'm going to see like 99 to one awful feedback, you know, bad faith feedback, malicious feedback,
some of it's probably even bots and I'm not even aware of who's a person who's a bot, right?
But I'm just going to stare into this 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 I, you know, mutual friends of ours who are behaving in certain ways on Twitter,
which just seemed 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, you know, an hourly basis or, you know, an increment sometimes of, you know,
multiple times an hour. I mean, I probably check Twitter, you know, at minimum 10 times a day,
and maybe I was checking it a hundred times a day on some days, right? Where things were really
active and I was really engaged with something. What was being delivered into my brain there was
subtly false information about how dishonest and,
you know, just generally unethical, totally normal people are capable of being, right?
It is a funhouse mirror. 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 coming at me on Twitter. I mean, it was essentially turning ordinary
people into sociopaths, right? It's like people are just, you know, it's their analogies that
many of us have made. It's like one analogy is road rage, right? Like people behave in the
confines of a car in ways that they never would if they didn't have this metal box around them,
you know, moving at speed. And it's, you know, all of that becomes quite hilarious and, you know,
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 realize, 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 and realized
this is the last person you want to fight with. That's one of the heartbreaking things is to see
people who I know, who I admire, who I know are friends, be everything from snarky to downright
mean, divisive towards each other. It doesn't make any sense. Like 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 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 whoever go paintball. Yeah, you're going to shoot your
friends, but you kind of accept that 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. You know, I don't think I, there's nothing, I don't think I ever did anything
that I really feel bad about, but yeah, it was always pushing me to the edge of snideness somehow.
And it's just not healthy. It's not, it's not, so the reason why I deleted my Twitter account
in the end was that it was obviously making me a worse person. And so, 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 they're actually quite surprising. There's a lot of good, I mean, they're like, even if
they're critical, they're like being thoughtful, which is nice. I used it that way too, and that
was what kept me hooked. But then there's also TouchBalls69 wrote a question. I can't imagine,
this is part of it, but one way to solve this is, you know, we've got to get rid of anonymity
for this. It's like, let me ask the question, ask Sam why he sucks, was the question. Well,
one reason why I sucked was Twitter. That was, and I've since solved that problem. So touch touch
ball 69. TouchBalls69 should be happy that I suck a little bit less now that I'm off Twitter.
I don't have to hear from TouchBalls69 on the regular. The fact that you have to see that
it probably can have a negative effect, just even in moderation, just to see that there is,
like for me, the negative effect is slightly losing faith in the underlying kindness of
humanity. You can also just reason your way out of it saying that this is an
enemy and this is kind of fun and this is kind of just the shit show of Twitter. It's okay,
but it does mentally affect you a little bit. I don't read too much into that kind of comment.
That's just trolling. I understand the fun the person is having on the other side of that.
Do you though?
Well, I do. I don't behave that way, but I do. And for all I know, that person could be
16 years old, right? So it's like-
It could be also an altar count for Elon. I don't know.
Well, yeah, that's right. Yeah. No, I'm pretty sure Elon would just tweet that
under his own name at this point.
You love each other. Okay. 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 that's on your mind,
and on how much you're actually learning and growing as a person, and it was negative.
Yeah. And I'd also seen the negativity in other people's lives. I mean, it's obviously,
he's not going to admit it, but I think it's obviously negative for Elon, right?
That was one of the things that when I was looking into the funhouse mirror,
I was also seeing the funhouse mirror on his side of Twitter, and it was just even more exaggerated.
It's like, 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, right?
And at lesser scale and at lesser risk, frankly, right?
And so, and it was just so, it's not just Twitter.
This isn't part an internet phenomenon.
It's like the whole Hunter Biden mess that you explored.
That was based on, 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.
Even, 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, 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 will assume
there's no relevant context I need to understand what happened in that clip, right?
And obviously the people who make those clips know that, right? And they're doing it quite
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, and 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 dysfunctional. See, I think it's possible to create a platform. I think we will keep living
on clips, but when I saw that clip of you talking about children and so on, just knowing that you
have a sense of humor, we just went to a dark place in terms of humor. So 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 giving a person benefit of the doubt, that's not even the right term. It's not like I was
is really like interpreting it in the context of only 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. So, 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. Like 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, even people who I think should be marginalized and people who
should be defenestrated because they really are terrible people who are doing dangerous things
and 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, you know, who's more 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, you know, forget about being divorced
from context. There was no context. I mean, that's a misinformation apocalypse that is,
we're right on the cusp of, and you know, it's terrifying.
Or it could be just a new world like where Alice going to Wonderland, where humor is the only thing
we have and they will save us. Maybe in the end, Trump's approach to social media was the right
one after all, nothing is true and everything's absurd. Yeah, but we can't live that way. People
function on the basis of what they assume is true, right? They think, you know, people have
functioned to do anything. It's like, I mean, you have to, 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, 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, you know, it's, it's, it's going to matter because it comes down to like,
what medicines do you give your children, right? Like we're going to be manufacturing fake
journal articles. I mean, this is, I'm sure someone's using chat GPT for, for this reader
as we speak. And if it's not credible, if it's not persuasive now to most people, I mean, honestly,
I don't think we're going to, it's, it's, 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 I just,
it's just, there are the people who don't 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, insulated themselves from the downside here enough
that they're not implicated in the great unraveling we are witnessing or could, 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 at something? How do
you know if you've achieved it? I think it's, it's important to acknowledge upfront that this,
there's something paradoxical about how we relate to, to authority, especially within science.
And I don't think that paradox is going away and it's just, it doesn't have to be confusing.
It's just, and it's not, it's not truly a paradox. It's just like there are different moments in
time. So it is true to say that within science or within, within rationality, generally, I mean,
we're just whenever you're making it, having a fact-based discussion about anything, it is true
to say that the truth or falsity of a statement does not even slightly depend on the credentials
of the person making the statement, right? So it doesn't matter if you're a Nobel Laureate,
you can be wrong, right? The thing you could, the last sentence you spoke could be total bullshit,
right? And it's also possible for someone who's deeply uninformed to be right about something
or to be right for the wrong reasons, right? Or someone just gets lucky or someone or, or,
and there are middling cases where you have like a backyard astronomer who's got no credentials,
but he just loves astronomy and he's got a telescope and it's, he's spent a lot of time
looking at the night sky and he discovers a comet that no one else has seen, you know, not even
the professional expert astronomers. And my God, I think that happens less and less now, but,
but some version of that keeps happening and it may always keep happening in every area of
expertise, right? So it's true that truth is orthogonal to the reputational concerns we have
among apes who are talking about the truth, but it is also true that most of the time
real experts are much more reliable than frauds or people who are not experts, right? So,
and expertise really is a thing, right? And when it's, you know, when you're flying an airplane
in a, in a storm, you don't want just randos coming into the cockpit saying, listen,
I've got a new idea about how to, you know, how we should tweak these controls, right?
You want someone who's a trained pilot and, and, and that training gave them something,
right? It gave them a set of competences and intuitions and they, they know what all those
dials and switches do, right? And I don't, right? I shouldn't be flying that plane.
So when things really matter, you know, and put in this at 30,000 feet in a storm sharpens this
up, we want real experts to be in charge, right? And we are at 30,000 feet a lot of the time
on a lot of issues, right? And whether they're public health issues, whether it's issue,
whether it's a geopolitical emergency like Ukraine, climate change, I mean, just pick your,
pick your topic. There are real problems and the clock is rather often ticking
and their solutions are not obvious, right? And so expertise is a thing and deferring to experts
much of the time makes a lot of sense. It's at minimum, it, it prevents
spectacular errors of incompetence and, and just, you know, foolhardiness. But even in,
in the case of some where you're talking about someone, I mean, people like ourselves who are
like, we're well-educated, we were not the worst possible candidates for, you know, the Dunning
Krueger 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, we can work and we're pretty quick studies.
We can learn a lot of things pretty fast and we can begin to play a language game
that sounds fairly expert. Right. And in that case, the invitation to do your own research,
right, is in when, when times are good, I view as an invitation to waste your time
pointlessly. Right. When times are good. Now the truth is times are not all that good. Right. And
we have the ongoing public display of failures of expertise. We have experts who are obviously
corrupted by bad incentives. We've got experts who, you know, perversely won't admit they were
wrong when they, in fact, you know, are demonstrated to be wrong. We've got institutions
that have been captured by a political ideology that's not truth tracking. I mean, this whole woke
encroachment into really every place, you know, whether it's universities or science journals or
government, or, I mean, it's just like 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, you know, I have a PhD in neuroscience, right. So
I can read a medical journal article and understand a lot of it. Right. And I, you know, so I'm just
fairly conversant with, you know, medical terminology and I understand its methods and
I'm alert to the difference because I've, you know, because in neuroscience I've spent hours
and hours in journal clubs, you know, diagnosing, you know, and 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 don't, 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, you know, in journals of oncology and try to really get
up to speed as an oncologist because it's, it's not, it's, one is a bad, one is a bad and
potent 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 want to, I know someone's going to get cancer. I may not go back to school and
become an oncologist, but what I want to do is I want to know everything I can know about cancer.
Right. So I'm going to take the next four years and spend most of my time on cancer. Okay. I
could do that. Right. I still think that's a waste of my time. I still think at the end of, even at
the end of those four years, I'm not going to be the best person to, 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, you know, my family member. I'm going to, you know, what I'm not advocating, I'm not
advocating a, a blind trust in authority. Like if you get cancer and you're talking to one
oncologist and they're recommending some course of treatment, by all means, get a second opinion,
get a third opinion. Right. But it matters that those opinions are coming from real experts and
not from, you know, Robert Kennedy Jr. You know, who's telling you that, you know, you got it
because you got a vaccine, right? It's like, 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. Like there's no, there is no scenario in which you should be
getting your opinion about vaccine safety or, 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, like she, she's not
a relevant expert on any of those topics. And what's more, she doesn't seem to care. Right.
And, and she's living in a culture that has, that has amplified that not caring into a business
model and an effective business model. Right. So it's just, it's, and there's something very
Trumpian about all that, or like that's, that's the problem. The problem is, is the culture,
it's not these specific individuals. So, so the paradox here is that expertise is a real thing
and we defer to it a lot as a, as a labor saving device. And it's just as, and just based on the,
the, the, the, the reality that it's very hard to be a polymath. Right. And specialization is
a thing. Right. And so there are people who specialize in a very narrow topic. They know
more about that topic than the next guy, no matter how smart that, that guy or gal is.
And that those differences matter, but it's also true that when you're talking about facts,
sometimes the, the, the, the best experts are wrong. The scientific consensus is wrong.
You get a, a, a sea change in the thinking of a whole field because one person who's an outlier
for whatever reason decides, okay, I'm you know, I'm going to prove this point and they prove it.
Right. So somebody like the doctor who believed that that stomach ulcers were not due to stress,
but were due to, to H. pylori infections. Right. So he just drank a vial of H. pylori bacteria and,
and prove that, and then quickly got an ulcer and convinced the field that, that at minimum
H. pylori was involved in, 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, you know, you're, 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, 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 that make up
the meta, meta-analyses. They, and you can read a lot of those blog posts that are conflicting with
each other and you can take that information 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, 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 the 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? 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 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, right? 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 a 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, right? And there are many different
modalities in which to interact with it as a problem, right? So yes, pharmaceuticals
have whatever promise they have, but there's certainly reason to be concerned that they don't
work well for everybody. And I mean, 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 got those up and
running, they do make you feel better in the aggregate. But the reality is that there are
clinical level depressions that are so bad that we just don't have good tools for them. And there's
no life change someone's going to embrace that is 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.
It's 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, you know, it's human transmissible.
We're still catching up. We're catching up to every aspect of it.
We don't know how it spreads.
We don't know how.
How effective masks are.
Well, at a certain point we knew it was respiratory, but whether it's spread by
fomites and like all that, we were confused about a lot of things and we're still confused. It's
been a moving target this whole time and it's been changing this whole time. And our responses to it
have been, you know, we ramped up the vaccines as quickly as we could, but, you know, 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, you know, to my eye, that would make ethical sense to do challenge trials.
But, 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 a concern about our ability to respond to a truly scary pathogen next time. Like for,
you know, outside those initial months, you know, 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're
getting, and we knew we were getting those vaccines in short order, right? Beyond that,
and we had, and we knew just how dangerous the illness was and how dangerous it wasn't.
For years now, I've just been worrying about this as a failed dress rehearsal for something much
worse, right? I think what we proved to ourselves at this moment in history is that we have built
informational tools 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's at fault here?
And what's the fix? So much blame to go around, but so much of it is not a matter of bad people
conspiring to do bad things. It's a matter of incompetence and misaligned incentives and just
ordinary, just plain vanilla dysfunction. But my problem was that people like you,
people like Brett 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 I tweet something of that
nature and not about you, but just, it feels like the pandemic made people really more emotional
than before. And then Kimbo 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. Well, 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 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
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 everything, every concern
about vaccines is a species of, it was born of misinformation or born of this cult, but there is
a cult that is just, 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. It's almost impossible to exaggerate how confused some
people are and how fully 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, you know, Tom Hanks and Oprah
Winfrey and Michelle Obama are among those cannibals. I mean, like they're 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 bad faith are, you know, 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 guaranteed that is preferentially sharing
misinformation. Actually, just on a small tangent, how do you defend yourself against the claim that
you're a pedophile cannibal? It's difficult. 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 what like 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 there's, 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-Nazis, but they're not not
doing it. Like 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 that don't understand that a
green frog is just a green frog, even when it isn't just a green frog, right? It's like they're
just, it's just gumming up everyone's cognitive bandwidth with bullshit, right? I get that that's
fun if you're a teenager and you just want to vandalize our new sphere, but at a certain point,
we have to recognize that real questions of human welfare are in play, right? There's like,
they're really, there is this, 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 my, 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, like there was a, 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? That's so, and then when we realized
that was no longer the case, I stopped doing that. But so there, again, it was a moving target and
a lot of things we did in hindsight around masking and school closures looks fairly dysfunctional,
but 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 start,
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 combined together when there's hundreds of billions,
trillions of dollars to be made. And so that skepticism, I guess the sense was
that you weren't open enough to the skepticism. I understand that people have that sense. I'll
tell you how I thought about it and think about it. One, again, it was a moving target. So there
was a point in the timeline where it was totally rational to expect that the vaccines were both
working, both 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, that that was a forced choice. You're eventually going to
get COVID and the question is, do you want to be vaccinated when you do? 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 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 experience. And we're still, 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 Brett 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 was 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 seamings 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.
It's like, so you ask me now, how do I feel about getting the next booster?
I don't know that I'm going to get the next booster, right? So 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 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 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, right? 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 Brett 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 Brett 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 a variety of reasons,
they didn't pass the smell test for me. One larger problem, and this goes back to 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, right? 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. But some of the people Brett found were people who had obvious
tells to my point of view, to my eye. I mean, and I saw them on some of the same people were
on Rogan's podcast, right? And it's hard because if a person does have the right credentials,
and they're not saying something floridly mistaken, and we're talking about something where
it's their genuine unknowns, right? Like how much do we know about the safety of these vaccines,
right? 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 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, 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'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? Like, 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, you know, everyone's a journalist, right? Everyone's a scientist,
everyone's an expert, everyone's got direct contact with the facts or a 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 will 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
communication that's out there and actually aggregating it together and being able to say
this is actually what's most likely the truth. And also some of that has to do with 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, 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 this is the totalitarian boot finally on the neck of the good people who are always having
their interests, you know, introduced by the elites. So like this is, 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. 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, right? And it was completely rational in the beginning of this thing to lock
down given, to attempt to lock down. We never really locked down. To attempt some semblance
of a lockdown just to quote, bend the curve, to spare our healthcare system, given what we were
seeing happen in Italy, right? Like 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, right? We live in a society that's just not gonna 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. There's a pity
more children didn't die from COVID, right? This is actually the same person who, and 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, right? And this guy,
at one glance, I knew how unreliable this guy was, right? But I think I'm not at all,
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 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 gonna 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 at the
beginning. We have maintained good vibes, which is not what I can say about Elon.
I disagree with you, because good vibes in the moment, there's a deep core of good vibes that
persist 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. 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- The thing you criticized me for is actually
the right thing to do with Brett. Okay, 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. Let's see if you can maintain that philosophy in the present.
Let's go. 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. And first of all, I love you, Sam.
You're still an inspiration and somebody I deeply admire. Okay. 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 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 opens people's minds to actually questioning their own beliefs more. It takes
them out of the dogmatism, deescalates 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, the experts you're talking to,
they seem credentialed, but they're not actually as credentialed as they are illustrating. They're
not grounding their findings in actual meta-analyses 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,
like basically showing that like removing the emotional attachment to this debate,
even though you are very emotionally attached, because in the case of COVID specifically,
there is a very large number of lives at stake, but removing all of that and remembering that
you have a friendship. Yeah, well, so 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, in fact, those aren't mutually exclusive. So one of
three possibilities, he's either mentally ill, he's an asshole, or he's mentally ill and an
asshole. I think all three of those possibilities are possible for the both of us as well. No, I
would argue none of those are likely for either of us, but not to say we don't have our moments,
but so the reason not to talk to Kanye, so I think you should have had the conversation you
had with him in private. That's great, and I've got no criticism of what you said had it been
in private. 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 gonna 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, an ordinary garden
variety anti-Semite, well, then there's also not much to say unless you're really gonna 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,
right? There is a sort of wisdom that you can wield compassionately in moments like that,
where someone's full of shit and you just make it absolutely clear to them and to your audience
that they're full of shit, and there's no hatred being communicated. In fact,
you could just, it's like, listen, I'm gonna 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, right? I get that many,
this is not a signal you're likely to get from your audience, right? 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
lifestyle, 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 seeing a person? If it does, it's opening up in the wrong direction where just
gale force nonsense is coming in, right? I think we should have an open mind and an open heart, but
there's some clear things here that we have to keep in view. One is the mental illness component
is its own thing. 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 people see it.
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' podcast, either that's
more genius performance in his world, or he's unraveling further.
I wouldn't put that under mental illness. I think there's another conversation to be had about
how we treat artists, because they're weirdos. Taking words from Kanye as if he's like Christopher
Hitchens or something like that, like very eloquent, researched, written many books on
history and politics and geopolitics, on psychology, Kanye didn't do any of that.
He's an artist just spouting off. And so there's a different style of conversation
and a different way to treat the words that are coming out of his mouth.
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 antisemitism, 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.
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. 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 his own press. He actually
thinks 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. 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. So let me say just a couple of
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 that people talk about it. But I should also say that you're one of the only
people that wrote to me privately criticizing me out of the people I really respect and
admire, and that was really valuable. It was painful because I had to think through it for
a while. It still haunts me because the other kind of criticism I got a lot of, people basically
said things towards me based on who I am that they hate me. You mean antisemitic things?
Antisemitic things. I just hate the word antisemitic. It's like racist. But here's the reality.
So I'm someone, so I'm Jewish, although obviously not religious.
I have never taken, I've been a student of the Holocaust, obviously. I know a lot about that,
and there's reason 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 it's knit together,
it's not just ordinary racism. It's knit together with lots of conspiracy theories that never seem
to die out. It can by turns equally animate the left and the right politically. I mean,
what's so perverse about antisemitism, look in the American context, with the far right,
with white supremacists, Jews aren't considered white. So they hate us in the same spirit in
which they hate black people or brown people or anyone who's not white. But on the left,
Jews are considered extra white. I mean, we're the extra beneficiaries of white privilege.
And in the black community, that is often the case. We're a minority that has thrived,
and it seems to stand as a counterpoint to all of the problems that other minorities suffer,
in particular, African-Americans in the American context. And yeah, Asians are now getting a little
bit of this, like the model minority issue. But Jews have had this going on for centuries and
millennia, and it never seems to go away. And again, this is something that I've never focused
on, but this has been at a slow boil for as long as we've been alive. And there's no guarantee
it can't suddenly become much, much uglier than we have any reason to expect it to become,
even in our society. And so there's kind of a special concern at moments like that,
where you have an immensely influential person in a community who already has a checkered history
with respect to their own beliefs about the Jews and the conspiracies and all the rest.
And he's just messaging, not especially fully opposed by you and anyone else who's given him
the microphone at that moment to the world. And so that made my spidey sense tingle.
Yeah, it's complicated. The stakes are very high. And I, as somebody who's been obviously family
and also reading a lot about World War II, and just this whole period is a very difficult
conversation. But I believe in the power, especially given who I am, of not always,
but sometimes often turning the other cheek. Oh yeah. And again, things change
when they're for public consumption. It's like, I mean, the cut for me that has just,
the use case I keep stumbling upon is the kinds of things that I will say on a podcast like this, or
if I'm giving a public lecture versus the kinds of things I will say at dinner with strangers or
with friends. If I'm in an elevator with strangers and I hear someone say something stupid,
I don't feel an intellectual responsibility to turn around in the confines of that space with
them and say, listen, that thing you just said about X, Y, or Z is completely false and here's
why. But if somebody says it in front of me on some public dais, where I'm actually talking
about ideas, that's when there's a different responsibility that comes online. The question
is how you say it, how you say it. Or even whether you say anything in those, I mean,
there are moments, there are definitely moments to privilege civility or just to pick your battles.
I mean, sometimes it's just not worth it to get into it with somebody out in real life. I just
believe in the power of empathy, both in the elevator and when a bunch of people are listening.
That when they see you willing to consider another human being's perspective,
it just gives more power to your words after.
Well, yeah, but until it doesn't, because you can extend charity too far. It can be absolutely
obvious what someone's motives really are and they're dissembling about that. And so then you're
taken at face value, their representations begins to look like you're just being duped and you're
not actually doing the work of putting pressure on a bad actor. And again, the mental illness
component here makes it very difficult to think about what you should or shouldn't have said
to Kanya. So I think the topic of platforming is pretty interesting. What's your view on
platforming controversial people? Let's start with the old, would you interview Hitler
on your podcast and how would you talk to him? Oh, and follow-up question. Would you interview him
in 1935, 41, and then like 45? Well, I think we have an uncanny valley problem with respect to
this issue of whether or not to speak to bad people. So if a person is sufficiently bad,
if they're all the way out of the valley, then you can talk to them. And it's just,
it's totally unproblematic to talk to them because you don't have to spend any time
signaling to your audience that you don't agree with them. And if you're interviewing Hitler,
you don't have to say, listen, I just got to say, before we start, I don't agree with the whole
genocide thing. And I just think you're killing mental patients in vans and all that. That was
all bad. It's a bad look. It can go without saying that you don't agree with this person
and you're not platforming them to signal boost their views. You're just trying to,
if they're sufficiently evil, you can go into it very much as an anthropologist would.
You just want to understand the nature of evil, right? You just want to understand this
phenomenon. Like how is this person, who they are, right? And that strikes me as a intellectually
interesting and morally necessary thing to do, right? So yes, I think you always interview
Hitler. Well, once he's Hitler. But when do you know it? Once he's legitimately Hitler. But when
do you know it? Is genocide really happening? It's 1942, 43. No, if you're on the cusp of it,
where it's just, he's someone who's gaining power and you don't want to help facilitate that,
then there's a question of whether you can undermine him while pushing back against him
in that interview, right? So there are people I wouldn't talk to just because I don't want to
give them oxygen. And I don't think that in the context of my interviewing them, I'm going to be
able to take the wind out of their sails at all, right? So it's like for whatever, either because
it's an asymmetric advantage because I just know that they can do something within the span of an
hour that I can't correct for. It's like they can light many small fires and it just takes too much
time to put them out. That's more like on the topic of vaccines, for example, having a debate
on the efficacy of vaccines. Yeah. It's not that I don't think sunlight is usually the best
disinfectant. I think it is. Even these asymmetries aside, I mean, it is true that
a person can always make a mess faster than you can clean it up, right? But still there are
debates worth having even given that limitation. And they're the right people to have those
specific debates. And there's certain topics where I'll debate someone just because I'm the right
person for the job and it doesn't matter how messy they're going to be. It's just worth it because I
can make my points land at least to the right part of the audience. So some of it is just your
own skill and competence and also interest in preparing correctly? Well, yeah. Yeah. And the
nature of the subject matter. But there are other people who just by default, I would say, well,
there's no reason to give this guy a platform. And there are also people who are so confabulatory
that they're making such a mess with every sentence that insofar as you're even trying
to interact with what they're saying, you're by definition going to fail and you're going to seem
to fail to a sufficiently large uninformed audience where it's going to be a net negative
for the cause of truth, no matter how good you are. So for instance, I think talking to Alex
Jones on any topic for any reason is probably a bad idea because I just think he's just
neurologically wired to just utter a string of sentences. He'll get 20 sentences out,
each of which contains more lies than the last. And there's not time enough in the world
to run down, and certainly not time enough in the span of a conversation, to run down each of those
leads to bedrock so as to falsify it. I mean, he'll just make shit up or make shit up and then
then weave it in with half-truths and micro-truths that give some semblance of credibility to
somebody out there. I mean, apparently millions of people out there. And there's just no way to
untangle that in real time with him. I have noticed that you have an allergic reaction to
confabulatorization. Yeah, confabulation. Confabulation. That if somebody says something
a little micro-untruth, it really stops your brain. Here I'm not talking about micro-untruths,
I'm just talking about making up things out of whole cloth. Just like, if someone says something,
well, what about, and then the thing they put at the end of that sentence is just a set of
pseudo-facts that you can't possibly authenticate or not in the span of that conversation.
They will, whether it's about UFOs or anything else, they will seem to make you look like an
ignoramus when in fact everything they're saying is specious, whether they know it or not. I mean,
there's some people who are just crazy, there's some people who are just bullshitting and they're
not even tracking whether it's true, it just feels good, and then some people are conscious
and then some people are consciously lying about things. But don't you think there's just a kind
of jazz masterpiece of untruth that you should be able to just wave off by saying like, well,
none of that is backed up by any evidence and just almost like take it to the humor place.
But the thing is, the place I'm familiar with doing this and not doing this is on specific
conspiracies like 9-11 truth. Because of what 9-11 did to my intellectual life, it sent me down
a path for the better part of a decade. I became a critic of religion. I don't know if I was ever
going to be a critic of religion. It happened to be in my wheelhouse because I spent so much time
studying religion on my own. And I was also very interested in the underlying spiritual
concerns of every religion. And so I devoted more than a full decade of my life to just what is real
here? What is possible? What is the nature of subjective reality and how does it relate to
reality at large? And is there anything to, you know, who was someone like Jesus or Buddha? And
are these people frauds? Or are these just myths? Or is there really a continuum of insight to be
had here that is interesting? So I spent a lot of time on that question through the full decade of
my 20s. And that was launched in part by 9-11 truther? No, but then when 9-11 happened,
I had spent all this time reading religious books, empathically understanding the motivations of
religious people, knowing just how fully certain people believe what they say they believe. So
I took religious convictions very seriously. And then people started flying planes into our
buildings. And so I knew that there was something to be said about the core doctrines of Islam.
Exactly. So I went down. So that became my wheelhouse for a time,
terrorism and jihadism and related topics. And so the 9-11 truth conspiracy thing kept
getting aimed at me. And the question was, well, do I want to debate these people?
Alex Jones, perhaps.
Yeah. So Alex Jones, I think, was an early purveyor of it, although I don't think I
knew who he was at that point. And privately, I had some very long debates with people who,
you know, one person in my family went way down that rabbit hole. And I just, you know,
every six months or so, I'd literally write the two hour email, you know, that would
try to deprogram him, you know, however, ineffectually. And so I went back and forth
for years on that topic in private with people. But I could see the structure of the conspiracy.
I could see the nature of how impossible it was to play whack-a-mole sufficiently well,
so as to convince anyone of anything who was not seeing the problematic structure of that
way of thinking. I mean, it's not actually a thesis. It's a proliferation of anomalies
that you can't actually connect all the dots that are being pointed to. They don't connect
in a coherent way. They're incompatible theses that are not, and their incompatibility is not
being acknowledged. But they're running this algorithm of things are never what they seem.
There's always malicious conspirators doing things perfectly. We see all, we see evidence of human
incompetence everywhere else. No one can tie their shoes, you know, expertly anywhere else.
But over here, people are perfectly competent. They're perfectly concealing. Thousands of people
are collaborating, you know, inexplicably. I mean, incentivized by what? Who knows? They're
collaborating to murder thousands of their neighbors, and no one is breathing a peep
about it. No one's getting caught on camera. No one's breathed a word of it to a journalist,
and so I've dealt with that style of thinking, and I know what it's like to be in the weeds
of a conversation like that, and the person will say, okay, well, but what do you make of the fact
that all those F-16s were flown 800 miles out to sea on the morning of 9-11 doing an exercise
that hadn't even been scheduled for that day? Now, all of these, I dimly recall some thesis
of that kind, but I'm just making these things up now, right? So that detail hadn't even been
scheduled for that day. It was inexplicably run that day. So how long would it take to track
that down, right? The idea that this is anomalous, like there was an F-16 exercise run
and it wasn't even supposed to be run that day, right? Someone like Alex Jones,
their speech pattern is to pack as much of that stuff in as possible at the highest velocity that
the person can speak, and unless you're knocking down each one of those things to that audience,
you appear to just be uninformed. You appear to just not be... Wait, he didn't know about the
F-16s? He doesn't know about Project Mockingbird? You haven't heard about Project Mockingbird? I
just made up Project Mockingbird. I don't know what it is, but that's the kind of thing that
comes tumbling out in a conversation like that. That's the kind of thing, frankly, I was worried
about in the COVID conversation, because not that someone like Brett would do it consciously,
but someone like Brett is swimming in a sea of misinformation on social... Living on Twitter,
getting people sending the blog post and the study from the Philippines that showed that in
this cohort, Ivermectin did X, right? And to actually run anything to ground,
you have to actually do the work, journalistically and scientifically,
and run it to ground. So for some of these questions, you actually have to be a statistician
to say, okay, they used the wrong statistics in this experiment. Now,
yes, we could take all the time to do that, or we could at every stage along the way
in a context where we have experts we can trust go with what 97% of the experts are saying about
X, about the safety of mRNA, about the transmissibility of COVID, about whether to
wear a mask or not wear masks. And I completely agree that that broke down unacceptably
in the over the last few years. But I think that's largely... Social media and blogs and
the efforts of podcasters and substack writers were not just a response to that.
I think it was a symptom of that and a cause of that. And I think we're living in an environment
where we have trained ourselves not to be able to agree about facts on any topic,
no matter how urgent, right? What's flying in our sky? What's happening in Ukraine?
Is Putin just denazifying Ukraine? I mean, there are people who we respect
who are spending time down that particular rabbit hole. Maybe there are a lot of Nazis
in Ukraine, and that's the real problem, right? Maybe Putin's not the bad actor here, right?
How much time do I have to spend empathizing with Putin to the point of thinking, well,
maybe Putin's got a point and it's like, well, what about the polonium and the nerve agents
and the killing of journalists and Navalny? I'm not paying so much attention to that because I'm
following all these interesting people on Twitter and they're giving me some pro-Putin material
here. And there are some Nazis in Ukraine. It's not like there are no Nazis in Ukraine.
How am I going to weight these things? I think people are being driven crazy by Twitter.
Yeah. But you're kind of speaking to conspiracy theories that pollute everything,
but every example you gave is kind of a bad faith style of conversation.
But it's not necessarily knowingly bad faith. The people who are worried about
Ukrainian Nazis, I mean, they're some of the same people. They're the same people who are
worried about Ivermectin got suppressed. Like Ivermectin is really a panacea,
but it got suppressed because no one could make billions on it. It's the same,
it's literally, in many cases, the same people and the same efforts to unearth those.
You're saying it's very difficult to have conversations with those kinds of people.
What about a conversation with Trump himself? Would you do a podcast with Trump?
No, I don't think so. I don't think I'd be learning anything about him. It's like with
Hitler, and I'm not comparing Trump to Hitler.
But clips guy, here's your chance. You got this one.
With certain world historical figures, I would just feel like, okay, this is an opportunity
to learn something that I'm not going to learn. I think Trump is among the most superficial people
we have ever laid eyes on. He is in public view. And I'm sure there's some distance between who
he is in private and who he is in public, but it's not going to be the kind of distance that's
going to blow my mind. And I think the liability, for instance, I think Joe Rogan was very wise not
to have Trump on his podcast. I think all he would have been doing is he would have put himself
in a situation where he couldn't adequately contain the damage Trump was doing, and he was
just going to make Trump seem cool to a whole new, potentially new cohort of his massive audience.
They would have had a lot of laughs. Trump's funny. The entertainment value of things is so
influential. I mean, there was that one debate where Trump got a massive laugh on his line,
only Rosie O'Donnell. The truth is we're living in a political system where if you can get a big
laugh during a political debate, you win. It doesn't matter who you are. It doesn't matter
how uninformed you are. It doesn't matter that half the debate was about what the hell we should
do about the threat of nuclear war or anything else. We're monkeys, right? And we like to laugh.
Well, because you brought up Joe. He's somebody like you I look up to.
I've learned a lot from him because I think who he is privately is a human being. Also,
he's kind of the voice of curiosity to me. He inspired me. That's an unending,
open-minded curiosity, much like you are the voice of reason.
They recently had a podcast. Joe had recently had a podcast with Jordan Peterson and
he brought you up saying they still have a hope for you.
Yeah. I saw that clip, yeah.
Any chance that you talk to Joe again and reinvigorate your friendship?
Well, I reached out to him privately when I saw that clip.
Did you use the power of love?
Joe knows I love him and consider him a friend, right? So there's no issue there.
He also knows I'll be happy to do his podcast when we get that together. I've got no policy of not
talking to Joe or not doing his podcast. I think we got a little sideways along these same lines
where we've talked about Brett and Elon and other people. It was never to that degree with Joe
because Joe's in a very different lane and consciously so. I mean, Joe is a standup comic
who interviews, who just is interested in everything, interviews the widest conceivable
variety of people and just lets his interests collide with their expertise or lack of expertise.
I mean, again, it's a super wide variety of people. He'll talk about anything and he can
always pull the rip cord saying, I don't know what the fuck I'm saying. I'm a comic. I'm stoned.
We just drank too much, right? It's very entertaining. To my eye, it's all in good faith.
I think Joe is an extraordinarily ethical, good person.
Also doesn't use Twitter. Doesn't really use Twitter.
The crucial difference though is that because he is an entertainer first. I mean, I'm not saying
he's not smart and he doesn't understand things. What's potentially confusing is he's very smart
and he's also very informed. His full-time job is taught when he's not doing standup
or doing color commentary for the UFC. His full-time job is talking to
lots of very smart people at great length. So he's created the Joe Rogan University for himself
and he's gotten a lot of information crammed into his head. So it's not that he's uninformed,
but he can always, when he feels that he's uninformed or when it turns out he was wrong
about something, he can always pull the rip cord and say, I'm just a comic. We were stoned.
It was fun. Don't take medical advice from me. I don't play a doctor on the internet.
I can't quite do that, right? You can't quite do that. We're in different lanes. I'm not saying
you and I are in exactly the same lane, but for much of Joe's audience, I'm just this establishment
shill, just banging on about the universities and medical journals. And it's not true, but that
would be the perception. And as a counterpoint to a lot of what's being said on Joe's podcast or
or, you know, certainly Brett's podcast on these topics, I can see how they, they would form that
opinion. But in reality, if you listen to me long enough, you hear that I've said as much against
the woke nonsense as anyone, even any lunatic on the right, who's can only keep that bright,
that bright shining object in view, right? So there's nothing that Candace Owens has said about
wokeness that I haven't said about wokeness in so far as she's speaking rationally about wokeness.
But we have to be able to keep multiple things in view, right? If you could only look at the
problem of wokeness and you couldn't acknowledge the problem of Trump and Trumpism and QAnon and
the explosion of irrationality that was happening on the right and bigotry that was happening on
the right, you were just disregarding half of the landscape. And many people took half of the
problem in recent years. The last five years is a story of many people taking half of the problem
and monetizing that half of the problem and getting captured by an audience that only
wanted that half of the problem talked about in that way. And this is the larger issue of
audience capture, which is very, I'm sure it's an ancient problem, but it's a very helpful phrase
that I think comes to us courtesy of our mutual friend, Eric Weinstein. And audience capture is
a thing. And I believe I've witnessed many casualties of it. And if there's anything I've
been on guard against in my life professionally, it's been that. And when I noticed that I had a
lot of people in my audience who didn't like my criticizing Trump, I really leaned into it. And
when I noticed that a lot of the other cohort of my audience didn't like me criticizing the
far left and wokeness, I thought I was exaggerating that problem. I leaned into it because I thought
those parts of my audience were absolutely wrong. And I didn't care about whether I was going to
lose those parts of my audience. There are people who have created, knowingly or not,
there are people who've created different incentives for themselves because of how they've
monetized their podcasts and because of the kind of signal they've responded to in their audience.
And I worry about, Brett would consider this a totally invidious ad hominem thing to say,
but I really do worry that that's happened to Brett. I cannot explain how you do a hundred,
with all the things in the universe to be interested in, and of all the things he's
competent to speak intelligently about, I don't know how you do a hundred podcasts in a row on
COVID. It makes no sense. Do you think, in part, audience capture can explain that?
I absolutely think it can.
What about, for example, do you feel pressure to not admit that you made a mistake on COVID
or made a mistake on Trump? I'm not saying you feel that way, but do you feel this pressure?
So you've attacked audience capture within the way you do stuff, so you don't feel
as much pressure from the audience, but within your own ego.
I mean, again, the people who think I'm wrong about any of these topics are going to think,
okay, you're just not admitting that you're wrong, but now we're having a dispute about
specific facts. There are things that I believed about COVID or worried might be true about COVID
two years ago that I no longer believe or I'm not so worried about now, and vice versa. I
mean, things have flipped. Certain things have flipped upside down. The question is, was I wrong?
Here's the cartoon version of it, but this is something I said probably 18 months ago,
and it's still true. When I saw what Brett was doing on COVID, let's call it two years ago,
I said, even if he's right, even if it turns out that ivermectin is a panacea and the mRNA
vaccines kill millions of people, he's still wrong right now. His reasoning is still flawed
right now. His facts still stuck right now, and his confidence is unjustified now. That was true
then. That will always be true then, and not much has changed for me to revisit any of my time
points along the way. Again, I will totally concede that if I had teenage boys and their
schools were demanding that they be vaccinated with the mRNA vaccine, I would be powerfully
annoyed. I wouldn't know what I was going to do, and I would be doing more research about
myocarditis, and I'd be badgering our doctors, and I would be worried that we have a medical system,
and a pharmaceutical system, and a healthcare system, and a public health system that's not
incentivized to look at any of this in a fine-grain way, and they just want one blanket
admonition to the entire population. Just take the shot, you idiots. I view that largely
as a result, a panicked response to the misinformation explosion that happened,
and the public, the populist resistance animated by misinformation that just made it
impossible to get anyone to cooperate, right? Part of it is, again, a pendulum swing in the
wrong direction, somewhat analogous to the woke response to Trump and the Trumpist response to
woke, right? A lot of people have just gotten pushed around for bad reasons, but understandable
reasons, but yes, there are caveats to my, things have changed about my view of COVID, but
the question is, if you roll back the clock 18 months, was I wrong to want to platform
Eric Topol, a very well-respected cardiologist on this topic, or Nicholas Christakis to
talk about the network effects of whether we should close schools, right? He's
written a book on COVID. His network effects are his wheelhouse, both as an MD and as a
sociologist. There was a lot that we believed we knew about the efficacy of closing schools
during pandemics, right? During the, you know, during the Spanish flu pandemic and others,
right? But there's a lot we didn't know about COVID. We didn't know, we didn't know how
negligible the effects would be on kids compared to older people. We didn't know,
like the... So my problem, I really enjoyed your conversation with Eric Topol, but also didn't.
So he's one of the great communicators in many ways on Twitter, like distillation of the current
data, but he, I hope I'm not overstating it, but there is a bit of an arrogance from him that I
think it could be explained by him being exhausted, by being constantly attacked by conspiracy
theory, like anti-vaxxers. To me, the same thing happens with people that
start drifting to being right-wing, is they get attacked so much by the left,
they become almost irrational and arrogant in their beliefs. And I felt your conversation
with Eric Topol did not sufficiently empathize with people that have skepticism, but also did
not sufficiently communicate uncertainty we have. So like many of the decisions you made,
many of the things you were talking about were kind of saying there's a lot of uncertainty,
but this is the best thing we could do now. Well, it was a forced choice. You're going to get
COVID. Do you want to be vaccinated when you get it? That was always, in my view, an easy choice.
And it's up until you start breaking apart the cohorts and you start saying, okay, wait a minute,
there is this myocarditis issue in young men. Let's talk about that.
Before that story emerged, it was just clear that
if it's not knocking down transmission as much as we had hoped, it is still mitigating
severe illness and death. And I still believe that it is the current view of
most people competent to analyze the data that we lost something like 300,000 people unnecessarily
in the US because of vaccine hesitancy. But I think there's a way to communicate
with humility about the uncertainty of things that would increase the vaccination rate.
I do believe that it is rational and sometimes effective to signal impatience with certain
bad ideas and certain conspiracy theories and certain forms of misinformation.
I think so. I just think it makes you look like a douchebag most times.
Well, certain people are persuadable, certain people are not persuadable, but it's, no,
because there's not enough, it's the opportunity cost. Not everything can be given a patient
hearing. So you can't have a physics conference and then let people in to just trumpet their pet
theories about the grand unified vision of physics when they're obviously crazy or they're obviously
half crazy or they're just not, you begin to get a sense for this when it is your wheelhouse.
But there are people who kind of declare their irrelevance to the conversation fairly quickly
without knowing that they have done it. And the truth is, I think I'm one of those people
on the topic of COVID. It's never that I felt, listen, I know exactly what's going on here.
I know these mRNA vaccines are safe. I know exactly how to run a lockdown. No,
this is a situation where you want the actual pilots to fly the plane, right? We needed experts
who we could trust. And insofar as our experts got captured by all manner of things, I mean,
some of them got captured by Trump. Some of them were made to look ridiculous just standing next
to Trump while he was bloviating about whatever, that it's just going to go away. There's just 15
people. There's 15 people in a cruise ship and it's just going to go away. There's going to be
no problem. Or it's like when he said, many of these doctors think I understand this better than
them. They're just amazed at how I understand this. And you've got doctors, real doctors,
the heads of the CDC and NIH standing around just ashen faced while he's talking. All of this
was deeply corrupting of the public communication of science. And then again, I've banged on about
the depredations of wokeness. The woke thing was a disaster, right? Still is a disaster.
But the thing is there's a big difference between me and Brett in this case. I didn't do 100
podcasts on COVID. I did like two podcasts on COVID. The measure of my concern about COVID
can be measured in how many podcasts I did on it, right? It's like once we had a sense of how
to live with COVID, I was just living with COVID, right? Like, okay, if you get vaxxed or don't get
vaxxed, wear a mask or don't wear a mask, travel or don't travel. Like you've got a few things to
decide, but my kids were stuck at home on iPads for too long. I didn't agree with that. It was
obviously not functional. Like I criticized that on the margins, but there was not much to do about
it. But the thing I didn't do is make this my life and just browbeat people with one message
or another. We need a public health regime where we can trust what the competent people are saying
to us about what medicines are safe to take. And in the absence of that, craziness is going to,
even in the presence of that craziness is going to proliferate given the tools we've built. But
in the absence of that, it's going to proliferate for understandable reasons. And that's going to,
it's not going to be good next time when something orders of magnitude more dangerous hits us. And
that's, I spent, insofar as I think about this issue, I think much more about next time than
this time. Before this COVID thing, you and Brett had some good conversations. I would say we're
friends. What's your, what do you admire most about Brett outside of all the criticism we've
had about this COVID topic? Well, I think Brett is very smart and he's a very ethical person who
wants good things for the world. I mean, I have no reason to doubt that. So the fact that we're on,
you know, we're crosswise on this issue is not, does not mean that I think he's a bad person. I
mean, the thing that worried me about what he was doing, and this was true of Joe and this was true
of Elon, this is true of many other people, is that once you're messaging at scale to a vast
audience, you incur a certain kind of responsibility not to get people killed.
And I do, I did worry that, yeah, people were making decisions on the basis of the information
that was getting shared there. And that's why I was, I think, fairly circumspect. I just said,
okay, give me the, the center of the fairway expert opinion at this time point and at this
time point and at this time point, and then I'm out, right? I don't have any more to say about
this. I'm not an expert on COVID. I'm not an expert on the safety of mRNA vaccines.
If something, if something changes so as to become newsworthy, then maybe I'll do a podcast.
So I mean, I just did a podcast on the lab leak, right? I was never skeptical of the lab leak
hypothesis. Brett was very early on saying this is, this is a lab leak, right? At a point where
my only position was who cares if it's a lab leak, right? Like this, there's, the thing we have to
get straight is what do we do given the nature of this pandemic? But also we should say that
you've actually stated that it is a possibility. Oh yeah. You just said it doesn't, doesn't quite
matter. The time to figure that out. Now I've actually, I have had my, my podcast guest on this
topic changed my view of this because, you know, one of the guests, Alina Chan made the point that,
no, actually the best time to figure out the origin of this is immediately, right? Because
in the, you lose touch with the evidence. And I hadn't really been thinking about that. Like I
didn't, if you come back after a year, you know, there are certain facts you might not be able to
get in hand, but I've always felt that it didn't matter for two reasons. One is we had the genome
of the virus and, and we could design, we very quickly designed immediately designing vaccines
against that genome. And that's what we had to do. And then we had to figure out how to vaccinate
and to, and to mitigate and to develop treatments and all of that. So the origin story didn't
matter. Generically speaking, either origin story was politically inflammatory and made the Chinese
look bad, right? And the Chinese response to this looked bad, whatever the origin story, right?
They're not cooperating. They're letting, they're, they're stopping their domestic flights, but
letting their international flights go. I mean, it's just, they were bad actors and they should
be treated as such regardless of the origin. Right. And you know, I would argue that the
wet market origin is even more politically invidious than the lab leak origin. I mean,
why do you think, because for lab leak to my eye, the lab leak could happen to anyone, right? We're
all running, all these advanced countries are running these dangerous labs. That's a practice
that we should be worried about. You know, in general, we know lab leaks are a problem. There
have been multiple lab leaks of even worse things that haven't gotten out of hand in this way, but
you know, worse pathogens. We're wise to be worried about this. And on some level it could
happen to anyone, right? The wet market makes them look like barbarians within another century.
Like you got to clean up those wet markets. Like what are you doing putting a bat on top of a
pangolin on top of a duck? It's like, get your shit together. So like, if anything,
the wet market makes them look worse in my view. Now I'm sure there's, I'm sure that what they
actually did to conceal a lab leak, if it was a lab leak and all of that's going to look odious.
Do you think we ever get to the bottom of that? I mean, one of the big negative,
I would say failures of Anthony Fauci and so on is to be transparent and clear,
and it's just a good communicator about gain and function research. The dangers of that,
the success, like the, you know, why it's a useful way of research, but it's also dangerous.
Right. You know, just being transparent about that as opposed to just coming off really shady.
Of course the conspiracy theorists and the politicians are not helping,
but this just created a giant mess. Yeah, no, I would agree. So that exchange with
Fauci and Rand Paul that went viral. Yeah. I would agree that Fauci looked like he was
taking refuge in kind of very lawyered language and not giving a straightforward account of what
we do and why we do it. And so, yeah, I think it looked shady. It played shady and it probably
was shady. I mean, I don't know how personally entangled he is with any of this, but
yeah, the gain of function research is something that I think we're wise to be
worried about. And insofar as I judge myself adequate to have an opinion on this,
I think it should be banned, right? Like I, probably a podcast I'll do, you know,
if you or somebody else doesn't do it in the meantime. You know, I would like a virologist
on to defend it against a virologist who would criticize it. Forget about just the gain of
function research. I don't even understand virus hunting at this point. It's like, I don't know.
I don't even know why you need to go into a cave to find this next virus that could be circulating
among bats that may jump zoonautically to us. Why do that when we can make, when we can sequence
in a day and make vaccines in a weekend? I mean, like what kind of headstart do you think you're
getting? That's a surprising new thing, how quickly you can develop a vaccine. Exactly.
That's, yeah, that's really interesting. But the shadiness around lab leak.
I think the point I didn't make about Brett's style of engaging this issue is people are using
the fact that he was early on lab leak to suggest that he was right about ivermectin and about mRNA
vaccines and all the rest. Like, no, that's, none of that connects. And it was possible to be
falsely confident. Like you shouldn't have been confident about lab. No one should have been
confident about lab leak early, even if it turns out to be lab leak, right? It was always plausible.
It was never definite. It still isn't definite. Zoonautic is also quite plausible. It certainly
was super plausible then. Both are politically uncomfortable. Both at the time were inflammatory
to be banging on about when we were trying to secure some kind of cooperation from the Chinese,
right? So there's a time for these things and it's possible to be right by accident,
right? Your reasoning, the style of reasoning matters whether you're right or not.
It's like, because your style of reasoning is dictating what you're going to do on the next
topic. Sure. But this multivariate situation here, it's really difficult to know what's
right on COVID, given all the uncertainty, all the chaos, especially when you step outside the
pure biology, virology of it, and you started getting to policy. It's really-
Yeah. It's just trade-offs. Yeah. Like transmissibility of the virus.
Just knowing if 65% of the population gets vaccinated, what effect would that have?
Just even knowing those things, just modeling all those things. Given all the other incentives,
I mean, Pfizer, I don't know what to think. But you had the CEO of Pfizer on your podcast.
Did you leave that conversation feeling like this is a person who is consciously
reaping windfall profits on a dangerous vaccine and putting everyone at intolerable risk? Or did
you think this person was making a good faith attempt to save lives and had no taint of bad
incentives or something? The thing I sensed, and I felt in part it was a failure on my part,
but I sensed that I was talking to a politician. So it's not thinking of there was malevolence
there or benevolence. He just had a job. He put on a suit and I was talking to a suit,
not a human being. Now, he said that his son was a big fan of the podcast, which is why he
wanted to do it. So I thought I would be talking to a human being. And I asked challenging
questions, what I thought the internet thinks otherwise. Every single question in that interview
was a challenging one, but it wasn't grilling, which is what people seem to want to
do with pharmaceutical companies. There's a deep distrust of pharmaceutical companies.
What was the alternative? I mean, I totally get that windfall profits at a time of public
health emergency looks bad. It is a bad look, right? But how do we reward and return capital
to risk takers who will spend a billion dollars to design a new drug for a disease that maybe only
harms a single digit percentage of the population? It's like, well, what do we want to encourage
and who do we want to get rich? I mean, so like the person who cures cancer,
do we want that person to get rich or not? We want the person who gave us the iPhone to get rich,
but we don't want the person who cures cancer to get rich. I mean, what are we trying to do?
I think it's a very gray area. So what we want is the person who declares that they have a cure
for cancer to have authenticity and transparency. I think we're good now as a population smelling
bullshit. And there is something about the Pfizer CEO, for example, just CEOs of pharmaceutical
companies in general, just because they're so lawyered up, so much marketing PR people
that they're, you just smell bullshit. You're not talking a real human.
It just feels like none of it is transparent to us as a public. So like this whole talking point
that Pfizer is only interested in helping people just doesn't ring true, even though it very well
could be true. It's the same thing with Bill Gates, who seems to be at scale helping a huge
amount of people in the world. And yet there's something about the way he delivers that message
where people like, they seem suspicious. What's happening underneath this? There's certain kinds
of communication styles that seem to be more, serve as better catalysts for conspiracy theories.
And I'm not sure what that is because I don't think there's an alternative
for capitalism in delivering drugs that help people. But also at the same time,
there seems to need to be more transparency and plus like regulation that actually makes sense
versus it seems like pharmaceutical companies are susceptible to corruption.
Yeah, I worry about all that, but I also do think that most of the people going into those fields
and most of the people going into government, they're non-psychopaths trying to get good things
done and trying to solve hard problems. And they're not trying to get rich. I mean,
many of the people are, it's like bad incentives or something. Again, I've
uttered that phrase 30 times on this podcast, but it's just almost everywhere it explains
normal people creating terrible harm. It's not that there are that many bad people.
And yes, it makes the truly bad people that much more remarkable and worth paying attention to, but
the bad incentives and the power of bad ideas do much more harm because that's what gets good
people running in the wrong direction or doing things that are clearly creating unnecessary
suffering. You've had, and I hope still have, a friendship with Elon Musk, especially over
the topic of AI. You have a lot of interesting ideas that you both share, concerns you both share.
Well, let me first ask, what do you admire most about Elon?
Well, I had a lot of fun with Elon. I like Elon a lot. I mean, Elon, I knew as a friend, I
like a lot and it's not going to surprise anyone. I mean, he's done and he's
continuing to do amazing things. And I think many of his aspirations are realized, the world will
be a much better place. I think it's amazing to see what he's built and what he's attempted to
build and what he may yet build. So with Tesla, with SpaceX.
Yeah, I'm a fan of almost all of that. I mean, there are wrinkles to a lot of that or some of
that. All humans are full of wrinkles. There's something very Trumpian about how he's acting
on Twitter. I mean, Twitter, I think Twitter, he doesn't, he thinks Twitter is great. He
bought the place because he thinks it's so great. I think Twitter is driving him crazy.
Right. I think he's, I think he's needlessly complicating his life and harming his reputation
and creating a lot of noise and, and harming a lot of other people. I mean, so like he,
the thing that I objected to with him on Twitter is not that he bought it and made
changes to it. I mean, that was not, again, I remain agnostic as to whether or not he can
improve the platform. It was how he was personally behaving on Twitter, not just toward me,
but toward the world. I think when you, you know, forward an article about Nancy Pelosi's husband
being attacked, not as he was by some lunatic, but that it's just some gay, gay tryst gone awry.
Right. That's not what it seems. And you link to a, a website that previously claimed that
Hillary Clinton was dead and that a body double was campaigning in her place.
That thing was exploding in Trumpistan as a conspiracy theory. Right. And it was having
its effect and it matters that he was signal boosting it in front of 130 million people.
And so it is with saying that your, you know, your, your former employee,
Yoel Roth is a pedophile. Right. I mean, it's like, that has real consequences. It appeared
to be complete bullshit. And now you get, this guy's getting inundated with death threats. Right.
And Elon, it's all, that's totally predictable. Right. And he's, so he's behaving quite recklessly
and there's a long list of things like that, that he's done on Twitter. It's not ethical.
It's not good for him. It's not good for the world. It's not serious. It's just, it's, it's,
it's a very adolescent relationship to real problems in our society. And so my, my problem
with how he's behaved is that he's, he's purported to touch real issues by turns like, okay, do I
give the satellites to Ukraine or not? Do I, do I minimize their use of them or not? Is this,
should I publicly worry about world war three or not? Right. He's doing this shit on Twitter.
Right. And at the same moment, he's doing these other very impulsive, ill-considered things,
and he's not showing any willingness to really clean up the mess he makes.
Um, he brings Kanye on knowing he's an anti-Semite who's got mental health problems and then kicks
him off for a swastika, which I probably wouldn't have kicked him off for a swastika. It's like,
that's, that's even like, can you really kick people off for swastikas? Is that something that
you get banned for? I mean, that, are you a free speech absolutist if you can't
let a swastika show up? I'm not even sure that's enforced and enforceable terms of service,
right? There's their way, there are moments to use swastikas that are not conveying hate and
not raising the risk of violence. Clip that. Yeah. Any, but so much of what he's doing,
given that he's, again, scale matters. He's doing this in front of 130 million people.
That's very different than a million people. And that's very different than a hundred thousand
people. And so when I went off the tracks with Elon, he was doing this about COVID.
And, um, again, this was a situation where I tried to privately mitigate a friend's behavior
and it didn't work out very well. Did you try to correct him
sort of highlighting things he might be wrong on or did you use the Lex power love method? I should,
I should write like a pamphlet for Sam Harris. Well, no, but it was, it was totally coming from
a place of love because I was concerned about his reputation. I was concerned about what he,
I mean, there was a twofold concern. I could see what was happening with the tweet. I mean,
he'd had this original tweet that was, uh, I think it was panic, panic over COVID is dumb or
something like that. Right. This is way, this is in March, early March, 2020. Oh, super early days.
Super early. So when nobody knew anything, but we knew we saw what was happening in Italy. Right.
It was totally kicking off. Um, God, that was a wild time. That's when the toilet paper was
totally wild, but that became the most influential tweet on Twitter for that week. I mean, it had
more engagement than any other tweet more than any crazy thing. Trump was tweeting. I mean,
it was, it went off again. It was just a nuclear bomb of, of, um, information. And I could see
that people were responding to it. Like, wait a minute. Okay. Here's this genius technologist
who must have inside information about everything, right? Surely he knows something that is not on
the surface about this pandemic and they're reading, they were reading into it a lot of
information that I knew wasn't there. Right. And I, and I, at the time I didn't even,
I didn't think he had any reason to be suggesting that. I think he was just firing off a tweet.
Right. So I reached out to him in private and I mean, because it was a private
text conversation, um, I won't talk about the details, but I'm just saying, and that's a case,
you know, among the many cases of friends who have public platforms and who did something that I
thought was dangerous and ill considered. This was a case where I, I reached out in private and tried
to, to, um, help genuinely help because it was just, I thought it was harmful in every sense
because it was being misinterpreted. And it was like, Oh, okay. You can say that panic over
anything is dumb. Fine. But this was not how this was landing. This was like
non-issue conspiracy code. There's going to be no COVID in the U S it's going to peter out. It's
just going to become a cold. I mean, that, that's how this was getting received. Whereas at that
moment, it was absolutely obvious how big a deal this was going to be or that it was going to add
minimum going to be a big deal. I don't know if it was obvious, but it was, it was obvious that it
was a significant probability that it could be a big, I remember in March, it wasn't unclear
like how big, cause there were still stories of it. Like it's probably going to like
the big concern, the hospitals might overfill, but it's going to die out in like two months or
something. Yeah, we don't know, but it was, there was no way we weren't going to have
tens of thousands of deaths at a minimum at that point. And, and it was, it was every,
it was totally rational to be worried about hundreds of thousands. And when Nicholas
Christakis came on my podcast very early, you know, he predicted quite confidently that we
would have about a million people dead in the U S right. And that didn't seem, you know, it was,
it was, you know, I think appropriately hedged, but it was still, it was just like, okay,
it's just going to, you just look at the, we're just kind of riding this exponential and we're,
and it's going to be, you know, it'd be very surprising not to have that order of magnitude
and not something much, much less. And so anyway, I mean, again, to, to close the story on Elon,
I could see how this was being received and I tried to get him to walk that back. And then we,
we had a fairly long and detailed exchange on this issue and that, so that intervention didn't
work and it was not done, you know, I was not an asshole. I was not, I was just concerned,
you know, for him, for the world for, and, you know and then there are other relationships where
I didn't take the, again, that's an example where taking the time didn't work right privately.
There are other relationships where I thought, okay, this is just going to be more trouble than
it's worth. And I said, I just, just ignored it, you know, and there's a lot of that. And I, and I,
Frank, again, I'm not comfortable with how this is all netted out because I don't know if, you know,
I'm not, you know, frankly, I'm not comfortable with how much time in this conversation we've
spent talking about these specific people. Like, what good is it for me to, to talk about Elon or
Brett or anything? I think there's a lot of good because those friendships, listen, as a fan,
these are the conversations that I loved, love as a fan. And it feels like COVID has robbed the
world of these conversations because you were exchanging back and forth on Twitter, but that's
not what I mean by conversations, like long form discussions, like a debate about COVID,
like a normal debate. But there's no, there is no, Elon and I shouldn't be debating COVID.
You should be. Here's the thing with humility, like basically saying, we don't really know,
like the Rogan method, we don't, we're just a bunch of idiots. Like one is an engineer,
you're a neuroscientist, but like, it just kind of, okay, here's the evidence and be like normal
people. That's what everybody was doing. The whole world was like trying to figure out what the hell,
what. Yeah, but the issue was that at that, so at the moment I had this collision with Elon,
certain things were not debatable, right? It was just, it was absolutely clear where this was
going. It wasn't clear how far it was going to go or how quickly we would mitigate it, but
it was absolutely clear that it was going to be an issue, right? The train had come off the tracks
in Italy. We knew we weren't going to seal our borders. There were already people, you know,
there are already cases known to many of us personally in the US at that point.
And he was operating by a very different logic that I couldn't engage with.
Sure, but that logic represents a part of the population and there's a lot of interesting
topics that have a lot of uncertainty around them, like the effectiveness of masks.
Yeah, but no, but where things broke down was not at the point of, oh, there's a lot to talk about,
a lot to debate. This is all very interesting and who knows what's what. It broke down very early at
this is, you know, there's nothing to talk about here. Like either there's a water bottle on the
table or there isn't, right? Technically there's only one fourth of a water bottle.
So what defines a water bottle? Is it the water inside the water bottle or is it the water bottle?
What I'm giving you is an example of it's worth a conversation. This is difficult because this is,
we had an exchange in private and I want to honor not exposing the details of it, but,
you know, the details convinced me that there was not a follow-up conversation on that topic.
On this topic. That said, I hope, and I hope to be part of helping that happen,
that the friendship is rekindled because one of the topics I care a lot about,
artificial intelligence, you've had great public and private conversations about this topic.
Yeah, and Elon was very formative in my taking that issue seriously. I mean, he and I went to
that initial conference in Puerto Rico together and it was only because he was going and I found
out about it through him and I just rode his coattails to it, you know, that I got dropped
in that side of the pool to hear about these concerns at that point. It would be interesting
to hear how has your concern evolved with the coming out of ChatGPT and these new large language
models that are fine-tuned with reinforcement learning and seemingly to be able to do some
incredible human-like things. There's two questions. One, how has your concern in terms of AGI and
superintelligence evolved and how impressed are you with ChatGPT as a student of the human mind
and mind in general? Well, my concern about AGI is unchanged. I've spoken about it a bunch
on my podcast, but I did a TED Talk in 2016, which was the kind of summary of what that conference
and various conversations I had after that did to my brain on this topic. Basically, that once
superintelligence is achieved, there's a takeoff, it becomes exponentially smarter,
and in a matter of time, there's just we're ants and they're gods. Well, yeah, unless we find some
way of permanently tethering a superintelligent self-improving AI to our value system and I don't
believe anyone has figured out how to do that or whether that's even possible in principle. I know
people like Stuart Russell, who I just had on my podcast. Oh, really? Have you released it?
I haven't released it, yeah. Oh, great. He's been on previous podcasts, but we just recorded
this week. Because you haven't done an AI podcast in a while, so it's great. He's a good person to
talk about alignment with. Yeah, so Stuart has been probably more than anyone my guru on this
topic. I mean, just reading his book and doing, I think I've done two podcasts with him at this
point. I think it's called The Control Problem or something like that. His book is Human Compatible.
Human Compatible. Yeah, he talks about The Control Problem. And yeah, so I just think the idea that
we can define a value function in advance that permanently tethers a self-improving
super-intelligent AI to our values as we continue to
discover them, refine them, extrapolate them in an open-ended way. I think that's a tall order
and I think there are many more ways. There must be many more ways of designing super-intelligence
that is not aligned in that way and is not ever approximating our values in that way. So I mean,
Stuart's idea to put it in a very simple way is that he thinks you don't want to specify the value
function upfront. You don't want to imagine you could ever write the code in such a way as to
admit of no loophole. You want to make the AI uncertain as to what human values are and
perpetually uncertain and always trying to ameliorate that uncertainty by hewing more
and more closely to what our professed values are. So it's always interested in
us saying, oh no, no, that's not what we want. That's not what we intend. Stop doing that.
No matter how smart it gets, all it wants to do is more perfectly approximate human values. I
think there are a lot of problems with that at a high level. I'm not a computer scientist,
so I'm sure there are many problems at a low level that I don't understand. Like how to force
a human into the loop always, no matter what. There's that and like what humans get a vote
and just what do humans value and what is the difference between what we say we value and
our revealed preferences, which if you were a super intelligent AI that could look at
humanity now, I think you could be forgiven for concluding that what we value is driving ourselves
crazy with Twitter and living perpetually on the brink of nuclear war and just watching
hot girls in yoga pants on TikTok again and again and again. You're saying that is not?
This is all revealed preference and it's what is an AI to make of that and what should it optimize.
This is also Stuart's observation that one of the insidious things about the YouTube algorithm is
it's not that it just caters to our preferences, it actually begins to change us in ways so as to
make us more predictable. It finds ways to make us a better reporter of our preferences and to
trim our preferences down so that it can further train to that signal. The main concern is that
most of the people in the field seem not to be taking intelligence seriously. As they design
more and more intelligent machines and as they profess to want to design true AGI,
they're not spending the time that Stuart is spending trying to figure out how to do this
safely above all. They're just assuming that these problems are going to solve themselves
as we make that final stride into the end zone or they're saying very
Pollyanna-ish things like an AI would never form a motive to harm humans. Why would it
ever form a motive to be malicious toward humanity unless we put that motive in there?
That's not the concern. The concern is that in the presence of vast disparities in competence
and certainly in a condition where the machines are improving themselves,
they're improving their own code, they could be developing instrumental goals
that are antithetical to our well-being without any intent to harm us. It's analogous to what we
do to every other species on earth. You and I don't consciously form the intention to harm
insects on a daily basis, but there are many things we could intend to do that would in fact
harm insects because you decide to repave your driveway or whatever you're doing. You're just not
taking the interest of insects into account because they're so far beneath you in terms of
your cognitive horizons. The real challenge here is that
if you believe that intelligence scales up on a continuum toward heights that we can only dimly
imagine, and I think there's every reason to believe that. There's no reason to believe that
we're near the summit of intelligence. Maybe there's some forms of intelligence for which
this is not true, but for many relevant forms, like the top 100 things we care about cognitively,
I think there's every reason to believe that many of those things, most of those things,
are a lot like chess or Go, where once the machines get better than we are, they're going
to stay better than we are. Although, I don't know if you caught the recent thing with Go,
this actually came out of Stuart's lab. One time a human beat a machine in Go.
They found a hack for that. Anyway, ultimately, there's going to be no looking back. Then the
question is, what do we do in relationship to these systems that are more competent
than we are in every relevant respect? Because it will be a relationship. The people who
think we're just going to figure this all out without thinking about it in advance,
the solutions are just going to find themselves,
seem not to be taking the prospect of really creating autonomous super intelligence seriously.
What does that mean? It's every bit as independent and ungovernable, ultimately,
as us having created... I mean, just imagine if we created a race of people
that were 10 times smarter than all of us. How would we live with those people?
They're 10 times smarter than us. They begin to talk about things we don't understand. They begin
to want things we don't understand. They begin to view us as obstacles to them, so they're solving
those problems or gratifying those desires. We become the chickens or the monkeys in their
presence. I think that it's... But for some amazing solution of the sort that Stuart is
imagining, that we could somehow anchor their reward function permanently, no matter how
intelligence scales, I think it's really worth worrying about this. I do buy the sci-fi notion
that this is an existential risk if we don't do it well. I worry that we don't notice it.
I'm deeply impressed with Chad GPT, and I'm worried that it will become super intelligent.
These language models will become super intelligent because they're basically trained
in the collective intelligence of the human species, and then it will start controlling
our behavior if they're integrated into our algorithms, the recommender systems,
and then we just won't notice that there's a super intelligent system that's controlling
our behavior. Well, I think that's true even before, far before super intelligence,
even before general intelligence. I think just the narrow intelligence
of these algorithms and of what something like Chad GPT can do,
I mean, it's just far short of it developing its own goals that are at cross purposes with ours.
Just the unintended consequences of using it in the ways we're going to be incentivized to use it,
and the money to be made from scaling this thing, and what it does to our information space and our
sense of just being able to get to ground truth on any facts, it's super scary.
Do you think it's a giant leap in terms of the development towards AGI, Chad GPT, or is this
just an impressive little toolbox? When do you think the singularity is coming? Or is it T?
It doesn't matter. I have no intuitions on that front apart from the fact that if we continue to
make progress, it will come. You just have to assume we continue to make progress. There's
only two assumptions. You have to assume substrate independence. There's no reason why this can't be
done in silico. It's just we can build arbitrarily intelligent machines. There's nothing magical
about having this done in the wet wear of our own brains. I think that is true, and I think
that's scientifically parsimonious to think that that's true. Then you just have to assume we're
going to keep making progress. It doesn't have to be any special rate of progress. It doesn't have
to be Moore's law. We just keep going. At a certain point, we're going to be in relationship
to minds leaving consciousness aside. I don't have any reason to believe that
they'll necessarily be conscious by virtue of being super intelligent, and that's its own
interesting ethical question. Leaving consciousness aside, they're going to be more competent than we
are. Then that's like the aliens have landed. That's an encounter with, again, leaving aside
the possibility that something like Stuart's path is actually available to us. It is hard to picture
if what we mean by intelligence, all things considered, and it's truly general,
if that scales and begins to build upon itself, how you maintain that perfect, slavish devotion
until the end of time in those systems. The tether to humans?
Yeah. I think my gut says that that tether is not—there's a lot of ways to do it.
It's not this increasingly impossible problem.
Right. As you know, I'm not a computer scientist, so I have no intuitions about
just algorithmically how you would approach that and what's possible.
My main intuition is maybe deeply flawed, but the main intuition is based on the fact that
most of the learning is currently happening on human knowledge. Even Chad GPT is just
trained on human data. I don't see where the takeoff happens where you completely go above
human wisdom. The current impressive aspect of Chad GPT is that's using collective intelligence
of all of us. From what I glean, again, from people who know much more about this than I do,
I think we have reason to be skeptical that these techniques of deep learning are actually
going to be sufficient to push us into AGI. They're not generalizing in the way they need to.
They're certainly not learning like human children. There's brittle and strange ways.
It's not to say that the human path is the only path. Maybe we might learn better lessons by
ignoring the way brains work. We know that they don't generalize and use
abstraction the way we do. They have strange holes in their competence.
But the size of the holes is shrinking every time. The intuition starts to slowly fall apart.
The intuition is like, surely it can't be this simple to achieve super intelligence,
but it's becoming simpler and simpler. I don't know. The progress is quite incredible. I've
been extremely impressed with Chad GPT and the new models, and there's a lot of financial incentive
to make progress in this regard. We're going to be living through some very interesting times.
In raising a question that I'm going to be talking to you, a lot of people brought up this topic,
probably because Eric Weinstein talked to Joe Rogan recently and said that he and you were
contacted by folks about UFOs. Can you clarify the nature of this contact that you were contacted by?
I've got very little to say on this. He has much more to say. I think he went down
this rabbit hole further than I did, which wouldn't surprise anyone. He's got much more
of a taste for this sort of thing than I do, but I think we were contacted by the same person.
It wasn't clear to me who this person was or how this person got my cell phone number.
It didn't seem like we were getting punked. The person seemed credible to me.
And they were talking to you about the release of different videos on UFOs.
Yeah, and this is when there was a flurry of activity around this. There was a big
New Yorker article on UFOs and there were rumors of congressional hearings coming
and the videos that were being debunked or not.
This person contacted both of us around the same time. He might have contacted Rogan.
Eric is just the only person I've spoken to about it, I think, who I know was contacted.
The person kept writing a check that he didn't cash. He kept saying,
okay, next week, I understand this is sounding spooky and you have no reason to really trust me,
but next week I'm going to put you on a Zoom call with people who you will recognize and
they're going to be former heads of the CIA. Within five seconds of being on the Zoom call,
you'll know this is not a hoax. I said, great, just let me know. Just send me the Zoom link.
That happened maybe three times. There was just one phone conversation and then it was just texts,
you know, just a bunch of texts. And I think Eric spent more time with this person and I haven't
spoken to him about it. I know he's spoken about it publicly. It's not that my bullshit detector
ever really went off in a big way. It's just the thing never happened and so I lost interest.
So you made a comment, which is interesting, which I really appreciate, that you ran the
thought experiment of saying, okay, maybe we do have alien spacecraft or just the thought
experiment the aliens did visit. And then this very kind of nihilistic, sad thought that
it wouldn't matter. It wouldn't affect your life. Can you explain that? Well, no, I was, I think
many people noticed this. I mean, this was a sign of how crazy the news cycle was at that point,
right? Like we had COVID and we had Trump and I forget when the UFO thing was really kicking off,
but it just seemed like no one had the bandwidth to even be interested in this. It's like I was
amazed to notice in myself that I wasn't more interested in figuring out what was going on.
It's like, and I considered, okay, wait a minute. If this is true, this is the biggest story in
anyone's lifetime. I mean, contact with alien intelligence is by definition the biggest story
in anyone's lifetime in human history. Why isn't this just totally captivating? And not only was
it not totally captivating, it was just barely rising to the level of my being able to pay
attention to it. And I view that one as to some degree, an understandable defense mechanism
against the bogus claims that have been made about this kind of thing in the past.
The general sense is probably bullshit or it probably has some explanation that is purely
terrestrial and not surprising. And there is somebody who, what's his name? Is it Mick West?
I forget. Is it a YouTuber? He debunked stuff. Yeah. I have since seen some of those videos.
I mean, now this is going back still at least a year, but some of those videos seem like
fairly credible debunkings of some of the optical evidence. And I'm surprised we haven't seen more
of that. Like there was a fairly credulous 60 Minutes piece that came out around that time,
looking at some of that video. And it was the very video that he was debunking on YouTube and his
video only had like 50,000 views on it or whatever. But again, it seemed like a fairly credible
debunking. I haven't seen debunkings of his debunkings. I think there is, but he's basically
saying that there is possible explanations for it. And usually in these kinds of contexts,
if there's a possible explanation, even if it seems unlikely, is going to be more likely
than an alien civilization visiting us. Yeah. It's the extraordinary claims require
extraordinary evidence principle, which I think is generally true. Well, with aliens, I think
generally, I think there should be some humility about what they would look like when they show up.
I tend to think they're already here. The amazing thing about this AI conversation though, is that
we're talking about a circumstance where we would be designing the aliens and there's every reason
to believe that eventually this is going to happen. Like I said, I'm not at all skeptical about
the coming reality of the aliens and we're going to build them. Now here's the thing,
does this apply to when super intelligence shows up? Will this be trending on Twitter for a day?
And then we'll go on to complain about something Sam Harris once again said on his podcast next
day. You tend to trend on Twitter, even though you're not on Twitter, which is great.
Yeah. I haven't noticed. I did notice when I was on, but.
You have this concern about AGI, basically same kind of thing that we would just look the other
way. Is there something about this time where even like World War III, which has been throwing
around very casually, concerningly so, even that the new cycle wipes that away?
Yeah. Well, I think we have this general problem that we can't make
certain information, even unequivocally certain information, emotionally salient. Like we respond
quite readily to certain things. I mean, as we talked about, we respond to the little girl who
fell down a well. I mean, that gets a hundred percent of our emotional resources, but the
abstract probability of nuclear war, even a high probability, even an intolerable probability,
even if we put it at 30%, it's just like that's a Russian roulette with a gun with three chambers
and it's aimed at the heads, not only your head, but your kid's head and everyone's kid's head.
It's just 24 hours a day. I think people who have, this is pre-Ukraine, I think the people
who have made it their business professionally to think about the risk of nuclear war and to
mitigate it, people like Graham Allison or William Perry. I think they were putting the ongoing risk,
the risk that we're going to have a proper nuclear war at some point in the next generation,
people were putting it at something like 50%, that we're living with this sort of Damocles
over our heads. Now you might wonder whether anyone could have reliable intuitions about
the probability of that kind of thing, but the status quo is truly alarming. I mean,
we've got ICBMs on, leave aside smaller exchanges and tactical nukes and how we could have a world
war based on incremental changes. We've got the biggest bombs aimed at the biggest cities in both
directions and it's old technology and it's vulnerable to some lunatic deciding to launch
or misreading bad data. And we know we've been saved from nuclear war, I think at least twice
by Soviet submarine commanders deciding, I'm not going to pass this up the chain of command. It's
almost certainly an error and it turns out it was an error. And we need people to, I mean,
in that particular case, he saw, I think it was five, what seemed like five missiles launched
from the US to Russia. And he reasoned if America was going to engage in a first strike, they'd
launch more than five missiles, right? So this has to be fictional. And then he waited long enough
to decide that it was fictional, but the probability of a nuclear war happening by mistake
or in some other species of inadvertence, you know, misunderstanding, technical malfunction,
that's intolerable. Forget about the intentional use of it by people who are, you know, driven
crazy by some ideology. And more and more technologies are enabled at a kind of scale
of destruction. And misinformation plays into this picture in a way that is especially scary. I mean,
once you can get a deep fake of, you know, any current president of the United States claiming
to have launched a first strike, you know, and just, you know, send that everywhere. But they
change the nature of truth. And then we, that might change the engine we have for skepticism,
sharpen it, the more you have deep fakes.
Yeah, and we might have AI and digital watermarks that help us. Maybe we'll not trust any information
that hasn't come through specific channels, right? I mean, so like in my world, it's like,
I no longer feel the need to respond to anything other than what I put out in my channels of
information. It's like, there's so many people who have clipped stuff of me that shows the opposite
of what I was actually saying in context. I mean, the people have like re-edited my podcast audio
to make it seem like I said the opposite of what I was saying. It's like, unless I put it out,
you can't be sure that I actually said it, you know? I mean, it's just, but I don't know what
it's like to live like that for all forms of information. And I mean, strangely, I think it
may require a greater siloing of information in the end. You know, it's like, we're living through
this sort of Wild West period where everyone's got a newsletter and everyone's got a blog and
everyone's got an opinion, but once you can fake everything. There might be a greater value for
expertise for experts, but a more rigorous system for identifying who the experts are.
Yeah, or just knowing that, you know, it's going to be an arms race to authenticate information.
So it's like, if you can never trust a photograph unless it has been vetted by Getty Images,
because only Getty Images has the resources to authenticate the provenance of that photograph
and a test that hasn't been meddled with by AI. And again, I don't even know if that's technically
possible and maybe whatever the tools available for this will be, you know, commodified and the
cost will be driven to zero so quickly that everyone will be able to do it. You know,
it could be like encryption, but. And it would be proven and tested most effectively first,
of course, as always in porn, which is where most of human innovation technology happens first.
Well, I have to ask because Ron Howard, the director asked us on Twitter, since we're
talking about the threat of nuclear war and otherwise, he asked, I'd be interested in both
your expectations for human society if, when we move beyond Mars. Will those societies be
industrial-based? How will it be governed? How will criminal infractions be dealt with
when you read or watch sci-fi? What comes closest to sounding logical? Do you think
about our society beyond Earth? If we colonize Mars, if we colonize space?
Yeah, well, I think I have a pretty humbling picture of that. I mean, so,
because we're still going to be the apes that we are. So when you imagine colonizing Mars,
you have to imagine a first fistfight on Mars. You have to imagine a first murder on Mars.
Also infidelity.
Yeah, extra marital affairs on Mars, right? So it's going to get really homely and boring
really fast. I think, you know, it's like only the space suits or whatever the other
contingencies of just living in that atmosphere or lack thereof, will limit how badly we can
behave on Mars.
But do you think most of the interaction will be still in meat space versus digital? Do you think
we're like living through a transformation of a kind where we're going to be doing more and
more interaction than digital space? Like everything we've been complaining about Twitter,
is it possible that Twitter is just the early days of a broken system that's actually giving
birth to a better working system that's ultimately digital?
I think we're going to experience a pendulum swing back into the real world. I mean,
I think many of us are experiencing that now anyway. I mean, just wanting to have
face-to-face encounters and spend less time on our phones and less time online. I think,
you know, maybe everyone isn't going in that direction, but I do notice it myself and I
notice, I mean, once I got off Twitter, then I noticed the people who were never on Twitter,
right? And the people who were never basically, I mean, I know I have a lot of friends who were
never on Twitter and they actually never understood what I was doing on Twitter. It's like,
like they just like, it wasn't that they were seeing it and then reacting to it. They just
didn't know. It's like, it's like being on Reddit. Like I'm not on Reddit either,
but I don't spend any time thinking about not being on Reddit. Right. It's like,
I'm just not on Reddit. Do you think the pursuit of human happiness is better achieved,
more effectively achieved outside of Twitter world? Well, I think all we have is our attention
in the end and we just have to notice what these various tools are doing to it. And it's just,
it became very clear to me that it was an unrewarding use of my attention. Now,
it's not to say there isn't some digital platform that's conceivable that would be useful but,
and rewarding, but yeah, I mean, we just have, you know, our life is doled out to us in moments
and we have, and we're continually solving this riddle of what is going to suffice to make this
moment engaging and meaningful and aligned with who I want to be now and how I want the future
to look. Right. We have this tension between being in the present and becoming in the future. And,
you know, it's a seeming paradox. Again, it's not really a paradox, but it can seem like,
I do think the ground truth for personal wellbeing is to find a mode of being where
you can pay attention to the present moment. And this is, you know, meditation by another name.
You can pay attention to the present moment with sufficient, you know, gravity that you
recognize that just consciousness itself in the present moment, no matter what's happening,
is already a circumstance of freedom and contentment and tranquility. Like you can be
happy now before anything happens, before this next desire gets gratified, before this next
problem gets solved. There's this kind of ground truth that you're free, that consciousness is
free and open and unencumbered by really any problem until you get lost in thought about
all the problems that may yet be real for you. So the ability to catch and observe consciousness,
that in itself is a source of happiness. Without being lost in thought. And so this happens
haphazardly for people who don't meditate because they find something in their life that's so
captivating, it's so pleasurable, it's so thrilling. It can even be scary, but it can be,
even being scared is captivating. So it gets their attention, right? Whatever it is. Like,
you know, Sebastian Junger wrote a great book about people's experience in war here. You know,
it's like, strangely it can be the best experience anyone's ever had because everything, it's like
only the moment matters, right? Like the bullet is whizzing by your head. You're not thinking about
your 401k or that thing that you didn't say last week to the person you shouldn't have been
talking about. You're not thinking about Twitter. It's like, you're just fully immersed in the
present moment. Meditation is the only way, I mean, that word can mean many things to many
people, but what I mean by meditation is simply the discovery that there is a way to engage the
present moment directly, regardless of what's happening. You don't need to be in a war. You
don't need to be having sex. You don't need to be on drugs. You don't need to be surfing. You don't
have to be a peak experience. It can be completely ordinary, but you can recognize that
in some basic sense, there's only this and everything else is something you're thinking.
You're thinking about the past. You're thinking about the future and thoughts themselves have
no substance, right? It's fundamentally mysterious that any thought ever really commandeers your
sense of who you are and makes you anxious or afraid or angry or whatever it is.
The more you discover that, the half-life of all these negative emotions that blow all of us around
get much, much shorter, right? The anger that would have kept you angry for hours or days
lasts four seconds because the moment it arises, you recognize it and you can get off. You can
decide. At minimum, you can decide whether it's useful to stay angry at that moment and
obviously it usually isn't. And the illusion of free will is one of those thoughts. Yeah,
it's all just happening, right? Even the mindful and meditative response to this is just happening.
Even the moments where you recognize or not recognize is just happening. It's not that
this does open up a degree of freedom for a person, but it's not a freedom that gives
any motivation to the notion of free will. It's just a new way of being in the world.
Is there a difference between intellectually knowing free will as an illusion and
really experiencing it? What's the longest you've been able to experience
escape the illusion of free will? Well, it's always obvious to me when I pay attention.
I mean, whenever I'm mindful, the term of jargon in the Buddhist and increasingly outside the
Buddhist context is mindfulness, right? But there are sort of different levels of mindfulness and
there's different degrees of insight into this. But yes, I mean, what I'm calling evidence of
lack of free will and lack of the self, I've got two sides of the same coin. There's a sense of
being a subject in the middle of experience to whom all experience refers, the sense of I,
the sense of me. And that's almost everybody's starting point when they start to meditate and
that's almost always the place people live most of their lives from. I do think that gets interrupted
in ways that get unrecognized. I think people are constantly losing the sense of I, they're losing
the sense of subject, object, distance, but they're not recognizing it. And meditation is
the mode in which you can recognize, you can both consciously precipitate it. You can look
for the self and fail to find it and then recognize its absence. And that's just the
flip side of the coin of free will. I mean, the feeling of having free will is what it feels like
to feel like a self who's thinking his thoughts and doing his actions and intending his intentions.
And the man in the middle of the boat who's rowing, that's the false starting point. When
you find that there's no one in the middle of the boat, right? Or in fact, there's no boat,
there's just the river, there's just the flow of experience and there's no center to it. And
there's no place from which you would control it. Again, even when you're doing things, this does
not negate the difference between voluntary and involuntary behavior. It's like I can voluntarily
reach for this, but when I'm paying attention, I'm aware that everything is just happening. Like just
the intention to move is just arising, right? And I'm in no position to know why it didn't arise a
moment before or a moment later or a moment, or, you know, 50% stronger or weaker, or, you know,
so as to be ineffective or to be doubly effective. It's sort of where I lurched for it versus
I moved slow. I mean, I'm not, I can never run the counterfactuals. I can never,
I mean, all of this opens the door to an even more disconcerting picture along the same lines,
which is subsumes this conversation about free will. And it's the question of whether
anything is ever possible. Like what if, this is a question I haven't thought a lot of about it,
but it's been a few years I've been kicking this question around.
So I mean, what if only the actual is possible? What if, what if there was,
what if we live with this feeling of possibility? We live with the sense that,
let me tell you, so, you know, I have two daughters. I could have had a third child,
right? So what does it mean to say that I could have had a third child or do you don't have kids?
I don't think so. Not that I know of. So the possibility might be there. So what do we mean
when we say you could have had a child or you might, you might have a child in the future?
Like what, what, what is the space in reality? What's the relationship between possibility
and actuality and reality? Is there a reality in which
non-actual things are nonetheless real? And so we have other categories of like non
concrete things. We have things that don't have spatial temporal dimension,
but they're nonetheless, they nonetheless exist. So like, you know, the integers, right? So numbers,
there's a, there's a reality, there's an abstract reality to numbers. And this is,
it's philosophically interesting to think about these things. So they're not like,
in some sense, they're, they're, they're real. And they're, they're not merely invented by us.
They're discovered because they have structure that we can't impose upon them, right? It's not
like they're not fictional characters. Like, you know, Hamlet and Superman also exist in some sense,
but they exist at the level of, of our own fiction and abstraction, but it's like,
they're true. They're true and false statements you can make about Hamlet. They're true and false
statements you can make about Superman because our fiction, the fictional worlds we've created
have a certain kind of structure, but again, this is all abstract. It's like, it's all abstractable
from any of its concrete instantiations. It's not just in the comic books and just in the movies.
It's in our, you know, ongoing ideas about these characters, but natural numbers or, or
the integers don't function quite that way. I mean, they're similar, but they also have
a structure that's purely a matter of discovery. It's not, you can't just make up whether numbers
are prime. You know, if you give me two integers, you know, of, of a certain size to let's say,
you mentioned two enormous integers. If I were to say, okay, well between those two integers,
they're exactly 11 prime numbers, right? That's a very specific claim about which I can be right or
wrong and whether or not anyone knows I'm right or wrong. It's like, that's just, there's a domain
of facts there, but these are abstract. It's an abstract reality that relates in some way that's
philosophically interesting, you know, metaphysically interesting to what we call
real reality, you know, this, the spatial temporal order, the physics of things, but
possibility, at least in my view, occupies a different space. And this is something, again,
my thoughts on this are pretty inchoate. I think I need to talk to a philosopher of physics and,
and or a physicist about how this may interact with things like the many worlds interpretation.
That's an interesting, right, exactly. So I wonder if discovers in physics like further proof
or more concrete proof that many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics has some
validity, if that completely starts to change things. But even that's just more actuality.
So if I took that seriously, that's, that's a case of, and truth is that happens even, even if
the many worlds interpretation isn't true, but we just imagine we have a physically infinite
universe, the implication of infinity is such that things will begin to repeat themselves,
you know, the farther you go in space, right? So, you know, if you just head out in one direction,
eventually you're going to meet two people just like us having a conversation just like this,
and you're going to meet them an infinite number of times in every, you know, infinite variety
of permutations, slightly different from this conversation, right? So, I mean, infinity is just
so big that our intuitions of probability completely break down. But what I'm suggesting is
maybe probability isn't a thing, right? Maybe there's only actuality. If there's,
maybe there's only what happens. And at every point along the way, our notion of what could
have happened or what might've happened is just that it's just a thought about what could have
happened or might have happened. So it's a fundamentally different thing. If you can imagine
a thing that doesn't make it real. So they, cause that's, that's where that possibility exists is
in your imagination, right? Yeah. And possibility itself is a kind of spooky idea because it,
it too has a sort of structure, right? So like if I, if I'm going to say,
you know, you could have had a daughter right last year. So we're saying that's, that's possible,
but not actual, right? That is a claim. The things that are true and not true
about that daughter, right? Like it has a kind of structure. It's like,
I feel like there's a lot of fog around that, the possibility. It feels like almost
like a useful narrative. But what does it mean? So like, what does it mean if we say,
you know, I just did that, but I might, it's conceivable that I wouldn't have done that,
right? Like it's possible that I just threw this cap, but I might not have done that.
So you're taking it very temporally close to the original, like what would appear as a decision.
Whenever we're saying something's possible, but not actual, right? Like this thing just happened,
but it's concealing, it's possible that it wouldn't have happened or they would have
happened differently. In what does that possibility consist? Like, where is that?
For that to be real, for the possibility to be real, what do we, what claim are we making about
the universe? Well, isn't that an extension of the idea that free will is an illusion,
that all we have is actuality, that the possibility is an illusion? Right. Yeah,
I'm just extending it beyond human action. Ah, okay. This goes to the physics of things.
This is just everything. Like we're always telling ourselves a story that includes possibility.
Possibility is really compelling for some reason.
Well, yeah, well, because it's, I mean, so this, yeah, I mean, this could sound just academic,
but every backward looking regret or disappointment and every forward looking worry
is completely dependent on this notion of possibility. Like every regret is based on
the sense that something else, I could have done something else, something else could have happened.
Every disposition to worry about the future is based on the feeling that there's this range
of possibilities. It could go either way. And, you know, I mean, I know whether or not there's
such a thing as possibility, you know, I'm convinced that worry is almost never
psychologically appropriate because the reality is that in any given moment,
either you can do something to solve the problem you're worried about or not.
So if you can do something, just do it, you know, and if you can't, your worrying is just
causing you to suffer twice over, right? You're going to, you know, you're going to,
you're going to get the medical procedure next week anyway. How much time between now and next
week do you want to spend worrying about it? Right. It's going to, it's the worry,
the worry doesn't accomplish anything. How much do physicists think about possibility?
Well, they think about it in terms of probability more often, but probability just describes,
and again, this is a place where I might be out of my depth and need to talk to somebody to,
to debunk this, but the, um, do therapy with a physicist. Yeah. Um, but probably it seems
just describes a pattern of actuality that we've observed, right? I mean, we have,
there are certain things we observe and those are the actual things that have happened.
And we have this additional story about probability. I mean, there's, we have the
frequency with which things happen, have happened in the past. Um, you know, I can flip a fair coin
and no, I know in the abstract that I have a belief that in the limit that those flips,
you know, those tosses should converge on 50% heads and 50% tails. I know I have a story as
to why it's not going to be exactly 50% within any arbitrary timeframe. Um,
but in reality, all we ever have are the observed tosses, right? And then we have an additional
story that, Oh, it came up heads, but it could have come up tails. Why do we think that
about that last toss? And what are we claiming is true about the physics of things? If we say
it could have been otherwise. I think we're claiming that probability is true,
that it just allows us to have a nice model about the world. Gives us hope about the world. Yeah.
It seems that possibility has to be somewhere to be effective. It's a little, it's a little
bit like what's, what's happening with the laws of, there's something metaphysically interesting
about the laws of nature too, because the laws of nature, so the laws of nature are the laws of
nature too, because the laws of nature, so the laws of nature impose their, their work on the
world, right? We see their evidence, but they're not reducible to any specific set of instances.
Right? So there's some structure there, but the structure isn't just a matter of the actual things
with the actual billiard balls that are banging into each other. All of that actuality can be
explained by what actual things are actually doing. But then we have this notion that in
addition to that, we have the laws of nature that are making, they're explaining this, but,
but how are the laws of nature an additional thing in addition to just the actual things
that are actually effect causally? And if they're, if they are an additional thing,
how are they effective? If they're not among the actual things that are just actually banging
around. Yeah. And so to some degree for that, possibly, possibly has to be hiding somewhere
for the laws of nature to be possible for anything to be possible. It has to be, it has to have
a closet somewhere. I'm sure this is where all the possibility goes. It has to be attached to
something. So you don't think many worlds is that because many worlds still exist because we're in
this strand of that multiverse. Yeah. Right. So it's still, still you have just the local
instance of what is actual. Yeah. And then if it proliferates elsewhere where you can't be affected
by it. Many worlds says you can't really connect with the other. Yeah. Yeah. And so many worlds
are just a statement of basically everything that can happen, happens somewhere. Right.
And that's, I mean, maybe that's not an entirely kosher formulation of it, but it seems pretty
close. So, so, but there's whatever happens, right? In fact, there's, you know, relativistically,
there's a, there's an, you know, the, the Einstein's original notion of a block universe
seems to suggest this. And I, it's been a while since I've been in a conversation with a physicist
where I've gotten a chance to ask about the standing of this concept in physics. Currently,
I don't hear it discussed much, but the idea of a block universe is that, you know, space time
exists as a totality and our sense that we are traveling through space time,
where there's a real difference between the past and the future, that that's an illusion of just
our, you know, you know, weird, the weird, the weird slice we're taking of, of this larger
object. But on some level it's like, you know, you're reading a novel, the last page of the
novel exists just as much as the first page when you're in the middle of it. And they're just,
you know, if that's, if we're living in anything like that, then there's no such thing as
possibility. I would, it would seem as just what is actual. So as a matter of our experience,
moment to moment, I think it's totally compatible with that being true, that there is only
what is actual. And that sounds to the naive ear, that sounds like it would be depressing
and disempowering and confining, but as anything, but it's actually, it's a circumstance of pure
discovery. Like you have no idea what's going to happen next, right? You don't know who you're
going to be tomorrow. You're only by tendency seeming to resemble yourself from yesterday.
I mean, there's, there's way more freedom in all of that than, than it seems true to many people.
And yet the basic insight is that you're not, you're not in the real freedom is,
is the recognition that you're not in control of anything. Everything is just happening,
including your thoughts and intentions and moods.
So life is the, is a process of continuous discovery.
You're part of the universe. Yeah. You are, you are just this, I mean, it's,
it's the miracle that the, the universe is illuminated to itself as itself, where you sit
and you're, and you're continually discovering what your life is. And then you're,
you have this layer at which you're telling yourself a story that you already know what
your life is. And you know exactly, you know, who you should be and what's, you know,
what's about to happen, or you're struggling to form a confident opinion about all of that.
And yet there is this just fundamental mystery to everything, even the most familiar experience.
We're all NPCs in a most marvelous video game.
Maybe, although my, my game, my sense of gaming is, does not run as deep as to know what I'm
committing to there. It's a non, it's a non-playing character.
You're more, yeah. Oh, wow. Yes. You're more, you're more of a Mario Kart guy.
Yeah. I went back. I was an original video gamer, but it's been a long time since I,
I mean, I was, I was there for Pong. I remember when I saw the first Pong in a restaurant in,
I think it was like Benihana's or something. They had a Pong table. And that was an amazing moment
when you, you Sam Harris might live from Pong to the invention and deployment of a super
intelligent system. That happened fast. If it happens anytime in my lifetime.
From, from Pong to AGI. What kind of things do you do purely for fun that others might
consider a waste of time? Purely for fun.
Because meditation doesn't count because most people would say that's not a waste of time.
Is there something like Pong? That's a deeply embarrassing thing you would never admit.
I don't think, well, I mean, once or twice a year, I will play a round of golf,
which many people would find embarrassing. They might even find my play embarrassing, but it's
fun. Do you find it embarrassing?
No. I mean, I love, golf just takes way too much time. So I can only squander a certain
amount of time on it. I do love it. It's a lot of fun.
You have no control over your actual performance. You're, you're ever discovering.
I do. I do have, I have control over my mediocre performance, but it's a,
I don't have enough control as to make it really good. But happily, I don't, I,
I'm in the perfect spot because I don't invest enough time in it to care how I play.
So I just have fun when I play. Well, I hope there'll be a day where you
play around golf with the former president, Donald Trump. And I would love to be.
I would bet on him if we played golf, I'm sure he's a better golfer.
Amidst the chaos of human civilization in modern times, as we've talked about,
what gives you hope about this world in the coming year, in the coming decade,
in the coming hundred years, maybe a thousand years, what's the source of hope for you?
Well, it comes back to a few of the things we've talked about. I mean, I think I'm,
I'm hopeful. I know that most people are good and are mostly converging on the same core values,
right? It's like, we're, we're not surrounded by psychopaths. And I, the thing that finally
convinced me to, to get off Twitter was how different life was seeming through the lens
of Twitter. It's like, I just got the sense that there's way more psychopaths or effective
psychopaths than I realized. And then I thought, okay, that's, this isn't real. This is,
this is either a strange context in which actually decent people are behaving like psychopaths
or it's you know, it's a bot army or something that I don't have to take seriously. So yeah,
I just think most people, if we can get the, if we can get the incentives right,
I think there's no reason why we can't really thrive collectively. Like there's enough wealth
to go around. There's enough, you know, there's no, there's no effective limit, you know, I mean,
again, within the limits of what's physically possible, but we're, we're nowhere near the limit
on abundance, you know, on this, I forget about going to Mars on this, the one rock,
right? It's like we, we could make this place incredibly beautiful and stable if we just
did enough work to
solve some, you know, you know, rather long standing political problems.
The problem of incentives. So to you, the basic characteristics of human nature such that
we'll be okay if the incentives are okay. We'll do, we'll do pretty good.
I'm worried about the asymmetries that, you know, it's easier to break things than to fix them. It's
easier to, to light a fire than to put it out. And I do worry that, you know, as technology gets more
and more powerful, it becomes easier for the minority who wants to screw things up to effectively
screw things up for everybody. Right? So it's, it's easier. It's like a thousand years ago,
it was simply impossible for one person to, to range the lives of millions, much less billions.
Now that's getting to be possible. So on the assumption that we're always going to have a
sufficient number of crazy individuals or, or malevolent individuals, it's, it's
that we have to figure out that asymmetry somehow. And so there's some cautious exploration of
emergent technology that we need to get our, our heads screwed on straight about it. So like,
so gain of function research, like just how much do we want to democratize,
you know, all the relevant technologies there, you know, do we want really, you really want to
give everyone the ability to order nucleotides in the mail and, and give them the blueprints for
viruses online because of, you know, you're a free speech absolutist and you think
all PDFs need to be, you know, exportable everywhere. So I'm much more, so this is where,
yeah, so there are limits to, many people are confused about my take on free speech because
I've come down on, on, on the unpopular side of some of these questions, but it's been,
my overriding concern is that in many cases, I'm worried about the free speech of
individual businesses or individual platforms or individual, you know, media people to decide that
they don't want to be associated with certain things, right? So like, if you own Twitter,
I think you should be able to kick off the Nazi you don't want to be associated with because it's
your platform, you own it, right? That's your free speech, right? That's the side of my free
speech concern for Twitter, right? It's not that every Nazi has the right to, to be,
to algorithmic speech on Twitter. I think if you own Twitter, you should be, you are the,
you know, whether it's just Elon or, you know, in the world where it wasn't Elon, just the,
the people who own Twitter, the, the, and the board and the shareholders and the employees,
these, these people need to, can, should be free to decide what they want to promote or not.
They're public. I view them as publishers more, you know, more than as, as platforms in the end.
And, um, that has other implications, but I do worry about this problem of misinformation
and algorithmically and otherwise, you know, supercharged misinformation. And
I think, I do think we have a, we're at a bottleneck now. I mean, I guess it's,
it's could be the hubris of every present generation to think that their moment is
especially important, but I do think with the emergence of these technologies,
we're some kind of bottleneck where we really have to figure out how to get this right.
And if we do get this right, if we figure out how to not drive ourselves crazy by giving people
access to all the, all possible information, misinformation at all times, I think, yeah,
we could, there's no limit to how happily we could collaborate with billions of creative
fulfilled people. You know, it's just, and trillions of, uh, robots, some of them sex
robots, but robots that have are running the right algorithm, whatever that algorithm is,
whatever you need in your life to make you happy. So, um, uh, I was the first time we talked is one
of the huge honors of my life. I've been a fan of yours for a long time. The few times you were
respectful, but critical to me means the world. And thank you so much for helping, um, helping me
and caring enough and caring enough about the world and for everything you do. Uh, but I should
say that, uh, the, the few of us that try to put love in the world on Twitter, miss you on Twitter,
but this, uh, don't break anything. Have a good party without me. Thanks. Uh, very, very happy
to do this. Thanks. Thanks for the invitation. Great to see you again. Thanks for listening
to this conversation with Sam Harris to support this podcast. Please check out our sponsors in
the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Martin Luther King Jr.
Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.