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The following is a conversation with Sam Harris, his second time on the podcast.
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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.
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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, lab leak, Kanye West, and several key figures at the center of public discourse, including Joe Rogan and Elon Musk, both of whom have been friends of Sam and have become friends of mine.
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somehow in an amazing life trajectory that I do not deserve in any way, and in fact believe is probably a figment of my imagination.
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And if it s all right, please allow me to say a few words about this personal aspect of the conversation, of discussing Joe, Elon, and others.
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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.
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My hope is that they start talking again.
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They start being friends again.
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They start noticing the humanity that connects them that is much deeper than the disagreements that divide them.
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So let me take this moment to say with humility and honesty why I look up to and I m inspired by Joe, Elon, and Sam.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I will continue to try to mend divisions, to try to understand, not deride, to turn the other cheek if needed, to return hate with love.
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Sometimes people criticize me for being naive, cheesy, simplistic, all of that.
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I know.
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I agree.
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But I really am speaking from the heart.
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And I m trying.
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This world is too fucking beautiful not to try.
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In whatever way I know how.
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I love you all.
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And now, a quick few-second mention of each sponsor.
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a note-taking and team collaboration tool, my favorite note-taking and team collaboration tool.
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And they have a new feature, Notion AI, that I ve been using and loving.
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So just to list some features, they can edit the voice and tone of the text you already wrote, so they can rewrite it in a different tone.
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They can make the text, which I love, they can make it shorter or longer.
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Also, they can simplify the text, which to me is at the core of the writing process.
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make things as simple as possible, but not simpler, as Einstein said.
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And to have tools that give you ideas how to do that, not necessarily completely automate everything, but give you really powerful ideas on how to get 90% there, this is just brilliant.
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Also, if there s technical jargon, they can rewrite the text and explain it more simply.
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What else?
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They can obviously summarize the text.
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If you re having trouble starting to write and there s a blank page glaring back at you, they can generate, based on a topic, a bunch of text to get you going.
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I mean, there s so many just amazing features.
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I love it when great, powerful language models or any idea in AI is then injected into a tool that s actually usable and useful and powerful across a number of use cases to a huge number of people.
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I mean, this is really, really, really exciting.
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One of the people I just recently talked to is Chris Voss.
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He is a former FBI hostage negotiator.
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Brilliant guy.
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Off the mic, I really enjoy talking to him.
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There is...
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kindness, camaraderie, thoughtfulness, humor, wit, also a certain sort of cultural density and complexity, hailing from New York, or whatever that rich, sexy accent is from, it s just really fun to listen to him, to listen to him discuss what he s really good at.
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That was true on the podcast, and that is very much true in his master class, where he really systematically breaks down his ideas of what it takes to negotiate with terrorists.
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negotiate with hostage takers, negotiate with bank robbers, but I think the most important thing is negotiate in everyday life, to negotiate in business relationships, all of that.
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It s just a really brilliant, concise, clear, actionable advice that he gives.
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every single masterclass they have and you get access to all of them.
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Get unlimited access to every masterclass and get 15% off an annual membership at masterclass.com slash Lex.
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To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.
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And now, dear friends, here s Sam Harris.
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What is more effective at making a net positive impact on the world, empathy or reason?
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It depends on what you mean by empathy.
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There are at least two kinds of empathy.
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There s the
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The cognitive form, which is, I would argue, even a species of reason, it s just understanding another person s point of view.
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why they re suffering or why they re happy.
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You have a theory of mind about another human being that is accurate, and so you can navigate in relationship to them more effectively.
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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?
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Like you feel depressed,
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and I begin to feel depressed along with you because it s contagious, right?
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We re so close, and I m so concerned about you, and your problems become my problems, and it bleeds through, right?
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Now, I think both of those capacities are very important, but the emotional contagion piece
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And this is not really my thesis.
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This is something I have more or less learned from Paul Bloom, the psychologist who wrote a book on this topic titled Against Empathy.
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The emotional social contagion piece is a bad guide rather often for ethical behavior and ethical intuitions.
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And so I ll give you the clear example of this, which is
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We find stories with a single identifiable protagonist who we can effortlessly empathize with far more compelling than data, right?
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So if I tell you, you know, this is the classic case of the little girl who falls down a well, right?
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You know, this is somebody s daughter.
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You see the parents distraught on television.
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You hear her cries from the bottom of the well.
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The whole country stops.
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I mean this there was an example of this, you know, 20-25 years ago I think where it was just wall to wall on CNN.
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This is just the perfect use of CNN.
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It was, you know, 72 hours or whatever it was of continuous coverage of just extracting this girl from a well.
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So we effortlessly pay attention to that.
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We care about it.
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We will donate money toward it.
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I mean, it s just, it marshals 100% of our compassion and altruistic impulse.
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Whereas if you hear that there s a genocide raging in some country you ve never been to and never intended to go to, the numbers don t make a dent.
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And we find,
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the story boring, right?
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And we ll change the channel in the face of a genocide, right?
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It doesn t matter.
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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?
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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.
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And so empathy plays an unhelpful role there.
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So ultimately, I think,
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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,
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I think reason is the better tool, but it s not that I would want to dispense with any part of empathy either.
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There s a lot of dangers to go on there, but briefly to mention, you ve recently talked about affective altruism on your podcast.
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I think you mentioned some interesting statement.
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I m going to horribly misquote you.
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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 100 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.
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Right, I m not sure what the right answer is there, or even whether there is one right answer.
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There could be multiple.
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peaks on this part of the moral landscape.
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So the opposition is between an ethic that s articulated by someone like the Dalai Lama, or really any exponent of classic Buddhism,
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would say that the ultimate enlightened ethic is true dispassion with respect to friends and strangers.
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The mind of the Buddha would be truly dispassionate.
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You would love and care about all people equally.
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And 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 and much more about your kids than the kids of other people, and to prioritize your energy in that way, right?
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So you spend all this time trying to figure out how to keep your kids healthy and happy,
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you ll attend to their minutest concerns, however superficial.
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And again, there s a genocide raging in Sudan or wherever, and it takes up less than 1% of your bandwidth.
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I m not sure it would be a better world if everyone was running the Dalai Lama program there.
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I think some prioritization of one s nearest and dearest ethically might be optimal.
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because we ll all be doing that.
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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?
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So like when I go to, when my daughter gets sick and I have to take her to a hospital, I really want her to get attention, right?
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And I m worried about her more than I m worried about everyone else in the lobby.
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But the truth is, I actually don t want a totally corrupt hospital.
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I don t want a hospital that treats my daughter better than anyone else in the lobby because she s my daughter and I ve, 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.
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You don t want starkly corrupt, unfair situations.
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And when you sort of get pressed down the hierarchy of Maslow s needs, you know, individually and societally,
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a bunch of those variables change, and they change for the worse, understandably.
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But yeah, when everyone s corrupt and you re in a state of collective emergency, you ve got a lifeboat problem, you re scrambling to get into the lifeboat,
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yeah, then fairness and norms and the other vestiges of civilization begin to get stripped off.
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We can t reason from those emergencies to normal life.
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I mean, in normal life,
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We want justice, we want fairness, we re all better off for it, even when the spotlight of our concern is focused on the people we know, the people who are our friends, the people who are family, people we have good reason to care about.
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We still, by default, want a system that protects the interests of strangers, too.
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And we know that, generally speaking, and just in game theoretic terms, we re all gonna tend to be better off in a fair system than a corrupt one.
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One of the failure modes of empathy is our
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susceptibility to anecdotal data.
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Just a good story will get us to not think clearly.
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But what about empathy in the context of just discussing ideas with other people?
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And then there s a large number of people, like in this country, red and blue, half the population believes certain things on immigration or on the response to the pandemic or any kind of controversial issue.
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Even if the election was fairly executed,
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having an empathy for their worldview, trying to understand where they re coming from, not just in the explicit statement of their idea, but the entirety of the roots from which their idea stems, that kind of empathy while you re discussing ideas, what is, in your pursuit of truth, having empathy for the perspective of a large number of other people.
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versus raw mathematical reason?
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I think it s important, but it only takes you so far, right?
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It doesn t get you to truth, right?
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Truth is not decided by democratic principles, and certain people believe things for understandable reasons, but those reasons are nonetheless bad reasons, right?
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They don t scale, they don t generalize, they re not reasons anyone should adopt for themselves,
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or respect epistemologically, and yet their circumstance is understandable and it s something you can care about, right?
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And so yeah, let me just take, I think there s many examples of this that you might be thinking of.
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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.
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There was no doubt when we have a sitting president who s not agreeing to a peaceful transfer of power, right?
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So I m critical of all of that, and yet the fact that
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many millions of Americans didn t see what was wrong with Trump or bought into the, didn t see through his con, right?
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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.
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And so, you know, his heart is in the right place.
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You know, he was really a man of the people, even though he s a, you know, gold-plated everything in his life.
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they bought the myth somehow of, you know, largely because they had seen him on television for
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almost a decade and a half, pretending to be this genius businessman who could get things done.
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It s understandable to me that many very frustrated people who have not had their hopes and dreams actualized, who have been the victims of globalism and many other current trends, it s understandable that they would
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be confused and not see the liability of electing a grossly incompetent, morbidly narcissistic person into the presidency.
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Which is to say that I don t blame
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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 a very bad state of affairs in our society.
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So there s two levels to it.
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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.
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but then you can recognize that people have very different life experiences.
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And yeah, I mean, I think empathy and probably the better word for what I would hope to embody there is compassion, right?
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Like really, you know,
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to really wish people well, and to really wish strangers well, effortlessly wish them well.
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To realize that there is no opposition between, at bottom, there s no real opposition between selfishness and selflessness, because why is selfishness really takes into account other people s happiness?
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Do you wanna live in a society where you have everything, but most other people have nothing?
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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?
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I think it s obvious that the second society is much better, however much you can guard your good luck.
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But what about having empathy for certain principles that people believe?
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For example, the pushback, the other perspective on this, because you said bought the myth of Trump as the great businessman.
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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
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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.
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And then here s this chaos agent, Trump, who speaks off the top of his head.
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Yeah, he s flawed in all this number of ways.
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He s a more comedian than he is a presidential type of figure.
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And he s actually creating the kind of chaos that s going to shake up this bureaucracy, shake up the elites that are so uncomfortable because they don t want the world to know about the game that got running on everybody else.
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So that s the kind of perspective that they would take and say, yeah, there s these flaws that Trump has, but this is necessary.
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I agree with the first part.
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So I haven t bought the myth that it s a truly representative democracy in the way that we might idealize.
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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.
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I m not sure we want, in the end, everyone s opinion given equal weight about just what we should do about anything.
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And I include myself in that.
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I mean, there are many topics around which
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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.
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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.
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And I think it s important to see those bright lines in one s life and in the moment politically and ethically.
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So yeah, I think, so leave aside the viability of democracy.
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I m under no illusions that all of our institutions are, you know, worth preserving precisely as they have been up until the moment this great orange wrecking ball came swinging through our lives.
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It was a very bad bet to elect someone who is grossly incompetent, and worse than incompetent, genuinely malevolent in his selfishness.
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And this is something we know based on literally decades of him being in the public eye.
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He s not a public servant in any normal sense of that term.
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and he couldn t possibly give an honest or sane answer to the question you asked me about empathy and reason and what should guide us.
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I genuinely think he is missing some necessary moral and psychological tools, right?
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And I can feel compassion for him as a human being because I think
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Having those things is incredibly important, and genuinely loving other people is incredibly important, and knowing what all that s about, that s really the good stuff in life, and I think he s missing a lot of that.
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But I think we don t want to promote people to the highest positions of power in our society who are far outliers in
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in pathological terms, right?
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We want them to be far outliers in the best case, in wisdom and compassion and some of the things you ve, some of the topics you ve brought up.
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I mean, we want someone to be deeply informed.
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We want someone to be,
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unusually curious, unusually alert to how they may be wrong or getting things wrong consequentially.
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He s none of those things.
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And insofar as we re gonna get normal mediocrities in that role, which I think, you know, is often the best we could expect, let s get normal mediocrities in that role, not, you know, once in a generation narcissists and, you know,
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I mean, it s like, just take honesty as a single variable, right?
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I think you want, yes, it s possible that most politicians lie at least some of the time.
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I don t think that s a good thing.
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I think people should be generally honest, even to a fault.
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Yes, there are certain circumstances where lying, I think, is necessary.
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It s kind of on a continuum of self-defense and violence.
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So it s like 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.
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You know, Trump, arguably there s never been a person that anyone could name in human history who s lied with that kind of velocity.
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I mean, it s just, he was just a blizzard of lies, great and small, you know, to pointless and effective, but it s just, it says something
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fairly alarming about our society that a person of that character got promoted.
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And so, yes, I have compassion and concern for half of the society who didn t see it that way, and that s gonna sound elitist and smug or something for anyone who s on that side listening to me, but it s genuine.
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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
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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?
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So how much less bandwidth does somebody who s working two jobs or a single mom who s raising multiple kids, even a single kid, it s unimaginable to me that people have the bandwidth to
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to really track this stuff and so then they jump on social media and they they see they get inundated by misinformation and they see what their favorite influencer just said um and now they re worried about vaccines and they re it s just it s we re living in an environment where our the information space has become so corrupted
1
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And we ve built machines to further corrupt it.
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We ve built a business model for the internet that it further corrupts it.
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So it is just, it s chaos in informational terms.
1
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And I don t fault people for being confused and impatient and at their wits end.
1
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And yes, Trump was an enormous fuck you to the establishment.
1
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And that was understandable for many reasons.
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SPEAKER_00
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.
1
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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  brain.
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that there is something is disproportionately to the actual impact that Trump had on our society.
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He had an impact on the ability of balanced, calm, rational minds to see the world clearly, to think clearly.
1
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You being one of the beacons of that.
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Is there a degree to which he broke your brain?
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otherwise known as Trump Derangement Syndrome, a medical condition.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I think Trump Derangement Syndrome is a very clever meme because it just throws the problem back on the person who s criticizing Trump, but in truth, the true
1
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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
1
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untenable it was to still support someone who, you know, a sitting president who was not committing to a peaceful transfer of power.
1
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I mean that was, if that wasn t a bright line for you, you have been deranged by something.
1
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Because that was, you know, that was one minute to midnight for our democracy as far as I m concerned.
1
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And I think it really was but for
1
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the integrity of a few people that we didn t suffer some real constitutional crisis and real emergency, you know, after January 6th.
1
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I mean, if Mike Pence had caved in and decided to not certify the election, right?
1
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Literally, you can count on two hands the number of people who held things together at that moment.
1
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And so it wasn t for want of trying on Trump s part that we...
1
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didn t succumb to some, you know, real, truly uncharted catastrophe with our democracy.
1
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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.
1
SPEAKER_01
I mean, it s like, you know, you almost got run over by a car.
1
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but you didn t.
1
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And so the fact that you re adrenalized and you re thinking, boy, that was dangerous, I probably shouldn t wander in the middle of the street with my eyes closed, you weren t wrong to feel that you really had a problem, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
And came very close to something truly terrible.
1
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So I think that s where we were, and I think we shouldn t do that again, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
So the fact that he s still, he s coming back around as potentially a viable candidate,
1
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I m not spending much time thinking about it, frankly, because I m waiting for the moment where it requires some thought.
1
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I mean, it did, it took up, I don t know how many podcasts I devoted to the topic.
1
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It wasn t that, I mean, it wasn t that many in the end, against the number of podcasts I devoted to other topics, but there are people who look at Trump and just find him funny,
1
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entertaining, not especially threatening.
1
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It s just good fun to see somebody who s just not taking anything seriously and is just putting a stick in the wheel of business as usual again and again and again and again.
1
SPEAKER_01
And they don t really see anything much at stake, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
It doesn t really matter if we don t support NATO.
1
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It doesn t really matter if he says he trusts Putin more than our intelligence services.
1
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None of this, it doesn t matter if he s, on the one hand, saying that he loves the leader of North Korea, and on the other, threatens to bomb them back to the Stone Age, right, on Twitter.
1
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It all can be taken in the spirit of reality television.
1
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This is the part of the movie that s just fun to watch.
1
SPEAKER_01
I understand that.
1
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I can even inhabit that space for a few minutes at a time.
1
SPEAKER_01
there s a deeper concern that we re in the process of entertaining ourselves to death, right?
1
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That we re just not taking things seriously.
1
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And this is a problem I ve had with several other people we might name who just appear to me to be goofing around at scale.
1
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And they lack a kind of moral seriousness.
1
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I mean, they re touching big problems where lives hang in the balance.
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but they re just fucking around.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I think they re really important problems that we have to get our heads straight around.
2
SPEAKER_00
And we need, you know, it s not to say that institutions don t become corrupt, I think they do, and I think, and I m quite worried that
2
SPEAKER_00
both about the loss of trust in our institutions and the fact that trust has eroded for good reason, that they have become less trustworthy.
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They ve become infected by political ideologies that are not truth-tracking.
2
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I worry about all of that.
2
SPEAKER_00
But I just think we need institutions.
2
SPEAKER_00
We need to rebuild them.
2
SPEAKER_00
We need experts who are real experts.
2
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We need to value expertise over amateurish speculation and conspiracy thinking and just bullshit.
2
SPEAKER_00
What kind of amateur speculation are we doing on this very podcast?
2
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I m usually alert to the moments where I m
2
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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.
2
SPEAKER_00
So yeah, but it s not...
2
SPEAKER_00
It s different, you can invite someone onto your podcast who s an expert about something that you re not an expert about, and then 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,
2
SPEAKER_00
you really don t have a basis to have a strong opinion.
2
SPEAKER_00
And if you were gonna form a strong opinion that was this counter to the expert you have in front of you, it s gonna 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.
2
SPEAKER_00
But there s a paradox to how we value authority in science that most people don t understand.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I think we should at some point unravel that because it s the basis
2
SPEAKER_00
for a lot of public confusion, and frankly, it s the basis for a lot of criticism I ve received on these topics, where people think that I m against free speech, or I m an establishment shill, or it s like I just think, I m a credentialist, I just think people with PhDs from Ivy League universities should run everything.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s not true, but there s a ton of, 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.
2
SPEAKER_01
You ve talked about it, but it s just interesting, the intensity of feeling you have.
2
SPEAKER_01
You ve had this,
2
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famous phrase about Hunter Biden and children in the basement.
2
SPEAKER_01
Can you just revisit this case?
2
SPEAKER_01
So let me give another perspective on the situation of January 6th and Trump in general.
2
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It s possible that January 6th and things of that nature revealed that our democracy is actually pretty fragile.
2
SPEAKER_01
And then Trump is not a malevolent, an ultra-competent malevolent figure, but is simply a jokester.
2
SPEAKER_01
And he just, by creating the chaos, revealed that it s all pretty fragile.
2
SPEAKER_01
Because you re a student of history, and there s a lot of people, like Vladimir Lenin, Hitler, who are exceptionally competent at controlling power.
2
SPEAKER_01
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.
2
SPEAKER_01
And they did so extremely competently, and that is how they were able to gain power.
2
SPEAKER_01
The pushback with Trump, he was doing none of that.
2
SPEAKER_01
He was creating, which 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.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so he s not this,
2
SPEAKER_00
a once-in-a-generation horrible figure.
2
SPEAKER_00
Once-in-a-generation narcissist.
2
SPEAKER_00
No, I don t think he s a truly scary, sinister, Putin-like, or Hitler, much less Hitler-like figure, not at all.
2
SPEAKER_00
I mean, he s not ideological.
2
SPEAKER_00
He doesn t care about anything beyond himself.
2
SPEAKER_00
So it s not...
2
SPEAKER_00
No, no, he s much less scary than any really scary totalitarian, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
And he s- He s more brave in your world than 1984.
2
SPEAKER_00
This is what Eric Weinstein never stops badgering me about, but he s still wrong, Eric.
2
SPEAKER_00
My analogy for Trump was that he s an evil Chauncey Gardner.
2
SPEAKER_00
I don t know if you remember the book or the film, Being There.
2
SPEAKER_00
with Peter Sellers, but Peter Sellers is this gardener who really doesn t know anything, but he gets recognized as this wise man, and he gets promoted to immense power in Washington because he s speaking in a semblance of wisdom.
2
SPEAKER_00
He s got these very simple aphorisms, or what seem to be aphorisms.
2
SPEAKER_00
All he cares about is gardening.
2
SPEAKER_00
He s just talking about his garden all the time, but he ll say something, but in the spring, the new shoots will bloom,
2
SPEAKER_00
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.
2
SPEAKER_00
For me, Trump has always been someone like an evil Chauncey Gardner.
2
SPEAKER_00
I mean, he s, it s not to say he s totally, yes, he has a certain kind of genius.
2
SPEAKER_00
He s got a genius for creating a spectacle around himself, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
He s got a genius for getting the eye of the media always coming back to him.
2
SPEAKER_00
But it s only, it s a kind of,
2
SPEAKER_00
It s a kind of self-promotion that only works if you actually are truly shameless and don t care about having a reputation for anything that I or you would want to have a reputation for, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
It s like the pure pornography of attention, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
And he just wants more of it.
2
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I think the truly depressing and genuinely scary thing was that
2
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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
2
SPEAKER_00
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.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so, I mean, if there s a silver lining to this, it s along the lines you just sketched, it shows us how vulnerable our system is to a truly brilliant and sinister figure, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
I mean, like, I think we are, we really dodged a bullet.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yes, someone far more competent and conniving and ideological could have exploited our system
2
SPEAKER_00
in a way that Trump didn t.
2
SPEAKER_00
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?
2
SPEAKER_00
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,
2
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is how much our system relies on norms rather than laws.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, civility almost.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it s just like it s quite possible that he never did anything illegal, truly illegal.
2
SPEAKER_00
I think he probably did a few illegal things, but like illegal such that he really should be thrown in jail for it.
2
SPEAKER_00
At least that remains to be seen.
2
SPEAKER_00
So all of the chaos, all of the diminishment of our stature in the world, all of the opportunity costs of spending years focused on nonsense, all of that was just norm violations.
2
SPEAKER_00
All that was just all a matter of not saying the thing you should say, but that doesn t mean they re insignificant, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
It s not that, it s like, it s not illegal for a sitting president to say, no, I m not gonna commit to a peaceful transfer of power, right?
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SPEAKER_00
We ll wait and see whether I win.
2
SPEAKER_00
If I win,
2
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The election was valid.
2
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If I lose, it was fraudulent, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
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?
2
SPEAKER_00
That wasn t a humorous perturbation because he did everything he could.
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SPEAKER_00
Granted, he wasn t very competent, but he did everything he could
2
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to try to steal the election.
2
SPEAKER_00
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.
2
SPEAKER_00
I mean, all of it was fairly calculated.
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um the whole circus of of of you know the clown car That crashed into you know four seasons landscaping, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
And and you got rudy giuliani with his hair dye and you got sydney powell and all all these grossly incompetent people Lying as freely as they could breathe about election fraud, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
And all these things are getting thrown out by you know republican largely republican election officials and republican judges um
2
SPEAKER_00
It wasn t for want of trying that he didn t maintain his power in this country.
2
SPEAKER_00
He really tried to steal the presidency.
2
SPEAKER_00
He just was not competent, and the people around him weren t competent.
2
SPEAKER_00
So that s a good thing, and it s worth not letting that happen again.
2
SPEAKER_00
But he wasn t competent, so he didn t do everything he could.
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, no, he did everything he could.
2
SPEAKER_00
He didn t do everything that could have been done by someone more competent.
2
SPEAKER_01
Right, but the tools you have as a president, you could do a lot of things.
2
SPEAKER_01
You can declare emergencies, especially during COVID.
2
SPEAKER_01
You could postpone the election.
2
SPEAKER_01
You can create military conflict that, you know, any kind of reason to postpone the election.
2
SPEAKER_01
There s a lot of stuff.
2
SPEAKER_00
But he tried to do things, and he would have to have done those things through other people, and there are people who
2
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refuse to do those things.
2
SPEAKER_00
They re people who said they would quit, they would quit publicly, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
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?
2
SPEAKER_00
I mean, it s just awful that we were that close to something, you know,
2
SPEAKER_00
to a true unraveling of our political process.
2
SPEAKER_00
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.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s just like we looked like a banana republic there for a while, and we re the lone superpower.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s not good, and so we shouldn t, 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 storm our Capitol and smear shit on the walls, that s just more shaking things up, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
It s all just for the lulz.
2
SPEAKER_00
There s a nihilism and cynicism to all of that, which, again, in certain people it s understandable,
2
SPEAKER_00
You know, frankly, it s not understandable if you ve got a billion dollars and you have a compound in Menlo Park or wherever.
2
SPEAKER_00
There are people who are cheerleading this stuff who shouldn t be cheerleading this stuff and who know that they can get on their Gulfstream and fly to their compound in New Zealand if everything goes to shit, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
So there s a cynicism to all of that that I think we should be deeply critical of.
2
SPEAKER_01
What I m trying to understand is not
2
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and analyze is not the behavior of this particular human being, but the effect it had in part on the division between people.
2
SPEAKER_01
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.
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, I don t think there is
2
SPEAKER_00
something profitably to be said to someone who s truly captivated by the personality cult of Trumpism, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
There s nothing that I m gonna say to, there s no conversation I m gonna have with Candace Owens, say, about Trump that s gonna converge on something reasonable, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
You don t think so?
2
SPEAKER_00
No, I mean, I haven t tried with Candace, but I ve tried with many people who are in that particular orbit.
2
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I ve had conversations with people who,
2
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won t admit that there s anything wrong with Trump, anything.
2
SPEAKER_01
So I d like to push for the empathy versus reason.
2
SPEAKER_01
Because when you operate in the space of reason, yes.
2
SPEAKER_01
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.
2
SPEAKER_01
I think that s the way to win over the Kennesawans.
2
SPEAKER_00
But he has so few of them.
2
SPEAKER_00
He has fewer good qualities than virtually anyone I can name, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
He s funny.
2
SPEAKER_00
I ll grant you that he s funny.
2
SPEAKER_00
He s a good entertainer.
2
SPEAKER_00
There s others look at just policies and actual impacts he had.
2
SPEAKER_00
I ve admitted that.
2
SPEAKER_00
So I ve admitted that many of his policies I agree with.
2
SPEAKER_00
Many, many of his policies.
2
SPEAKER_00
probably more often than not, at least on balance, I agreed with his policy that we should take China seriously as an adversary, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
And I think, I mean, again, you have to, 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 m gonna take immigration.
2
SPEAKER_00
I think there s,
2
SPEAKER_00
it s obvious that we should have control of our borders, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
Like, I don t see the argument for not having control of our borders.
2
SPEAKER_00
We should let in who we wanna let in, and we should keep out who we wanna keep out, and we should have a sane immigration policy.
2
SPEAKER_00
So I didn t necessarily think it was a priority to build the wall, but I never criticized the impulse to build the wall, because if tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people are coming across that border, and we are not in a position to know who s coming,
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that seems untenable to me.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I can recognize that many people in our society are on balance the victims of immigration,
2
SPEAKER_00
And there is, in many cases, a zero-sum contest between the interests of actual citizens and the interests of immigrants, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
So I think we should have control of our borders.
2
SPEAKER_00
We should have a sane and compassionate immigration policy.
2
SPEAKER_00
We should let in refugees, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
So Trump on refugees was terrible.
2
SPEAKER_00
But no, I would say 80% of the policy concerns people
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SPEAKER_00
celebrated in him are concerns that I either share entirely or certainly sympathize with, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
So like that s not the issue.
2
SPEAKER_01
The issue is- A threat to democracy in some fundamental way.
2
SPEAKER_00
The issue is largely what you said it was.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s not so much the person, it s the effect on everything he touches, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
He has this superpower of
2
SPEAKER_00
deranging and destabilizing.
2
SPEAKER_00
almost everything he touches and sullying, and compromising the integrity of almost anyone who comes into his orbit.
2
SPEAKER_00
I mean, so you looked at these people who served as chief of staff or in various cabinet positions, people who had real reputations for probity and level-headedness, whether you shared their politics or not.
2
SPEAKER_00
I mean, these were real people.
2
SPEAKER_00
These were not, some of them were goofballs, but
2
SPEAKER_00
you know, many people who just got totally trashed by proximity to him and then trashed by him when they finally parted company with him.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I mean, there s just people bent over backwards to accommodate his norm violations and it was,
3
SPEAKER_01
It was bad for them and it was bad for our system.
3
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But none of that discounts the fact that we have a system that really needs proper house cleaning.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yes, there are bad incentives and
3
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um, entrenched interests and yeah, I m not a fan of the concept of, of the deep state.
3
SPEAKER_01
Uh, but cause it, you know, it s been so propagandized, but yes, there s, there s something like that, you know, that is, uh, not, um,
3
SPEAKER_01
flexible enough to respond intelligently to the needs of the moment, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
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.
3
SPEAKER_01
And the well-intentioned part is hugely important, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
Just give me someone who is not the most
3
SPEAKER_01
selfish person anyone has ever heard about in their lifetime, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
And what we got with Trump was literally the one most selfish person I think anyone could name.
3
SPEAKER_01
And again, there s so much known about this man.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s the thing.
3
SPEAKER_01
It predates his presidency.
3
SPEAKER_01
We knew this guy 30 years ago.
3
SPEAKER_01
And this is what, to come back to those inflammatory comments about Hunter Biden s laptop, the reason why I can say with confidence that I don t care what was on his laptop is that there is, and that includes any evidence of corruption on the part of his father, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
Now, there s been precious little of that that s actually emerged.
3
SPEAKER_01
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.
3
SPEAKER_01
even if there were just obvious corruption, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
Like Joe Biden was at this meeting and he took this amount of money from this shady guy for bad reasons, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
Given how visible the lives of these two men have been, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, given how much we know about Joe Biden and how much we know about Donald Trump and how they have lived in public for almost as long as I ve been alive, both of them, the scale of corruption
3
SPEAKER_01
can t possibly balance out between the two of them, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
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?
3
SPEAKER_01
And he s doing all these things I didn t know about.
3
SPEAKER_01
Okay, then I m gonna start getting a sense that, all right, maybe this guy is way more corrupt than I realized.
3
SPEAKER_01
Maybe there is some deal in Ukraine or with China that is just like, this guy is not who he seems.
3
SPEAKER_01
He s not the public servant he s been pretending to be.
3
SPEAKER_01
He s been on the take for decades and decades, and he s just, he s as dirty as can be, he s all mobbed up and it s a nightmare, and he can t be trusted, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
That s possible if you show me that his life is not at all what it seems, but on the assumption that I, having looked at this guy for literally decades, right,
3
SPEAKER_01
And and knowing that every journalist has looked at him for decades Just how many affairs is he having just how much you know, uh, how many drugs is he doing?
3
SPEAKER_01
How many houses does he have where you know?
3
SPEAKER_01
What what what is what are the obvious conflicts of interest, you know, you hold that against what we know about trump
3
SPEAKER_01
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?
3
SPEAKER_01
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
3
SPEAKER_01
And now you re saying, listen, there s a lot of stuff on that laptop that makes Joe Biden look like a total asshole.
3
SPEAKER_01
Okay, I m all ears, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, it was a forced, in 2020, it was a forced choice between a sitting president who wouldn t commit to a peaceful transfer of power, and a guy who s obviously too old to be president, who has a crack addicted son, who lost his laptop,
3
SPEAKER_01
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.
3
SPEAKER_00
And that might involve sort of, so the actual quote is, Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in the basement.
3
SPEAKER_00
There s a dark humor to it, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
Which is, I think you speak to, I would not have cared.
3
SPEAKER_00
There s nothing, it s Hunter Biden, it s not Joe Biden.
3
SPEAKER_00
Whatever the scope of Joe Biden s corruption is, it is infinitesimally compared to the corruption we know Trump was involved in.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s like a firefly to the sun is what you re speaking to.
3
SPEAKER_00
But let me make the case that you re really focused on the surface stuff.
3
SPEAKER_00
that it s possible to have corruption that masquerades in the thing we mentioned, which is civility.
3
SPEAKER_00
You can spend hundreds of billions of dollars or trillions towards a 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.
3
SPEAKER_00
And that, you know, the military-industrial complex,
3
SPEAKER_00
Everybody s very nice, everybody s very civil, just very upfront, here s how we re spending the money.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, sometimes somehow disappears in different places, but that s the way, you know, war is complicated.
3
SPEAKER_00
And everyone is very polite.
3
SPEAKER_00
There s no Coke and strippers or whatever is on the laptop.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s very nice and polite.
3
SPEAKER_00
In the meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of civilians die.
3
SPEAKER_00
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.
3
SPEAKER_01
But it s not just superficial.
3
SPEAKER_01
It is
3
SPEAKER_01
when someone only wants wealth and power and fame, that is their objective function, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
They re like a robot that is calibrated just to those variables, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
And they don t care about the risks we run on any other front.
3
SPEAKER_01
They don t care about, I mean,
3
SPEAKER_01
environmental risk, pandemic risk, nuclear proliferation risk, none of it, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
They re just tracking fame and money and whatever can personally redound to their self-interest along those lines.
3
SPEAKER_01
And they re not informed about the other risks we re running, really.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, in Trump, you had a president
3
SPEAKER_01
who was repeatedly asking his generals, why couldn t we use our nuclear weapons?
3
SPEAKER_01
Why can t we have more of them?
3
SPEAKER_01
Why do I have fewer nuclear weapons than JFK?
3
SPEAKER_01
Right, as though that were a sign of anything other than progress, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
And this is the guy who s got the button, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, somebody s following him around with a bag, waiting to take his order to launch, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
That is a,
3
SPEAKER_01
It s just, it s a risk we should never run.
3
SPEAKER_01
One thing Trump has going for him, I think, is that he doesn t drink or do drugs, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
Although people allege that he does speed, but let s take him at his word.
3
SPEAKER_01
He s not deranging himself with pharmaceuticals, at least.
3
SPEAKER_01
But apart from Diet Coke,
3
SPEAKER_00
But there s nothing wrong, just for the record, let me push back on that, there s nothing wrong with that.
3
SPEAKER_01
Nothing wrong with that, yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
I m consuming a very large amount.
3
SPEAKER_01
I occasionally have some myself.
3
SPEAKER_00
There s no medical, there s no scientific evidence that I observed the negatives of, you know, all those studies about aspartame and all of that.
3
SPEAKER_01
No, I don t know.
3
SPEAKER_01
I hope you re right.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, everything you said about the military-industrial complex is true, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
And we ve been worrying about that on both sides of the aisle for a very long time.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, that phrase came from Eisenhower.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, so much of,
3
SPEAKER_01
what ails us is a story of bad incentives, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
And bad incentives are so powerful that they corrupt even good people, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
How much more do they corrupt bad people, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
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,
3
SPEAKER_01
all of us can get together and try to diagnose those incentives and change them, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
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?
3
SPEAKER_01
And so it s almost the inversion of our current situation.
3
SPEAKER_01
So yes,
3
SPEAKER_01
And you say I changed my mind about the war.
3
SPEAKER_01
Not quite.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I was never a supporter of the war in Iraq.
3
SPEAKER_01
I was always worried that it was a distraction from the war in Afghanistan.
3
SPEAKER_01
I was a supporter of the war in Afghanistan.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I will admit in hindsight, that looks like, you know, at best a highly ambiguous and painful exercise, you know, more likely a fool s errand, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
It s like that, you know, it did not turn out well.
3
SPEAKER_01
It wasn t for want of trying.
3
SPEAKER_01
I don t, you know, I have not done a deep dive on all of the failures there.
3
SPEAKER_01
And maybe all of these failures are failures in principle.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, maybe it s just, maybe that s not the kind of thing that can be done well by anybody, whatever our intentions.
3
SPEAKER_01
But yeah, the move to Iraq always seemed questionable to me.
3
SPEAKER_01
And when we knew the problem, the immediate problem at that moment, you know, al-Qaeda was in Afghanistan and, you know, and then bouncing to Pakistan.
3
SPEAKER_01
Anyway, you know, so yes, but my
3
SPEAKER_01
my sense of the possibility of nation building, my sense of, you know, in so far as the neocon spirit of, you know,
3
SPEAKER_01
you know, responsibility and idealism, that, you know, America was the kind of nation that should be functioning in this way as the world s cop, and we have to get in there and untangle some of these knots by force rather often because, you know, if we don t do it over there, we re gonna have to do it over here kind of thing.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, some of that has definitely changed for me in my thinking.
3
SPEAKER_01
And there are obviously cultural reasons why it failed in Afghanistan.
3
SPEAKER_01
And if you can t change the culture, you re not gonna force a change at gunpoint in the culture.
3
SPEAKER_01
It certainly seems that that s not gonna happen.
3
SPEAKER_01
And it took us over 20 years, apparently, to realize that.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s one of the things you realize with a war is there s not going to be a strong signal that things are not working.
3
SPEAKER_00
If you just keep pouring money into a thing, a military effort,
3
SPEAKER_01
Well, also, there are signs of it working, too.
3
SPEAKER_01
You have all the stories of girls now going to school, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
You know, the girls are getting battery acid thrown in their faces by religious maniacs, and then we come in there and we stop that.
3
SPEAKER_01
And now girls are getting educated, and there s a—and that s all good, and our intentions are good there.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, we re on the right side of history there.
3
SPEAKER_01
Girls should be going to school.
3
SPEAKER_01
You know, Malala Yousafzai should have the Nobel Prize, and she shouldn t have been shot in the face by the Taliban, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
We know what the right answers are there.
3
SPEAKER_01
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?
3
SPEAKER_01
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.
3
SPEAKER_00
This reminded me of the thing that you and Jack Dorsey jokingly had for a while, the discussion about banning Donald Trump from Twitter.
3
SPEAKER_00
But does any of it bother you now that Twitter files came out that, I mean, this has to do with sort of the Hunter laptop, Hunter Biden laptop story.
3
SPEAKER_00
Does it bother you that there could be a collection of people that make decisions about who to ban or not?
3
SPEAKER_00
that could be susceptible to bias and to ideological influence?
3
SPEAKER_01
Well, I think it always will be, or in the absence of perfect AI, it always will be.
3
SPEAKER_00
And this becomes relevant with AI as well.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
Because there s some censorship on AI happening.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
And it s an interesting question there as well.
3
SPEAKER_01
I don t think Twitter is as important as people think it is, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
And I
3
SPEAKER_01
I used to think it was more important when I was on it, and now that I m off of it, I think it s, I mean, first let me say it s just an unambiguously good thing, in my experience, to delete your Twitter account, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
It s like it is just, even the good parts of Twitter that I miss,
3
SPEAKER_01
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 divert.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I was, you know,
3
SPEAKER_01
I was not a crazy Twitter addict.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I was probably a pretty normal user.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I was not someone who was tweeting multiple times a day or even every day, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
I think I probably averaged something like one tweet a day, I think I averaged.
3
SPEAKER_01
But in reality, it d be like four tweets one day and then I wouldn t tweet for the better part of a week.
3
SPEAKER_01
But I was looking a lot because it was my newsfeed.
3
SPEAKER_01
I was just following 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.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then when I would read an article that I thought I should signal boost, I would tweet.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so all of that seemed good, and that s all separable from all of the odious bullshit that came back at me largely in response to this Hunter Biden thing.
3
SPEAKER_01
But even the good stuff has a downside.
3
SPEAKER_01
And it comes at just this point of your phone is this perpetual stimulus of, which is intrinsically fragmenting of time and attention.
3
SPEAKER_01
And now my phone is much less of a presence in my life.
3
SPEAKER_01
And it s not that I don t check Slack or check email.
3
SPEAKER_01
I use it to work, but,
3
SPEAKER_01
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.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I had a, and it s just, it s, and the things that I think, I mean, we all know this phenomenon.
3
SPEAKER_01
We say of someone, that person s too online, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
Like, what does it mean to be too online?
3
SPEAKER_01
And where do you draw that boundary?
3
SPEAKER_01
How do you know?
3
SPEAKER_01
What constitutes being too online?
3
SPEAKER_01
In some sense, I think being on social media at all is to be too online.
3
SPEAKER_01
Given what it does to, given the kinds of information it signal boosts, and given the impulse it kindles in each of us to reach out to our audience in specific moments and in specific ways, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
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?
3
SPEAKER_01
Like there s no Twitter, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
So like there are lots of things that I would have tweeted in the last months.
3
SPEAKER_01
that are not the kind of thing I m gonna do a podcast about.
3
SPEAKER_01
I m not gonna roll out 10 minutes on that topic on my podcast.
3
SPEAKER_01
I m not gonna take the time to really think about it.
3
SPEAKER_01
But had I been on Twitter, I would have reacted to this thing in the news or this thing that somebody did, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
What do you do with that thought now?
3
SPEAKER_01
I just let go of it.
3
SPEAKER_00
Like chocolate ice cream is the most delicious thing ever.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it s usually not that sort of thing, but it s just,
3
SPEAKER_01
But then you look at the kinds of problems people create for themselves.
3
SPEAKER_01
You look at the life-deranging and reputation-destroying things that people do.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I look at 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.
4
SPEAKER_01
I mean, honestly, in my case, almost 100% of it was Twitter.
4
SPEAKER_01
The controversies I would get into, the things I would think I would have to respond to, like I would release a podcast on a certain topic, I would see some blowback on Twitter,
4
SPEAKER_01
it would give me the sense that there was some signal that I really had to respond to.
4
SPEAKER_01
Now that I m off Twitter, I recognize that most of that was just, it was totally specious, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
It was not something I had to respond to.
4
SPEAKER_01
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.
4
SPEAKER_01
And it became this self-perpetuating cycle which,
4
SPEAKER_01
I mean, if you re having fun, great.
4
SPEAKER_01
I mean, if it s generative of useful information and engagement professionally and psychologically, great.
4
SPEAKER_01
And there was some of that on Twitter.
4
SPEAKER_01
I mean, there were people who I ve connected with because I just, one of us DMed the other on Twitter, and it was hard to see how that was gonna happen otherwise.
4
SPEAKER_01
It was largely just a machine for manufacturing unnecessary controversy.
4
SPEAKER_00
Do you think it s possible to avoid the drug of that?
4
SPEAKER_00
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?
4
SPEAKER_00
And so anytime there s attacks, you just, I mean, that s how I tried to use it.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, but it s not the way I wanted to use it.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s not the way it promises itself as a... You wanted to have debate.
4
SPEAKER_01
I wanted to actually communicate with people.
4
SPEAKER_01
I wanted to hear from the person because...
4
SPEAKER_01
Again, it s like being in Afghanistan, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
It s like there are the potted cases where it s obviously good, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
It s like in Afghanistan, the girl who s getting an education, that is just here.
4
SPEAKER_01
That s why we re here.
4
SPEAKER_01
That s obviously good.
4
SPEAKER_01
I have 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.
4
SPEAKER_01
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.
4
SPEAKER_01
That s the promise of it, to actually talk to people.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so I kept getting lured back into that.
4
SPEAKER_01
No, the way, the sane or, you know, sanity-preserving way of using it is,
4
SPEAKER_01
just as a marketing channel.
4
SPEAKER_01
You just put your stuff out there and you don t look at what s coming back at you.
4
SPEAKER_01
And that s, you know, I m on other social media platforms that I don t even touch.
4
SPEAKER_01
I mean, my team posts stuff on Facebook and on Instagram.
4
SPEAKER_01
I never even see what s on there.
4
SPEAKER_00
So you don t think it s possible to see something and not let it affect your mind?
4
SPEAKER_01
No, that s definitely possible.
4
SPEAKER_01
But the question is, and I did that for vast stretches of time, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
But then,
4
SPEAKER_01
the promise of the platform.
4
SPEAKER_01
is dialogue and feedback, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
So why am I, if I know, for whatever reason, I m gonna see 99 to one awful feedback, bad faith feedback, malicious feedback, some of it s probably even bots, and I m not even aware of who s a person and who s a bot, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
But I m just gonna stare into this funhouse mirror of acrimony and dishonesty that is going to, I mean, the reason why I got off is
4
SPEAKER_01
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
4
SPEAKER_01
that it was insidiously changing the way I felt about people, both people I know and people I don t know, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
Like people I, you know, mutual friends of ours who are behaving in certain ways on Twitter, which just seemed insane to me.
4
SPEAKER_01
And then that became a signal I felt like I had to take into account somehow, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
You re seeing people at their worst, both friends and strangers.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I felt that it was, as much as I could sort of try to recalibrate for it,
4
SPEAKER_01
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.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so I felt like, all right, what s being advertised to me here on a, not just a daily basis, a hourly basis, or an increment sometimes of multiple times an hour, I mean, I probably check Twitter
4
SPEAKER_01
you know, at minimum 10 times a day, and maybe I was checking it 100 times a day on some days, right, where things were really active and I was really engaged with something.
4
SPEAKER_01
What was being delivered into my brain there was subtly false information about how dishonest and, you know,
4
SPEAKER_01
you know, just generally unethical, totally normal people are capable of being, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
It was like, it is a funhouse mirror.
4
SPEAKER_01
I was seeing the most grotesque versions of people who I know, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
People who I know I could sit down at dinner with and they would never behave this way.
4
SPEAKER_01
And yet they were coming at me on Twitter.
4
SPEAKER_01
I mean, it was essentially turning,
4
SPEAKER_01
ordinary people into sociopaths, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
It s like people are just, you know, and there are analogies that many of us have made.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s like, one analogy is road rage, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
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.
4
SPEAKER_01
And it s, you know, all of that becomes quite hilarious and,
4
SPEAKER_01
you know, obviously dysfunctional when they actually have to stop at the light next to the person they just flipped off and they realize 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.
4
SPEAKER_00
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, derisive towards each other.
4
SPEAKER_00
It doesn t make any sense.
4
SPEAKER_00
This is the only place where I ve seen people I really admire
4
SPEAKER_00
who have had a calm head about most things, like really be shitty to other people.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s probably the only place I ve seen that.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I don t, I tend, I choose to maybe believe that that s not really them, there s something about the system.
4
SPEAKER_00
Like, if you go paintballing, if you, Jordan Peterson, and whoever, go paintball.
4
SPEAKER_01
You re gonna shoot your friends, yeah.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, you re gonna 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.
4
SPEAKER_00
But it s sometimes hard to remind yourself of that.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I think I was guilty of that, definitely.
4
SPEAKER_01
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.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s just not healthy.
4
SPEAKER_01
So the reason why I deleted my Twitter account in the end was that it was obviously making me a worse person.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so, and yeah, is there some way to be on there where it s not making you a worse person?
4
SPEAKER_01
I m sure there is, but it s given the nature of the platform and given what was coming back at me on it,
4
SPEAKER_01
The way to do that is just to basically use it as a one-way channel of communication, just marketing.
4
SPEAKER_01
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.
4
SPEAKER_00
I put out a call for questions on Twitter, and actually, quite surprisingly, there s a lot of good.
4
SPEAKER_00
I mean, they re like, even if they re critical, they re like being thoughtful, which is nice.
4
SPEAKER_01
I used it that way too, and that was what kept me hooked.
4
SPEAKER_00
But then there s also touchballs69 wrote a question.
4
SPEAKER_01
I can t imagine.
4
SPEAKER_01
This is part of it, but one way to solve this is, you know, we ve got to get rid of anonymity for this.
4
SPEAKER_00
Let me ask the question.
4
SPEAKER_00
Ask Sam why he sucks was the question.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that s good.
4
SPEAKER_01
Well,
4
SPEAKER_01
One one reason why I sucked was Twitter that was and I ve since solved that problem.
4
SPEAKER_01
So I mean touch touch ball 69 69.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that s ball 69 should be happy that I Suck a little bit less now that I m off Twitter.
4
SPEAKER_00
I mean if I don t have to hear from touch balls 69 on the regular the fact that you have to see that
4
SPEAKER_00
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.
4
SPEAKER_00
You can also just reason your way out of it, saying that this is anonymity and this is kind of fun and this kind of,
4
SPEAKER_00
Just the the shit show of Twitter.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s okay, but it does mentally affect you a little bit Like I don t read too much into that kind of comment.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s like it s just that s just Trolling and it s you know, I I get what s I I get I understand the fun The person is having on the other side of that.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s like do you though?
4
SPEAKER_01
I do.
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, I do I don t I mean I don t behave that way but
4
SPEAKER_01
I do, and for all I know, that person could be 16 years old, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
So it s like- It could be also an alt account for Elon, I don t know.
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, yeah, that s right, yeah, yeah, yeah.
4
SPEAKER_01
No, I m pretty sure Elon would just tweet that under his own name at this point.
4
SPEAKER_01
Oh, man, they love each other.
4
SPEAKER_00
Okay, so do you think, so speaking of which, now that Elon has taken over Twitter, is there something that he could do to make this platform better?
4
SPEAKER_00
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?
4
SPEAKER_01
Maybe.
4
SPEAKER_01
Like in the next five years.
4
SPEAKER_01
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.
4
SPEAKER_00
So you were just observing yourself week by week, seeing the effect it has on your mind, and on how much you re actually learning and growing as a person, and it was negative.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and I d also seen the negativity in other people s lives.
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SPEAKER_01
I mean, it s obviously, I mean, he s not gonna admit it, but I think it s obviously negative for Elon, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
I mean, it s just not, it s, and that was one of the things that, you know, when I was looking into the Funhaus mirror, I was also seeing the Funhaus mirror on his side of Twitter, and it was just even more exaggerated.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s like, when I was asking myself, why is he spending his time this way?
4
SPEAKER_01
I then reflected on why, you know, why was I spending my time this way to a lesser degree, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
And at lesser scale and at lesser risk, frankly, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
And so, and it was just so, it s not just Twitter, I mean, this isn t part, an internet phenomenon.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s like the whole Hunter Biden mess that you,
4
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Explored.
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Explored.
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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.
4
SPEAKER_01
even, you know, 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, you know, even someone with,
4
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not functioning by a spirit of charity, but the clip was quite distinct from the podcast itself.
4
SPEAKER_01
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.
4
SPEAKER_01
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?
4
SPEAKER_01
Obviously the people who make those clips know that, and they re doing it quite maliciously.
4
SPEAKER_01
And in this case, the person who made that clip and subsequent clips of other podcasts was quite maliciously trying to engineer some reputational immolation for me.
4
SPEAKER_01
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?
4
SPEAKER_01
So it s a total failure, an understandable failure of ethics that everyone is so short on time and they re so fucking lazy
4
SPEAKER_01
And we now have these contexts in which we react so quickly to things, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
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.
4
SPEAKER_01
And most of the people who saw that clip
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don t understand what I actually think about any of these issues.
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And the irony is, people are gonna find clips from this conversation that are just as misleading, and they re gonna export those, and then people are gonna be dunking on those clips.
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And we re all living and dying by clips now, and it s dysfunctional.
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SPEAKER_00
See, I think it s possible to create a platform.
4
SPEAKER_00
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.
4
SPEAKER_00
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.
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SPEAKER_00
It s not like I was,
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is really interpreting it in the context of knowing your past.
4
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trump the benefit of the doubt when I see a clip of Trump.
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Because there are famous clips of Trump that are very misleading as to what he was saying in context.
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And I ve been honest about that.
4
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Like the whole, you know, there were good people on both sides scandal around his remarks after Charlottesville.
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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
4
SPEAKER_01
who has honestly apologized for what they did with that clip, that clip, he did not say what he seemed to be saying in that clip about the Nazis at Charlottesville, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
And I have always been very clear about that.
4
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So it s just, even people who I think should be marginalized and people who, you know,
4
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who should be defenestrated because they really are terrible people who are doing dangerous things and for bad reasons.
4
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I think we should be honest about what they actually meant in context, right?
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And this goes to anyone else we might talk about who s more, where the case is much more confusing.
4
SPEAKER_01
But yeah, so everyone s, it s just so, and then I m sure we re gonna get to AI, but the prospect of being able to manufacture clips
4
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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.
4
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There was no context.
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I mean, that s a misinformation apocalypse that we are right on the cusp of, and it s terrifying.
4
SPEAKER_00
Or it could be just a new world, like where Alice is going to Wonderland, where humor is the only thing we have and it will save us.
5
SPEAKER_00
In the end, Trump s approach to social media was the right one after all.
5
SPEAKER_00
Nothing is true and everything is absurd.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, but we can t live that way.
5
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People function on the basis of what they assume is true, right?
5
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They think- People have functioned.
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To do anything.
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It s like, I mean, you have to know what you think is gonna happen, or you have to at least give a probabilistic weighting over the future.
5
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Otherwise, you re gonna be incapacitated by, you re not gonna, like, people want certain things, and they have to have a rational plan to get those desires gratified.
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and they don t wanna 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?
5
SPEAKER_01
They re gonna do it and if it turns out it s misinformation, it s gonna matter because it comes down to like what medicines do you give your children, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
Like we re gonna be manufacturing fake,
5
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journal articles.
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I mean, this is, I m sure someone s using ChatGPT for this reader as we speak.
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And if it s not credible, if it s not persuasive now to most people, I mean, honestly, I don t think we re gonna, I ll be amazed if it s a year before we can actually create journal articles that would take a PhD to debunk.
5
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that are completely fake.
5
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And they re people who are celebrating this kind of, you know, coming cataclysm.
5
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But it s just, they re 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.
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And then they re the people who have met the few people
5
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who we could count on a few hands, who have managed to insulate themselves, or at least imagine they ve insulated themselves from the downside here enough, that they re not implicated in the great unraveling we are witnessing or could witness.
5
SPEAKER_00
The shaking up of what is true.
5
SPEAKER_00
So actually that returns us to experts.
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Do you think experts can save us?
5
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Is there such thing as expertise and experts in something?
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How do you know if you ve achieved it?
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I think it s important to acknowledge upfront that there s something paradoxical about how we relate to authority, especially within science.
5
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And I don t think that paradox is going away, and it doesn t have to be confusing, and it s not truly a paradox, it s just like there are different moments in time.
5
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So it is true to say that
5
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within science or within rationality generally, I mean, whenever you re 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?
5
SPEAKER_01
So it doesn t matter if you re a Nobel laureate, you can be wrong, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
The last sentence you spoke could be total bullshit, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
And it s also possible for someone who s deeply uninformed to be right about something, or to be right for the wrong reasons, or someone just gets lucky.
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SPEAKER_01
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 he spends a lot of time looking at the night sky.
5
SPEAKER_01
and he discovers a comet that no one else has seen, not even the professional expert astronomers.
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SPEAKER_01
My God, I think that happens less and less now, but some version of that keeps happening, and it may always keep happening in every area of expertise, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
So,
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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
5
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Real experts are much more reliable than frauds or people who are not experts, right?
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SPEAKER_01
And expertise really is a thing, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
And when you re flying an airplane in a storm, you don t want just randos come into the cockpit saying, listen, I ve got a new idea about how we should tweak these controls, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
You want someone who s a trained pilot and that training gave them something, right?
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SPEAKER_01
It gave them a set of competences and intuitions and they know what all those dials and switches do, right?
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SPEAKER_01
And I don t, right?
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SPEAKER_01
I shouldn t be flying that plane.
5
SPEAKER_01
So when things really matter, you know, and putting this at 30,000 feet in a storm sharpens this up,
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SPEAKER_01
We want real experts to be in charge, right?
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SPEAKER_01
And we are at 30,000 feet a lot of the time on a lot of issues, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
And whether they re public health issues, whether it s a geopolitical emergency like Ukraine,
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SPEAKER_01
climate change, I mean, just pick your topic.
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SPEAKER_01
There are real problems, and the clock is rather often ticking, and their solutions are non-obvious, right?
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SPEAKER_01
And so expertise is a thing, and deferring to experts much of the time makes a lot of sense.
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At minimum,
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prevents spectacular errors of incompetence and
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just foolhardiness, but even in the case of some, where you re talking about someone, I mean, people like ourselves who are like, we re well-educated, we re not the worst possible candidates for the Dunning-Kruger effect, when we re going into a new area where we re not experts, we re fairly alert to the possibility that we don t, it s not as simple as things seem at first, and we don t know how our tools translate to this new area.
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SPEAKER_01
We can be fairly circumspect, but we re also, because we re well-educated, and we re pretty quick studies, we can learn a lot of things pretty fast, and we can begin to play a language game that sounds fairly expert, right?
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SPEAKER_01
And in that case, the invitation to do your own research is, when times are good,
5
SPEAKER_01
I view as an invitation to waste your time pointlessly, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
When times are good.
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SPEAKER_01
Now, the truth is times are not all that good, right?
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SPEAKER_01
And we have the ongoing public display of failures of expertise.
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We have experts who are obviously corrupted by bad incentives.
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We ve got experts who perversely won t admit they were wrong when they in fact are demonstrated to be wrong.
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We ve got institutions that have been captured by
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political ideology that s not truth-tracking and this whole woke encroachment into really every place, whether it s universities or science journals or government.
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That has been genuinely deranging.
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SPEAKER_01
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.
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SPEAKER_01
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.
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SPEAKER_01
And if I get sick or someone close to me gets sick,
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SPEAKER_01
I have a PhD in neuroscience, right?
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SPEAKER_01
So I can read a medical journal article and understand a lot of it, right?
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SPEAKER_01
So I m just fairly conversant with medical terminology.
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SPEAKER_01
And I understand its methods, and I m alert to the difference because in neuroscience, I ve spent hours and hours in journal clubs analyzing the difference between good and bad studies.
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SPEAKER_01
I m alert to the difference between good and bad studies in medical journals, right?
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SPEAKER_01
And I understand that bad studies can get published and, you know, et cetera, and experiments can be poorly designed.
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SPEAKER_01
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?
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SPEAKER_01
I ve got no clinical experience.
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SPEAKER_01
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?
5
SPEAKER_01
So if someone close to me gets cancer,
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SPEAKER_01
I don t pretend to be an oncologist.
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SPEAKER_01
I don t start reading in journals of oncology and try to really get up to speed as an oncologist because it s... One, it s a bad and very likely misleading use of my time, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
And it s...
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SPEAKER_01
If I had a lot of runway, if I decided, okay, it s really important for me to know everything I can.
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SPEAKER_01
At this point, I know someone s gonna get cancer.
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SPEAKER_01
I may not go back to school and become an oncologist, but what I wanna do is I wanna know everything I can know about cancer, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
So I m gonna take the next four years and spend most of my time on cancer.
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SPEAKER_01
Okay, I could do that, right?
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SPEAKER_01
I still think that s a waste of my time.
5
SPEAKER_01
I still think even at the end of those four years, I m not gonna be the best person to form intuitions about what to do in the face of the next cancer that I have to confront.
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SPEAKER_01
I m still gonna want a better oncologist than I ve become to tell me what he or she would do if they were in my shoes or in the shoes of my family member.
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SPEAKER_01
I m not advocating a
5
SPEAKER_01
a blind trust and authority.
5
SPEAKER_01
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?
5
SPEAKER_01
But it matters that those opinions are coming from real experts and not from, you know,
5
SPEAKER_01
Robert Kennedy Jr.
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who s telling you that you got it because you got a vaccine.
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SPEAKER_01
We re swimming in a sea of misinformation where you ve got people who are moving the opinions of millions of others
5
SPEAKER_01
who should not have an opinion on these topics.
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SPEAKER_01
There is no scenario in which you should be getting your opinion about vaccine safety or climate change or
5
SPEAKER_01
the war in Ukraine, or anything else that we might want to talk about from Candace Owens, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
It s just like, she s not a relevant expert on any of those topics.
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SPEAKER_01
And what s more, she doesn t seem to care, right?
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SPEAKER_01
And she s living in a culture that has
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SPEAKER_01
amplify that not caring into a business model, an effective business model, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
And there s something very Trumpian about all that.
5
SPEAKER_01
The problem is the culture, it s not these specific individuals.
5
SPEAKER_01
So the paradox here is that expertise is a real thing,
5
SPEAKER_01
And we defer to it a lot as a labor-saving device and just based on the reality that it s very hard to be a polymath, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
And specialization is a thing, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
And so there are people who specialize in a very narrow topic.
5
SPEAKER_01
They know more about that topic than the next guy, no matter how smart that guy or gal is.
5
SPEAKER_01
And those differences matter, but it s also true
5
SPEAKER_01
that when you re talking about facts, sometimes the best experts are wrong.
5
SPEAKER_01
The scientific consensus is wrong.
5
SPEAKER_01
You get a sea change in the thinking of a whole field because one person who s an outlier for whatever reason decides, okay, I m gonna prove this point, and they prove it, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
So somebody like,
5
SPEAKER_01
The doctor who believed that stomach ulcers were not due to stress, but were due to H. pylori infections, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
So he just drank a vial of H. pylori bacteria and proved, and then quickly got an ulcer and convinced the field that at minimum, H. pylori was involved in that process.
5
SPEAKER_01
Okay, so yes, everyone was wrong.
5
SPEAKER_01
That doesn t disprove
5
SPEAKER_01
the reality of expertise.
5
SPEAKER_01
It doesn t disprove the utility of relying on experts most of the time, especially in an emergency, especially when the clock is ticking, especially when you re in this particular cockpit and you only have one chance to land this plane, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
You want the real pilot at the controls.
5
SPEAKER_00
But there s just a few things to say.
5
SPEAKER_00
So one, you mentioned this example with cancer and doing your own research, there s several things that are different about our particular time in history.
5
SPEAKER_00
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
5
SPEAKER_00
describe to you exactly the flaws in the different papers that make up the meta-analyses.
5
SPEAKER_00
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.
5
SPEAKER_00
For example, I don t know, I don t wanna overstate things, but if you suffer from depression, for example,
5
SPEAKER_00
then you could go to an expert and a doctor that prescribes you some medication.
5
SPEAKER_00
But you could also challenge some of those ideas and seeing what are the different medications, what are the different side effects, what are the different solutions to depression, all that kind of stuff.
5
SPEAKER_00
And I think depression is just a really difficult problem that s very, I don t wanna, again, state incorrect things, but I think it s,
5
SPEAKER_00
there s a lot of variability of what depression really means.
5
SPEAKER_00
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.
5
SPEAKER_00
Now, depression, that s something that s been studied for a very long time.
5
SPEAKER_00
With a new pandemic that s affecting everybody,
5
SPEAKER_00
It s, you know, with the airplane, equate it to like 9-11 or something.
5
SPEAKER_00
Like, did a new emergency just happen?
5
SPEAKER_00
And everybody, every expert in the world is publishing on it and talking about it.
5
SPEAKER_00
So doing your own research there could be exceptionally effective in asking questions.
5
SPEAKER_00
And then there s a difference between experts, virologists, and it s actually a good question, who is exactly the expert in a pandemic?
5
SPEAKER_00
but there s the actual experts doing the research and publishing stuff, and then there s the communicators of that expertise.
5
SPEAKER_00
And the question is, if the communicators are flawed,
5
SPEAKER_00
to a degree where doing your own research is actually the more effective way to figure out policies and solutions.
5
SPEAKER_00
Because you re not competing with experts, you re competing with the communicators of expertise.
5
SPEAKER_00
That could be WHO, CDC in the case of the pandemic, or politicians, or political type of science figures like Anthony Fauci.
5
SPEAKER_00
There s a question there of the effectiveness of doing your own research in that context,
5
SPEAKER_00
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.
5
SPEAKER_00
So those are the waters you re swimming in.
5
SPEAKER_00
But I think doing your own research in that kind of context could be quite effective.
5
SPEAKER_01
Let me be clear, I m not saying
5
SPEAKER_01
you shouldn t do any research, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
I m not saying that you shouldn t be informed about an issue.
5
SPEAKER_01
I m not saying you shouldn t read articles on whatever the topic is.
5
SPEAKER_01
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.
5
SPEAKER_01
And I ve read some.
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SPEAKER_01
So I m not making a virtue of ignorance and of blind optimism.
6
SPEAKER_01
and obedience to authority.
6
SPEAKER_01
And again, I recognize that authorities can discredit themselves or they can be wrong.
6
SPEAKER_01
They can be wrong even when there s no discredit.
6
SPEAKER_01
There s a lot we don t understand about the nature of the world.
6
SPEAKER_01
But still this vast gulf between truly informed opinion and bullshit exists.
6
SPEAKER_01
It always exists.
6
SPEAKER_01
And conspiracy thinking is,
6
SPEAKER_01
rather often, most of the time, a species of bullshit, but it s not always wrong.
6
SPEAKER_01
There are real conspiracies and there really are just awful
6
SPEAKER_01
corruptions born of bad incentives within our scientific processes, within institutions.
6
SPEAKER_01
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.
6
SPEAKER_01
And it was really corrosive of public trust, especially on the right.
6
SPEAKER_01
for understandable reasons.
6
SPEAKER_01
It was crazy, some of the things that were being said, and still is.
6
SPEAKER_01
And these cases are all different.
6
SPEAKER_01
You take depression, we just don t know enough about depression for anyone to be that confident about anything.
6
SPEAKER_01
And there are many different modalities in which to interact with it as a problem, right?
6
SPEAKER_01
So there s, yes, pharmaceuticals have whatever promise they have, but there s certainly reason to be concerned that they don t work well for everybody.
6
SPEAKER_01
And I mean, it s obvious they don t work well for everybody, but they do work for some people.
6
SPEAKER_01
But again, depression is a multifactorial problem, and there are different levels at which to influence it.
6
SPEAKER_01
And there are things like meditation, there are things like just life changes.
6
SPEAKER_01
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 wanna do.
6
SPEAKER_01
You don t have any energy to socialize, you don t wanna get things done, you don t wanna exercise.
6
SPEAKER_01
And all of those things, if you got those up and running, they do make you feel better in the aggregate.
6
SPEAKER_01
But the reality is that there are clinical level depressions that are so bad that it s just, we just don t have good tools for them.
6
SPEAKER_01
And it s not enough to tell, there s no life change someone s gonna embrace that is going to be an obvious remedy for that.
6
SPEAKER_01
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.
6
SPEAKER_01
It s less multifactorial.
6
SPEAKER_01
The logic by which you would make those choices, yeah.
6
SPEAKER_01
So it s like, we have a virus, we have a new virus.
6
SPEAKER_01
It s some version of bad.
6
SPEAKER_01
It s human transmissible.
6
SPEAKER_01
We re still catching up.
6
SPEAKER_01
We re catching up to every aspect of it.
6
SPEAKER_01
We don t know how it spreads.
6
SPEAKER_01
We don t know how.
6
SPEAKER_00
How effective masks are.
6
SPEAKER_01
Well, at a certain point, we knew it was respiratory, but.
6
SPEAKER_01
But how respiratory, what that means.
6
SPEAKER_01
And whether it s spread by fomites.
6
SPEAKER_01
We were confused about a lot of things, and we re still confused.
6
SPEAKER_01
It s been a moving target this whole time, and it s been changing this whole time.
6
SPEAKER_01
And our responses to it have been,
6
SPEAKER_01
We ramped up the vaccines as quickly as we could, but too quick for some, not quick enough for others.
6
SPEAKER_01
We could have done human challenge trials and got them out more quickly with better data.
6
SPEAKER_01
And I think that s something we should probably look at in the future because to my eye, that would make ethical sense to do challenge trials.
6
SPEAKER_01
But
6
SPEAKER_01
And so much of my concern about COVID, I mean, many people are confused about my concern about COVID.
6
SPEAKER_01
My concern about COVID has, for much of the time, not been narrowly focused on COVID itself and how dangerous I perceive COVID to be as a illness.
6
SPEAKER_01
It has been, for the longest time,
6
SPEAKER_01
even more a concern about our ability to respond to a truly scary pathogen next time.
6
SPEAKER_01
Outside those initial months, give me the first six months to be quite worried about COVID and the unraveling of society.
6
SPEAKER_01
And the supply of toilet paper.
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You wanna secure a steady supply of toilet paper.
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But beyond that initial period,
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when we had a sense of what we were dealing with and we had every hope that the vaccines are actually gonna work and we knew we were getting those vaccines in short order, right?
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Beyond that, and we knew just how dangerous the illness was and how dangerous it wasn t.
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For years now, I ve just been worrying about this as a failed dress rehearsal for something much worse.
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I think what we prove to ourselves at this moment in history is that we have built informational tools that we do not know how to use, and we have made ourselves, we ve basically enrolled all of human society into a psychological experiment that is deranging us and making it
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virtually impossible to solve coordination problems that we absolutely have to solve next time when things are worse.
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Do you understand who s at fault for the way this unraveled?
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The way we didn t seem to have the distrust in institutions and the institution of science that grew like seemingly exponentially or got revealed through this process, who is at fault here?
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And what s the fix?
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So much blame to go around, but so much of it is not a matter of bad people conspiring to do bad things.
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It s a matter of
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incompetence and misaligned incentives and just ordinary, plain vanilla dysfunction.
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But my problem was that people like you, people like Brett Weinstein, people that I look to for reasonable, difficult conversations on difficult topics,
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have a little bit lost their mind, became emotional and dogmatic in style of conversation, perhaps not in the depth of actual ideas, but they re, you know, a tweet something of that nature, and not about you, but just it feels like the pandemic
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made people really more emotional than before.
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And then Kimball Musk responded, I think something I think you probably would agree with, maybe not.
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I think it was the combo of Trump and the pandemic.
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Trump triggered the far left to be way more active than they could have been without him.
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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.
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I would agree with some of that.
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I m not sure how much to read into the nanny state concept, but.
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But yet like basically got people in the far left really activated.
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Yeah.
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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.
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My fear is that there was gonna be that complete distrust anyway, given the nature of the information space, given the level of conspiracy thinking, given the gaming of these tools by an anti-vax cult.
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I mean, there really is an anti-vax cult that just ramped up its energy during this moment.
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But it s a small one.
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It s not to say that everything, every concern about vaccines is a species of,
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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.
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I mean, QAnon is a cult.
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And so there s a lot of lying and there s a lot of confusion.
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There are...
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It s almost impossible to exaggerate how confused some people are and how fully their lives are organized around that confusion.
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I mean, there are people who think that the world s being run by pedophile cannibals and that Tom Hanks and Oprah Winfrey and Michelle Obama are among those cannibals.
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adjacent to the pure crazy, there s the semi-crazy, and adjacent to the semi-crazy, there s the grifting, opportunist, asshole.
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And the layers of bad faith are hard to fully diagnose, but the problem is
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All of this is getting signal boosted by an outrage machine that is preferentially spreading misinformation.
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It has a business model that is guaranteeing that it is preferentially sharing misinformation.
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Actually, just on a small tangent, how do you defend yourself against the claim that you re a pedophile cannibal?
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It s difficult.
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Here s the case I would make.
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Because I don t think you can use reason.
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I think you have to use empathy.
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You have to understand.
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Part of it, I find it very difficult to believe that anyone believes these things.
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I m sure there s some number of people
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who are just pretending to believe these things because it s just, again, this is sort of like the four-chanification of everything.
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It s just Pepe the Frog, right?
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None of this is what it seems.
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They re not signaling an alliance with white supremacy or neo-Nazism, but they re not not doing it.
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They just don t fucking care.
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It s just cynicism overflowing its banks, right?
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SPEAKER_01
It s just fun to wind up the normies, right?
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Look at all the normies who don t understand that a green frog is just a green frog, even when it isn t just a green frog.
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It s just gumming up everyone s cognitive bandwidth with bullshit.
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I get that that s fun if you re a teenager and you just want to vandalize our newsphere, but
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At a certain point, we have to recognize that real questions of human welfare are in play, right?
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There are wars getting fought or not fought, and there s a pandemic raging.
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there s medicine to take or not take.
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But I mean, to come back to this issue of COVID, I don t think I got so out of balance around COVID.
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I think people are quite confused about what I was concerned about.
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I mean, yes, there was a period where
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I was crazy because anyone who was taking it seriously was crazy because they had no idea what was going on.
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And so it s like, yes, I was wiping down packages with alcohol wipes, right?
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Because people thought it was transmissible by touch, right?
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And then when we realized that was no longer the case, I stopped doing that.
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So again, it was a moving target.
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And a lot of things we did in hindsight around masking and school closures,
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looks fairly dysfunctional, right?
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Unnecessary.
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I think the criticism that people would say about your talking about COVID, and maybe you can correct me, but you were against skepticism of the safety and efficacy of the vaccine.
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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 getting nervous.
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Especially after the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, I too was nervous about anything where a lot of money could be made.
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And you just see how the people who are greedy, they come to the surface all of a sudden.
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And a lot of them that run institutions, they re actually really good human beings.
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I know a lot of them.
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But it s hard to know how those two combine together when there s hundreds of billions, trillions of dollars to be made.
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And so that skepticism, I guess the sense was that you weren t open enough to the skepticism.
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I understand that people have that sense.
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I ll tell you how I thought about it and think about it.
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One, again, it was a moving target.
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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.
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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.
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You re eventually going to get COVID, and the question is, do you want to be vaccinated when you do?
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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.
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And so it wasn t just a personal choice.
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You were actually being a good citizen
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when you decided to run whatever risk you were gonna run to get vaccinated, because there are people in our society who actually can t get vaccinated.
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I mean, I know people who can t take any vaccines.
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They re so allergic to, I mean, they in their own person seem to justify all of the fears of the anti-vax cult.
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I mean, it s like, they re the kind of person who Robert Kennedy Jr.
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can point to and say, see, vaccines will fucking kill you, right?
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because of the experience, and we re still, I know people who have kids who fit that description, right?
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So we should all feel a civic responsibility to be vaccinated against egregiously awful and transmissible diseases for which we have relatively safe vaccines,
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to keep those sorts of people safe.
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SPEAKER_00
And there was a period of time when it was thought that the vaccine could stop transmission.
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Yes.
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And so again, all of this has begun to shift.
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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?
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As far as I know, that s the purview of the,
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of actual heightened concern, but also
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There s now a lot of natural immunity out there.
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Basically everyone who was gonna get vaccinated has gotten vaccinated.
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The virus has evolved to the point in this context where it seems less dangerous.
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Again, I m going more on the seemings than on research that I ve done at this point, but I m certainly less worried about getting COVID.
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I ve had it once.
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I ve been vaccinated.
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So you ask me now, how do I feel about getting the next booster?
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I don t know that I m going to get the next booster, right?
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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.
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And that was, at that point, given what we knew,
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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.
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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?
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How many of these boosters am I gonna get for the rest of my life, really?
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And how safe is the mRNA vaccine for a man of my age?
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And do I need to be worried about myocarditis?
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All of that is completely rational to talk about now.
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My concern is that at every point along the way,
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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.
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Right?
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I just disagree with that.
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I think, yes, in theory, I agree 100%, but I feel like experts failed at communicating.
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Not at doing- They did.
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And I just feel like you and Brett Weinstein actually have the tools with the internet
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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.
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The problem I have with experts- But there would be deference to experts and pseudo-experts behind all of that.
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SPEAKER_00
Well, the papers, you would stand on the shoulders of giants, but you can surf those shoulders better than the giants themselves.
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Yeah, but I knew we were gonna disagree about that.
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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.
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One larger problem, and this goes back to the problem of
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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?
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I mean, it is amazing, but you could find PhDs and MDs who would sit up there in front of Congress
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and say that they thought smoking was not addictive, or that it was not harmful to, there was no direct link between smoking and lung cancer.
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You can always find those people.
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But some of the people Brett found were people who had obvious tells, to my point of view, to my eye, and I saw them on, some of the same people were on Rogan s podcast, right?
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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 they re genuine unknowns, right?
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Like how much do we know about the safety of these vaccines, right?
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It s at that point, not a whole hell of a lot.
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I mean, we have no long-term data on mRNA vaccines.
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but to confidently say that millions of people are gonna die because of these vaccines and to confidently say that ivermectin is a panacea, right?
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Ivermectin is the thing that prevents COVID, right?
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There was no good reason to say either of those things at that moment.
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And so given that that s where Brett was,
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I felt like there was nothing to debate.
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We re both the wrong people to be getting into the weeds on this.
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We re both going to defer to our chosen experts.
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His experts look like crackpots to me, or at least the ones who are most vociferous on those edgiest points that seem most
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SPEAKER_00
And your experts seem like, what is the term, mass hysteria?
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SPEAKER_00
I forgot the term.
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SPEAKER_01
No, but it s like with climate science.
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It s received as a canard in half of our society now.
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the claim that 97% of climate scientists agree that human-caused climate change is a thing, right?
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So do you go with the 97% most of the time, or do you go with the 3% most of the time?
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It s obvious you go with the 97% most of the time for anything that matters.
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it s not to say that the three percent are always wrong.
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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?
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And it s an open question whether
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we can actually get things done with this level of transparency and pseudo-transparency given our information ecosystems.
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Like, can we fight a war, really fight a war that we may have to fight, like the next Nazis?
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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?
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Like, could we as a society do what we might have to do
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to actually get necessary things done when we re living in this panopticon of just, you know, everyone s a journalist, right?
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SPEAKER_01
Everyone s a scientist, everyone s an expert, everyone s got direct contact with the facts, or a semblance of the facts.
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SPEAKER_00
I don t know.
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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.
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So that s the fight, that s the mechanism by which you resist the dogmatism of this binary thinking.
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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.
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SPEAKER_00
Because the virologists haven t been able to be good communicators.
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SPEAKER_00
I still to this day don t really know what is the, what am I supposed to think about the safety and efficacy of the vaccines today?
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SPEAKER_00
As it stands today, what are we supposed to think?
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What are we supposed to think about testing?
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What are we supposed to think about the effectiveness of masks or lockdowns?
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Where s the great communicators on this topic that consider all the other conspiracy theories, all the communication that s out there,
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SPEAKER_00
and actually aggregating it together and being able to say this is actually what s most likely the truth.
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SPEAKER_00
And also some of that has to do with humility, epistemic humility, knowing that you can t really know for sure.
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SPEAKER_00
Just like with depression, you can t really know for sure.
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SPEAKER_00
I m not seeing those communications being effectively done, even still today.
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SPEAKER_01
Well, the jury is still out on some of it, and again, it s a moving target.
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And some of it, I mean, it s complicated.
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Some of it s a self-fulfilling dynamic where, so like lockdowns, in theory, a lockdown would work,
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if we could only do it, but we can t really do it.
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And there s a lot of people who won t do it because they re convinced that this is the totalitarian boot, you know, finally on the neck of the good people who, you know,
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SPEAKER_01
are always having their interests, you know, traduced by the elites, right?
7
SPEAKER_01
So like this is, if you have enough people who think the lockdown for any reason in the face of any conceivable illness, right, is just code for the new world order coming to fuck you over and take your guns, right?
7
SPEAKER_01
Okay, you have a society that is now immune to reason, right?
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SPEAKER_01
Because there are absolutely certain pathogens
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SPEAKER_01
that we should lock down for next time, right?
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SPEAKER_01
And it was completely rational in the beginning of this thing to lock down, to attempt to lock down.
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SPEAKER_01
We never really locked down.
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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?
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SPEAKER_01
Like that moment was not hard to navigate, at least in my view.
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It was obvious at the time.
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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.
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SPEAKER_01
We live in a society that s just not going to lock down.
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SPEAKER_00
Unless the pandemic is much more deadly.
7
SPEAKER_01
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 wanna see children die.
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SPEAKER_01
It s a pity more children didn t die from COVID, right?
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SPEAKER_01
This is actually the same person who... And that s the other thing that got so poisoned here.
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SPEAKER_01
It s like that person, this psychopath or effective psychopath who s creating these clips of me on podcasts, the second clip of me
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SPEAKER_01
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.
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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.
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This is somebody who Brett signal boosted as a very reliable source of information.
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SPEAKER_01
He kept retweeting this guy at me, against me, right?
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SPEAKER_01
And this guy, at one glance, I knew how unreliable this guy was, right?
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SPEAKER_01
But I think I m not at all sad.
7
SPEAKER_01
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
7
SPEAKER_01
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.
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SPEAKER_01
I haven t known what I think is ethically right about the choices that seem forced on us at moments like this.
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SPEAKER_01
I ve criticized you in public about your interview with Kanye.
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SPEAKER_01
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
7
SPEAKER_01
Podcast I more or less said the same thing that I said to you in private right now.
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SPEAKER_01
That was how I navigated that moment I did the same thing with you with Elon at least on at the beginning and
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SPEAKER_01
You know, we have maintained good vibes, which is not what I wanna say about Elon.
7
SPEAKER_00
But I don t think, 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.
7
SPEAKER_01
I think with Brett, I failed to reach out in private
7
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to the degree that I should have.
7
SPEAKER_01
And we never really had, we had tried to set up a conversation in private that never happened, but there was some communication, but it would have been much better for me to have made more of an effort in private than I did before it spilled out into public.
7
SPEAKER_01
And I would say that s true with other people as well.
7
SPEAKER_00
what kind of interaction in private do you think you should have with Brett?
7
SPEAKER_00
Because my case would be beforehand and now still.
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SPEAKER_00
The case I would like in this part of the criticism,
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SPEAKER_00
you sent my way, maybe it s useful to go to that direction.
7
SPEAKER_00
Actually, let s go to that direction, because I think I disagree with your criticism, as you stated publicly, but this is very- You re talking about your interview with Kanye, yeah.
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SPEAKER_00
The thing you criticized me for is actually the right thing to do with Brett.
7
SPEAKER_00
Okay, you said, Lex could have spoken with Kanye in such a way as to have produced a useful document.
7
SPEAKER_00
He didn t do that because he has a fairly naive philosophy about the power of love.
7
SPEAKER_00
Let s see if you can maintain that philosophy in the present.
7
SPEAKER_00
Let s go.
7
SPEAKER_00
No, it s beautiful.
7
SPEAKER_00
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.
7
SPEAKER_00
Let me make the case for this power of love philosophy, right?
7
SPEAKER_00
And first of all, I love you, Sam.
7
SPEAKER_00
You re still an inspiration and somebody I deeply admire.
7
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
7
SPEAKER_00
Back at you.
7
SPEAKER_00
To me, in the case of Kanye, it s not only that you get to the conversation and have hugs,
7
SPEAKER_00
it s that the display that you re willing to do that has power.
7
SPEAKER_00
So even if it doesn t end in hugging, the actual, the turning the other cheek, the act of turning the other cheek itself communicates both to Kanye later and to the rest of the world that we should,
7
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have empathy and compassion towards each other.
7
SPEAKER_00
There is power to that.
7
SPEAKER_00
Maybe that is naive, but I believe in the power of that.
7
SPEAKER_00
So it s not that I m trying to convince Kanye that some of his ideas are wrong, but I m trying to illustrate that just the act of listening and truly trying to understand the human being, that is power.
7
SPEAKER_00
opens people s minds to actually questioning their own beliefs more.
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SPEAKER_00
It takes them out of the dogmatism, deescalates the kind of dogmatism that I ve been seeing.
7
SPEAKER_00
So in that sense, I would say the power of love is the philosophy you might apply to Brett.
7
SPEAKER_00
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 re illustrating, they re not grounding their findings in actual meta-analyses and papers and so on.
7
SPEAKER_00
Like making a strong case, like what are you doing?
7
SPEAKER_00
This is gonna get a lot of people in trouble.
7
SPEAKER_00
But instead just saying, like being a friend in the dumbest of ways, being like,
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SPEAKER_00
respectful, sending love their way, and just having a conversation outside of all of this.
7
SPEAKER_00
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.
7
SPEAKER_00
But removing all of that, and remembering that you have a friendship,
7
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, well, so I think these are highly non-analogous cases, right?
7
SPEAKER_01
So your conversation with Kanye misfired from my point of view for a very different reason.
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SPEAKER_01
It was, it has to do with Kanye.
7
SPEAKER_01
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.
7
SPEAKER_01
Or both, I mean, actually those aren t mutually exclusive.
7
SPEAKER_01
So one of three possibilities, he s either mentally ill, he s an asshole, or he s mentally ill and an asshole.
7
SPEAKER_00
I think all three of those possibilities are possible for the both of us as well.
7
SPEAKER_01
No, I would argue none of those are likely for either of us, but... Possible.
7
SPEAKER_01
Not to say we don t have our moments, but...
7
SPEAKER_01
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.
7
SPEAKER_01
I just thought you re not doing him a favor.
7
SPEAKER_01
If he s mentally ill, right, he s in the middle of a pandemic,
7
SPEAKER_01
manic episode or, you know, I m not a clinician, but I ve heard it said of him that he is bipolar.
7
SPEAKER_01
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?
7
SPEAKER_01
We know what he thought about the Jews.
7
SPEAKER_01
We know that there s not much illumination that s going to come from him on that topic.
7
SPEAKER_01
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.
7
SPEAKER_01
If he s just an asshole and he s just an antisemite, an ordinary garden variety antisemite, 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.
7
SPEAKER_01
And I m saying you can do that with love.
7
SPEAKER_01
I mean, that s the other thing here is that
7
SPEAKER_01
I don t agree that compassion and love always have.
7
SPEAKER_01
this patient, embracing, acquiescent face, right?
7
SPEAKER_01
They don t always feel good to the recipient, right?
7
SPEAKER_01
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.
7
SPEAKER_01
And there s no hatred being communicated.
7
SPEAKER_01
In fact, you could just, it s like, listen, I m gonna do everyone a favor right now
7
SPEAKER_01
just take your foot out of your mouth.
7
SPEAKER_01
And the truth is, I just wouldn t have aired the conversation.
7
SPEAKER_01
I just don t think it was a document that had to get out there.
7
SPEAKER_01
I get that many people, this is not a signal you re likely to get from your audience.
7
SPEAKER_01
I get that many people in your audience thought, oh my God, that s awesome.
7
SPEAKER_01
You re talking to Kanye and you re doing it in Lex style where it s just love and you re not treating him like a pariah.
7
SPEAKER_01
and you re holding this tension between he s this creative genius who is 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.
7
SPEAKER_01
They re still wrong, and I still think that was unbalanced, not a good thing to put out into the world.
7
SPEAKER_00
You don t think it opens up the mind and heart of people that listen to that, just seeing a person?
8
SPEAKER_00
if it s opening up in the wrong direction where just gale force nonsense is coming in, right?
8
SPEAKER_00
I think we should have an open mind and an open heart, but there s some clear things here that
8
SPEAKER_00
that we have to keep in view.
8
SPEAKER_00
One is, the mental illness component is its own thing.
8
SPEAKER_00
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 one see it.
8
SPEAKER_01
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.
8
SPEAKER_01
That s why I chose to sit down.
8
SPEAKER_01
And I didn t get, I mean, mental illness is such a,
8
SPEAKER_00
But when he shows up in a gimp hood on Alex Jones s podcast, I mean, either that s more, you know, genius performance in his world, or he s unraveling further.
8
SPEAKER_01
I wouldn t put that under mental illness.
8
SPEAKER_01
I think there s another conversation to be had about
8
SPEAKER_01
how we treat artists.
8
SPEAKER_01
Right.
8
SPEAKER_01
Because they re weirdos.
8
SPEAKER_01
They re very, I mean, taking words from Kanye as if he s like Christopher Hitchens or something like that, like very eloquent, researched,
8
SPEAKER_01
written many books on history, on politics, on geopolitics, on psychology.
8
SPEAKER_01
Kanye didn t do any of that.
8
SPEAKER_01
He s an artist just spouting off.
8
SPEAKER_01
And so it s a different style of conversation and a different way to treat the words that are coming out of his mouth.
8
SPEAKER_00
Let s leave the mental illness aside.
8
SPEAKER_00
So if we re gonna say that there s no reason to think he s mentally ill and this is just him being creative and brilliant and opinionated,
8
SPEAKER_00
well, then that falls into the asshole bucket for me.
8
SPEAKER_00
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.
8
SPEAKER_00
But the most offensive thing is just how delusionally egocentric he is.
8
SPEAKER_00
or was coming off in that interview and in others.
8
SPEAKER_00
He has an estimation of himself as this omnibus genius, not only to rival Shakespeare, to exceed Shakespeare, right?
8
SPEAKER_00
I mean, he is the greatest mind that has ever walked among us.
8
SPEAKER_00
And he s more or less explicit on that point, and yet he manages to talk for hours without saying anything actually interesting or insightful or factually illuminating, right?
8
SPEAKER_00
So it s complete delusion
8
SPEAKER_00
of a very Trumpian sort.
8
SPEAKER_00
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.
8
SPEAKER_00
Kanye seems to believe his own press.
8
SPEAKER_00
He actually thinks he s just a colossus.
8
SPEAKER_00
He may be a great musician.
8
SPEAKER_00
It s certainly not my wheelhouse to compare him to any other musicians.
8
SPEAKER_00
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.
8
SPEAKER_00
And so when you couple that to the anti-Semitism he was spreading, which was genuinely noxious and ill-considered and
8
SPEAKER_00
um has Potential knock-on effects in the black community.
8
SPEAKER_00
I mean this there s a there s an ambient level of anti-semitism in the black community That is worth worrying about and talking about anyway There s a bunch of guys, you know playing the knockout game in brooklyn just punching orthodox jews in the face
8
SPEAKER_00
And I think letting Kanye air his anti-Semitism that publicly only raises the likelihood of that rather than diminishes it.
8
SPEAKER_01
I don t know.
8
SPEAKER_01
So let me say just a couple of things.
8
SPEAKER_01
So one, my belief at the time was it doesn t.
8
SPEAKER_01
It decreases it.
8
SPEAKER_01
Showing empathy while pushing back
8
SPEAKER_01
decreases the likelihood of that.
8
SPEAKER_01
It might on the surface look like it s increasing it, but that s simply because the anti-Semitism or the hatred in general is brought to the surface, and then people talk about it.
8
SPEAKER_01
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.
8
SPEAKER_01
It s painful, because I have to think through it for a while.
8
SPEAKER_01
It still haunts me, because the other kind of criticism I got a lot of, people basically said, thinks towards me based on who I am, that they hate me.
8
SPEAKER_00
Just- You mean anti-Semitic things?
8
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, anti-Semitic things.
8
SPEAKER_01
I just hate the word anti-Semitic.
8
SPEAKER_01
It s like racist.
8
SPEAKER_00
But here s the reality.
8
SPEAKER_00
So I m someone, so I m Jewish, although obviously not religious.
8
SPEAKER_00
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.
8
SPEAKER_00
in my lifetime and in my experience, I have never taken anti-Semitism very seriously.
8
SPEAKER_00
I have not worried about it.
8
SPEAKER_00
I have not made a thing of it.
8
SPEAKER_00
I ve done exactly one podcast on it.
8
SPEAKER_00
I had Barry Weiss on my podcast when her book came out.
8
SPEAKER_00
But it really is a thing and it s, I don t know,
8
SPEAKER_00
it s something we have to keep an eye on societally because it s a unique kind of hatred, right?
8
SPEAKER_00
It s unique in that it seems it s knit together with, it s not just ordinary racism, it s knit together with lots of conspiracy theories that never seem to die out.
8
SPEAKER_00
It can by turns equally animate the left and the right politically.
8
SPEAKER_00
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.
8
SPEAKER_00
But on the left, Jews are considered extra white.
8
SPEAKER_00
I mean, we re the extra beneficiaries of white privilege, right?
8
SPEAKER_00
And in the black community, that is often the case, right?
8
SPEAKER_00
We re a minority that has thrived.
8
SPEAKER_00
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.
8
SPEAKER_00
And yeah, Asians are now getting a little bit of this, you know, like the model minority issue.
8
SPEAKER_00
But Jews have had this going on for centuries and millennia, and it never seems to go away.
8
SPEAKER_00
And again, this is something that I ve never focused on, but
8
SPEAKER_00
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.
8
SPEAKER_00
And so there s kind of a special concern at moments like that where you have an immensely influential person in a community
8
SPEAKER_00
Who already has a checkered history with respect to their own beliefs about the jews and the conspiracies and all the rest Uh, and he s just messaging, uh, you know, not especially Fully opposed by you and anyone else who s who s given him the microphone at that moment to the world and that so that that
8
SPEAKER_00
you know, made my Spidey sense tangled.
8
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it s complicated.
8
SPEAKER_01
The stakes are very high.
8
SPEAKER_01
And as somebody who s been obviously family and also reading a lot about World War II and just this whole period, it was a very difficult conversation.
8
SPEAKER_01
But I believe in the power, especially given who I am of not always, but sometimes, often turning the other cheek.
8
SPEAKER_00
Oh yeah, and again, things change.
8
SPEAKER_00
when they re for public consumption.
8
SPEAKER_00
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.
8
SPEAKER_00
If you re in an elevator, if I m in an elevator with strangers and I hear someone say something stupid,
8
SPEAKER_00
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, right?
8
SPEAKER_00
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.
8
SPEAKER_00
The question is how you say it, how you say it.
8
SPEAKER_00
Or even whether you say anything.
8
SPEAKER_00
in those, I mean, they re moments, they re definitely moments to privilege civility or just to pick your battles.
8
SPEAKER_00
I mean, sometimes it s just not worth it to get into it with somebody out in real life.
8
SPEAKER_01
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,
8
SPEAKER_01
It just gives more power to your words after.
8
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, but until it doesn t.
8
SPEAKER_00
Because you can extend charity too far.
8
SPEAKER_00
It can be absolutely obvious what someone s motives really are, and they re dissembling about that.
8
SPEAKER_00
And so then you re taking at face value their representations, begins to look like you re just being duped and you re not actually doing the work of
8
SPEAKER_00
of putting pressure on a bad actor.
8
SPEAKER_00
And again, the mental illness component here makes it very difficult to think about what you should or shouldn t have said to Kanye.
8
SPEAKER_01
So I think the topic of platforming is pretty interesting.
8
SPEAKER_01
What s your view on platforming controversial people?
8
SPEAKER_01
Let s start with the old, would you interview Hitler on your podcast?
8
SPEAKER_01
And how would you talk to him?
8
SPEAKER_01
Oh, and follow-up question.
8
SPEAKER_01
Would you interview him in 1935, 41, and then like 45?
8
SPEAKER_00
Well, I think we have an uncanny valley problem with respect to this issue of whether or not to speak to bad people, right?
8
SPEAKER_00
So if a person s sufficiently bad, right, if they re all the way out of the valley, then you can talk to them and it s totally unproblematic.
8
SPEAKER_00
to talk to them because you don t have to spend any time signaling to your audience that you don t agree with them.
8
SPEAKER_00
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.
8
SPEAKER_00
And I just think you re killing mental patients in vans and all that.
8
SPEAKER_00
That was all bad.
8
SPEAKER_00
It s a bad look, Adolf.
8
SPEAKER_00
It can go without saying that you don t agree with this person and you re not platforming them to signal boost their
8
SPEAKER_00
their views, you re just trying to, if they re sufficiently evil, you can go into it very much as an anthropologist would.
8
SPEAKER_00
You just want to understand the nature of evil, right?
8
SPEAKER_00
You just want to understand this phenomenon, like how is this person who they are, right?
8
SPEAKER_00
And that strikes me as a intellectually interesting and morally necessary thing to do, right?
8
SPEAKER_00
So yes, I think you always interview Hitler,
8
SPEAKER_00
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait,
8
SPEAKER_00
then there s a question of whether you can undermine him while pushing back against him in that interview.
8
SPEAKER_00
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,
8
SPEAKER_00
I m gonna be able to take the wind out of their sails at all, right?
8
SPEAKER_00
So it s like, for whatever, either because an asymmetric advantage, because I just know that they can do something within the span of an hour that I can t correct for.
8
SPEAKER_00
It s like they can light many small fires and it just takes too much time to put them out.
8
SPEAKER_01
That s more like on the topic of vaccines, for example, having a debate on the efficacy of vaccines.
8
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
8
SPEAKER_00
It s not that I don t think sunlight is usually the best disinfectant.
8
SPEAKER_00
I think it is.
8
SPEAKER_00
You know, even these asymmetries aside, I mean, there are, it is true that a person can always make a mess faster than you can clean it up, right?
8
SPEAKER_00
But still, there are debates worth having, even given that limitation.
8
SPEAKER_00
And they re the right people to have those specific debates.
8
SPEAKER_00
And there s certain topics where, you know, I ll debate someone just because
8
SPEAKER_00
I m the right person for the job and it doesn t matter how messy they re gonna be.
8
SPEAKER_00
It s just worth it because I can make my points land at least to the right part of the audience.
8
SPEAKER_01
So some of it is just your own skill and competence and also interest in preparing correctly?
8
SPEAKER_00
Well, yeah, yeah, and the nature of the subject matter.
8
SPEAKER_00
But there are other people who just by default I would say, well, there s no reason to give this guy a platform.
8
SPEAKER_00
And there are also people who are so confabulatory that
8
SPEAKER_00
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 gonna be a net negative for the cause of truth no matter how good you are.
8
SPEAKER_00
So like for instance, I think
8
SPEAKER_00
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.
8
SPEAKER_00
He ll get 20 sentences out, each of which contains more lies than the last, and
8
SPEAKER_00
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.
8
SPEAKER_00
I mean, he ll just make shit up.
8
SPEAKER_00
Or make shit up and then weave it in with half-truths and micro-truths that give some semblance of credibility to somebody out there.
8
SPEAKER_00
I mean, apparently millions of people out there.
8
SPEAKER_00
And there s just no way to untangle that in real time with him.
8
SPEAKER_01
I have noticed that you have an allergic reaction to confabularitization.
8
SPEAKER_00
Confabulation.
8
SPEAKER_00
Confabulation.
8
SPEAKER_01
That if somebody says something a little micro untruth, it really stops your brain.
8
SPEAKER_00
Here I m not talking about micro untruths, I m just talking about making up things out of whole cloth.
8
SPEAKER_00
If someone says something, well what about,
8
SPEAKER_00
And then the thing they put at the end of that sentence is just a set of pseudofacts, right, that you can t possibly authenticate or not in the span of that conversation.
8
SPEAKER_00
They will, you know, whether it s about UFOs or anything else, right, they will seem to make you look like an ignoramus when, in fact, everything they re saying is specious, right, whether they know it or not.
8
SPEAKER_00
I mean, there s some people who are just crazy.
8
SPEAKER_00
There s some people who are,
8
SPEAKER_00
who are just bullshitting and they re not even tracking whether it s true, it just feels good, and then some people are consciously lying about things.
8
SPEAKER_01
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?
8
SPEAKER_00
Well, yeah, but the thing is, I mean, the
8
SPEAKER_00
The place I m familiar with doing this and not doing this is on specific conspiracies like 9-11 truth.
8
SPEAKER_00
Because of what 9-11 did to my intellectual life, it sent me down a path for the better part of a decade.
8
SPEAKER_00
I became a critic of religion.
8
SPEAKER_00
I don t know if I was ever going to be a critic of religion, but it happened to be in my wheelhouse because I had spent so much time studying religion on my own, and I was also very interested in the underlying spiritual concerns of every religion.
8
SPEAKER_00
And so I was
9
SPEAKER_00
is I devoted more than a full decade of my life to just, what is real here?
9
SPEAKER_00
What is possible?
9
SPEAKER_00
What is the nature of subjective reality and how does it relate to reality at large?
9
SPEAKER_00
And is there anything to, who was someone like Jesus or Buddha and are these people frauds or are these just myths or is there really,
9
SPEAKER_00
a continuum of insight to be had here that is interesting.
9
SPEAKER_00
So I spent a lot of time on that question through the full decade of my 20s.
9
SPEAKER_01
And that was launched in part by 9-11 truth or?
9
SPEAKER_00
No, but then when 9-11 happened, I had spent all this time reading religious books, empathically understanding the motivations of religious people,
9
SPEAKER_00
right, knowing just how fully certain people believe what they say they believe, right?
9
SPEAKER_00
So I took religious convictions very seriously.
9
SPEAKER_00
And then people started flying planes into our buildings.
9
SPEAKER_00
So I knew that there was something to be said about that.
9
SPEAKER_00
Allegedly.
9
SPEAKER_00
The core doctrines of Islam, exactly.
9
SPEAKER_00
So I went down, so that became my wheelhouse for a time, you know, terrorism and jihadism and related topics.
9
SPEAKER_00
And so the 9-11 truth conspiracy thing kept, you know, getting aimed at me.
9
SPEAKER_00
And the question was, well, do I wanna debate these people, right?
9
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, Alex Jones, perhaps.
9
SPEAKER_00
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.
9
SPEAKER_00
And privately, I had some very long debates with people who, you know, one person in my family went way down that rabbit hole.
9
SPEAKER_00
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.
9
SPEAKER_00
And so I went back and forth for years on that topic in private with people.
9
SPEAKER_00
But I could see the structure of the conspiracy.
9
SPEAKER_00
I could see the nature of how,
9
SPEAKER_00
of how impossible it was to play whack-a-mole sufficiently well so as to convince anyone of anything who was not seeing the
9
SPEAKER_00
the problematic structure of that way of thinking.
9
SPEAKER_00
I mean, it s not actually a thesis.
9
SPEAKER_00
It s a proliferation of anomalies that you can t actually connect all the dots that are being pointed to.
9
SPEAKER_00
They don t connect in a coherent way.
9
SPEAKER_00
They re incompatible theses, and their incompatibility is not being acknowledged.
9
SPEAKER_00
But they re running this algorithm of things are never what they seem.
9
SPEAKER_00
There s always malicious conspirators doing things perfectly.
9
SPEAKER_00
We see evidence of human incompetence everywhere else.
9
SPEAKER_00
No one can tie their shoes expertly anywhere else, but over here,
9
SPEAKER_00
people are perfectly competent, they re perfectly concealing, thousands of people are collaborating, inexplicably, 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,
9
SPEAKER_00
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,
9
SPEAKER_00
Okay, well, but what do you make of the fact that all those F-16s were flown 800 miles out to sea on the morning of 9-11 doing an exercise that hadn t even been scheduled for that day, but it was, and now all of these, I dimly recall some thesis of that kind, but I m just making these things up now, right?
9
SPEAKER_00
So like that detail hadn t even been scheduled for that day, it was inexplicably run that day.
9
SPEAKER_00
How long would it take to track that down, right?
9
SPEAKER_00
The idea that this is anomalous, like there was a F-16 exercise run, and it wasn t even supposed to be run that day, right?
9
SPEAKER_00
Someone like Alex Jones, their speech pattern is to pack as much of that stuff in as possible at the highest velocity that a person can speak.
9
SPEAKER_00
And unless you re knocking down each one of those things,
9
SPEAKER_00
to that audience, you appear to just be uninformed.
9
SPEAKER_00
You appear to just not be, wait a minute, he didn t know about the F-16s?
9
SPEAKER_00
He doesn t know about Project Mockingbird?
9
SPEAKER_00
You haven t heard about Project Mockingbird?
9
SPEAKER_00
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.
9
SPEAKER_00
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,
9
SPEAKER_00
But someone like Brett is swimming in a sea of misinformation on social media, 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?
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to actually run anything to ground, right?
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SPEAKER_00
You have to actually do the work, journalistically and scientifically, and run it to ground, right?
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So for some of these questions, you actually have to be a statistician to say, okay, they used the wrong statistics in this experiment, right?
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SPEAKER_00
Now, yes, we could take all the time to do that, or we could, at every stage along the way,
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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 masks or not wear masks.
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And I completely agree that that broke down
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unacceptably over the last few years.
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But I think that s largely, social media and blogs and the efforts of podcasters and sub-stack writers were not just a response to that, I think it was a symptom of that and a cause of that, right?
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And I think we re living in an environment where
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People, we ve basically, we have trained ourselves not to be able to agree about facts on any topic, no matter how urgent, right?
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What s flying in our sky, you know?
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What is, you know, what is, what s happening in Ukraine?
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Is Putin just denazifying Ukraine?
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SPEAKER_00
I mean, like, there are people who we respect who are spending time down that particular rabbit hole, like this is,
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This is, you know, maybe there are a lot of Nazis in Ukraine and that s the real problem, right?
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SPEAKER_00
Maybe Putin s not the bad actor here, right?
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SPEAKER_00
How much time do I have to spend?
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empathizing with Putin to the point of thinking, well, maybe Putin s got a point and it s like, what about the polonium and the nerve agents and the killing of journalists and the, you know, Navalny and like, does that count?
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Well, no, listen, I m not paying so much attention to that because I m following all these interesting people on Twitter and they did give me some pro-Putin material here.
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And there is a, there are some Nazis in Ukraine.
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It s not like there are no Nazis in Ukraine.
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How am I going to weight these things?
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I think people are being driven crazy by Twitter.
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Yeah.
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But you re kind of speaking to conspiracy theories that pollute everything.
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But every example you gave is kind of a bad faith style of conversation.
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But it s not necessarily knowingly bad faith by the people who are worried about Ukrainian Nazis.
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I mean, they re some of the same people.
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They re the same people who are worried about
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Ivermectin got suppressed.
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Ivermectin is really a panacea, but it got suppressed because no one could make billions on it.
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It s literally, in many cases, the same people and the same efforts to unearth those facts.
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SPEAKER_01
You re saying it s very difficult to have conversations with those kinds of people.
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What about a conversation with Trump himself?
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Would you do a podcast with Trump?
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SPEAKER_00
No, I don t think so.
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I don t think I d be learning anything about him.
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It s like with Hitler, and I m not comparing Trump to Hitler, but- Klipsch guy, here s your chance.
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You got this one.
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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.
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I think Trump is
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among the most superficial people we have ever laid eyes on, right?
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SPEAKER_00
Like he is in public view, right?
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And I m sure there s some distance between who he is in private and who he is in public, but it s not gonna be the kind of distance that s gonna blow my mind.
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And I think, so I think the liability of, so for instance, I think Joe Rogan was very wise not to have Trump on his podcast.
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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 gonna make Trump seem cool to a whole new, you know, a potentially new cohort of his massive audience, right?
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I mean, they would have had a lot of laughs.
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Trump s funny.
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The entertainment value of things is so influential
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I mean, it was that one debate where Trump got a massive laugh on his line, only Rosie O Donnell, right?
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The truth is we re living in a political system where if you can get a big laugh during a political debate, you win.
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It doesn t matter who you are.
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That s the level of, 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,
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you know, a threat of nuclear war or anything else, it s, we re monkeys, right?
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And we like to laugh.
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Well, because you brought up Joe.
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He s somebody like you I look up to.
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I ve learned a lot from him because I think who he is privately as a human being, also his, he s kind of the voice of curiosity to me.
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He inspired me that, so unending open-minded curiosity, much like you are the voice of reason.
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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.
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SPEAKER_01
Any chance you talk to Joe again and reinvigorate your friendship?
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, well, I reached out to him privately when I saw that.
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Did you use the power of love?
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SPEAKER_00
Joe knows I love him and consider him a friend, so there s no issue there.
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He also knows I ll be happy to do his podcast when we get that together.
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I ve got no policy of not talking to Joe or not doing his podcast.
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I think we got a little sideways along these same lines where we ve talked about Brett and Elon and other people.
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SPEAKER_00
It was never to that degree with Joe because...
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Joe s in a very different lane, right?
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And consciously so.
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I mean, Joe is a stand-up 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.
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SPEAKER_00
I mean, he s, again, it s a super wide variety of people.
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He ll talk about anything, and he can always pull the ripcord, saying, you know, I don t know what the fuck I m saying, I m a comic, I m stoned, we just drank too much, right?
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SPEAKER_00
Like, it s very entertaining, it s all in, you know, to my eye, it s all in good faith, I think Joe is an extraordinarily ethical, good person.
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Also doesn t use Twitter, doesn t really use Twitter.
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Right, yeah, yeah.
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The crucial difference, though, is that because he is
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an entertainer first.
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I mean, I m not saying he s not smart and doesn t understand things.
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I mean, what s potentially confusing is he s very smart and he s also very informed.
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His full-time job is taught, you know, when he s not doing stand-up or doing color commentary for the UFC,
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SPEAKER_00
full-time job is talking to lots of very smart people at great length.
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So he s created the Joe Rogan University for himself, and he s gotten a lot of information crammed into his head.
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SPEAKER_00
So it s not that he s uninformed, but he
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can always, when he feels that he s uninformed, or when it turns out he was wrong about something, he can always pull the ripcord and say, I m just a comic, we were stoned, it was fun, don t take medical advice from me, I don t play a doctor on the internet.
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I can t quite do that.
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Right?
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You can t quite do that.
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We re in different lanes.
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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, you know, the universities and medical journals.
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SPEAKER_00
And it s not true, but that would be the perception.
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And as a counterpoint to a lot of what s being said on Joe s podcast or, you know, certainly Brett s podcast on these topics, I can see how they would form that opinion.
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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 can only keep that bright shining object in view, right?
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SPEAKER_00
So there s nothing that Candace Owens has said about wokeness that I haven t said about wokeness insofar as she s speaking rationally about wokeness.
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But
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we have to be able to keep multiple things in view, right?
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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.
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And many people took half of the problem.
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in recent years.
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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.
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SPEAKER_00
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.
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Audience capture s 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.
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And when I noticed that I had a lot of people in my audience who didn t like my criticizing Trump,
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I really leaned into it, and when I noticed that a lot of the other cohort in my audience didn t like me criticizing the far left and wokeness, they 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 gonna lose those parts of my audience.
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There are people who have created,
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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.
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And I worry about, Brett would consider this a totally invidious,
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ad hominem thing to say, but I really do worry that that s happened to Brett.
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SPEAKER_00
I think, I cannot explain how you do 100, 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 100 podcasts in a row on COVID, right?
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SPEAKER_01
It s just, it makes no sense.
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Do you think, in part, audience capture can explain that?
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SPEAKER_00
I absolutely think it can, yeah.
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SPEAKER_01
Do you, like for example,
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SPEAKER_01
Do you feel pressure to not admit that you made a mistake on COVID or made a mistake on Trump?
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SPEAKER_01
I m not saying you feel that way, but do you feel this pressure?
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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.
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SPEAKER_00
I mean, again, the people who think I m wrong about any of these topics are gonna think, okay, you re just not admitting that you re wrong, but now we re having a dispute about specific facts.
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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.
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I mean, things have flipped.
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Certain things have flipped upside down.
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The question is, was I wrong?
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So here s the cartoon version of it, but this is something I said probably 18 months ago, and it s still true.
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SPEAKER_00
You know, when I saw what Brett was doing on COVID, let s call it two years ago...
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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.
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His reasoning is still flawed right now.
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His facts still suck right now.
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And his confidence is unjustified now.
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That was true then, that will always be true then.
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SPEAKER_00
And not much has changed for me to revisit any of my time points along the way.
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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, right?
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SPEAKER_00
I wouldn t know what I was gonna do, and I would be doing more research about
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SPEAKER_00
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-grained way, and they just want one blanket admonition to the entire population, just take the shot, you idiots.
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I view that largely as a result, a panicked response to the misinformation explosion that happened and the populist resistance animated by misinformation that just made it impossible to get anyone to cooperate.
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Part of it is, again, a pendulum swing in the wrong direction.
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somewhat analogous to the woke response to Trump and the Trumpist response to woke, right?
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SPEAKER_00
So there s, a lot of people have just gotten pushed around for bad reasons, but understandable reasons.
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But yes, it s, 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,
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SPEAKER_00
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?
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SPEAKER_00
He s written a book on COVID.
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SPEAKER_00
His network effects are his wheelhouse, both as an MD and as a sociologist.
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SPEAKER_00
There was a lot that we believed we knew about the efficacy of closing schools during pandemics, right, during the Spanish flu pandemic and others, right?
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SPEAKER_00
But there s a lot we didn t know about COVID.
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SPEAKER_00
We didn t know how negligible the effects would be on kids compared to older people.
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SPEAKER_01
We didn t know, like, so- My problem, I really enjoyed your conversation with Arctopo, but also didn t.
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SPEAKER_01
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 could be explained by him being exhausted by being constantly attacked by conspiracy theory, like anti-vaxxers.
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To me, the same thing happens with people that
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start drifting to being right-wing, is to get attacked so much by the left, they become almost irrational and arrogant in their beliefs.
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SPEAKER_01
And I felt your conversation with Erick Topol did not sufficiently empathize with people that have skepticism, but also did not sufficiently communicate uncertainty we have.
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SPEAKER_01
So many of the decisions you made, many of the things you were talking about,
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we re kinda saying there s a lot of uncertainty, but this is the best thing we could do now.
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SPEAKER_00
Well, it was a forced choice.
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SPEAKER_00
You re gonna get COVID.
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SPEAKER_00
Do you wanna be vaccinated when you get it?
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SPEAKER_00
That was always, in my view, an easy choice.
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SPEAKER_00
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.
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SPEAKER_00
Let s talk about that.
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SPEAKER_00
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.
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SPEAKER_00
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.
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SPEAKER_01
But I think there s a way to communicate with humility about the uncertainty of things that would increase the vaccination rate.
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SPEAKER_00
I do believe that it is rational and sometimes effective
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SPEAKER_00
to signal impatience with certain bad ideas, right?
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SPEAKER_00
And certain conspiracy theories and certain forms of misinformation.
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SPEAKER_00
I think so.
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SPEAKER_00
I just think it makes you look like a douchebag most times.
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SPEAKER_00
Well, I mean, certain people are persuadable, certain people are not persuadable, but...
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SPEAKER_00
It s... No, because there s not enough... It s the opportunity cost.
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SPEAKER_00
Not everything can be given a patient hearing.
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SPEAKER_00
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.
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SPEAKER_00
when they re obviously crazy, or they re obviously half crazy.
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SPEAKER_00
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, right?
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SPEAKER_00
And the truth is, I think I m one of those people on the topic of COVID, right?
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SPEAKER_00
It s never that I felt, listen, I know exactly what s going on here.
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SPEAKER_00
I know these mRNA vaccines are safe.
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SPEAKER_00
I know exactly how to run a lockdown.
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SPEAKER_00
No, this is a situation where you want the actual pilots to fly the plane, right?
10
SPEAKER_00
We needed experts who we could trust.
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SPEAKER_00
And insofar as our experts got captured by all manner of things, I mean, some of them got captured by Trump.
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SPEAKER_00
Some of them were made to look ridiculous just standing next to Trump while he was bloviating about, you know, whatever, you know, it s just gonna go away, there s just 15 people.
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SPEAKER_00
you know, there s 15 people in a cruise ship and it s just going to go away, there s going to be no problem.
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SPEAKER_00
Or it s like when he said he, you know, many of these doctors think I understand this better than them, they re just amazed at how I understand this.
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SPEAKER_00
And you ve got doctors, real doctors, the heads of the CDC and NIH standing around just ashen-faced while he s talking, you know.
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SPEAKER_00
All of this was deeply corrupting of the public communication of science.
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SPEAKER_00
And then again, I ve banged on about the
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depredations of wokeness.
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SPEAKER_00
The woke thing was a disaster, right?
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SPEAKER_00
Still is a disaster.
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SPEAKER_00
But it doesn t mean that... I mean, but the thing is, there s a big difference between me and Brett in this case.
10
SPEAKER_00
I didn t do 100 podcasts on COVID.
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SPEAKER_00
I did like two podcasts on COVID.
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SPEAKER_00
The measure of my concern about COVID can be measured in how many podcasts I did on it, right?
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SPEAKER_00
It s like, once we had a sense of how to live with COVID,
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SPEAKER_00
I was just living with COVID, right?
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SPEAKER_00
Like, okay, get vaxxed or don t get vaxxed.
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SPEAKER_00
Wear a mask or don t wear a mask.
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SPEAKER_00
Travel or don t travel.
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SPEAKER_00
Like you ve got a few things to decide, but my kids were stuck at home on iPads for too long.
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SPEAKER_00
I didn t agree with that.
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SPEAKER_00
It was obviously not functional.
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SPEAKER_00
I criticized that on the margins, but there was not much to do about it.
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SPEAKER_00
But the thing I didn t do is make this my life and just browbeat people with one message or another.
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SPEAKER_00
we need a public health regime where we can trust what competent people are saying to us about what medicines are safe to take.
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SPEAKER_00
And in the absence of that, craziness is gonna, even in the presence of that, craziness is gonna proliferate, given the tools we ve built.
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SPEAKER_00
But in the absence of that, it s gonna proliferate for understandable reasons.
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SPEAKER_00
And that s gonna, it s not gonna be good next time when something orders of magnitude more dangerous hits us.
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SPEAKER_00
And that s,
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SPEAKER_00
And so far as I think about this issue, I think much more about next time than this time.
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SPEAKER_01
Before this COVID thing, you and Brett had some good conversations.
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SPEAKER_01
I would say we re friends.
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SPEAKER_01
What do you admire most about Brett outside of all the criticism we ve had about this COVID topic?
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SPEAKER_00
Well, I think Brett is very smart and he s a very ethical person who wants good things for the world.
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SPEAKER_00
I mean, I have no reason to doubt that.
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SPEAKER_00
So the fact that we re crosswise on this issue does not mean that I think he s a bad person.
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SPEAKER_00
I mean, the thing that worried me about what he was doing
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SPEAKER_00
and this was true of Joe, and this was true of Elon, this was 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.
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SPEAKER_00
And I did worry that, yeah, people were making decisions on the basis of the information that was getting shared there.
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SPEAKER_00
And that s why I was,
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I think fairly circumspect.
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SPEAKER_00
I just said, okay, give me 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?
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SPEAKER_00
I don t have any more to say about this.
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SPEAKER_00
I m not an expert on COVID.
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SPEAKER_00
I m not an expert on the safety of mRNA vaccines.
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SPEAKER_00
If something changes so as to become newsworthy, then maybe I ll do a podcast.
10
SPEAKER_00
I just did a podcast on the lab leak.
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SPEAKER_00
I was never skeptical of the lab leak hypothesis.
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SPEAKER_00
Brett was very early on saying, this is a lab leak, at a point where my only position was, who cares if it s a lab leak?
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SPEAKER_00
The thing we have to get straight is what do we do given the nature of this pandemic?
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SPEAKER_01
But also we should say that you ve actually stated that it is a possibility.
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SPEAKER_00
Oh yeah.
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SPEAKER_01
You just said it doesn t quite matter.
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SPEAKER_00
The time to figure that out, now I ve actually, I have had my podcast guest,
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SPEAKER_00
on this topic changed my view of this because, you know, one of the guests, Alina Chan, made the point that, you know, actually the best time to figure out the origin of this is immediately, right?
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SPEAKER_00
Because then you lose touch with the evidence.
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SPEAKER_00
And I hadn t really been thinking about that.
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SPEAKER_00
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.
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SPEAKER_00
I ve always felt that it didn t matter for two reasons.
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SPEAKER_00
One is we had the genome of the virus and we could design, we re very quickly design, immediately designing vaccines against that genome.
10
SPEAKER_00
And that s what we had to do.
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SPEAKER_00
And then we had to figure out how to vaccinate and to mitigate and to develop treatments and all of that.
10
SPEAKER_00
So the origin story didn t matter.
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SPEAKER_00
Generically speaking, either origin story was politically inflammatory and made the Chinese look bad, right?
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SPEAKER_00
And the Chinese response to this looked bad, whatever the origin story, right?
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SPEAKER_00
They re not cooperating.
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SPEAKER_00
They re letting 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, what do you think because for lab leak to my eye is
10
SPEAKER_00
The lab leak could happen to anyone, right?
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SPEAKER_00
All these advanced countries are running these dangerous labs.
10
SPEAKER_00
That s a practice that we should be worried about in general.
10
SPEAKER_00
We know lab leaks are a problem.
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SPEAKER_00
There have been multiple lab leaks of even worse things that haven t gotten out of hand in this way, but worse pathogens.
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SPEAKER_00
We re wise to be worried about this, and on some level, it could happen to anyone, right?
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SPEAKER_00
The wet market makes them look like barbarians living in another century.
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SPEAKER_00
Like, you gotta clean up those wet markets.
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SPEAKER_00
Like, what are you doing putting a bat on top of a pangolin on top of a duck?
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SPEAKER_00
It s like, get your shit together.
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SPEAKER_00
So like, if anything, the wet market makes them look worse, in my view.
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SPEAKER_00
Now, I m sure that what they actually did to
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conceal a lab leak, if it was a lab leak, all of that s going to look odious.
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Do you think we ll ever get to the bottom of that?
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I mean, one of the big negative
10
SPEAKER_01
I would say failures of Anthony Fauci and so on is to be transparent and clear and just a good communicator about gain-and-function research, the dangers of that, why it s a useful way of research, but it s also dangerous.
10
SPEAKER_01
Just being transparent about that as opposed to just coming off really shady.
10
SPEAKER_01
Of course, the conspiracy theorists and the politicians are not helping, but this just created a giant mess.
10
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, no, I would agree.
10
SPEAKER_00
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
10
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giving a straightforward account of what we do and why we do it.
10
SPEAKER_00
So yeah, I think it looked shady, it played shady, and it probably was shady.
10
SPEAKER_00
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.
10
SPEAKER_00
And insofar as I judge myself adequate to have an opinion on this,
10
SPEAKER_00
I think it should be banned, right?
10
SPEAKER_00
Probably a podcast I ll do if you or somebody else doesn t do it in the meantime.
10
SPEAKER_00
I would like a virologist to defend it against a virologist who would criticize it.
10
SPEAKER_00
Forget about just the gain-of-function research.
10
SPEAKER_00
I don t even understand virus hunting at this point.
10
SPEAKER_00
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 zoonotically to us.
10
SPEAKER_00
Why do that when we can sequence in a day and make vaccines in a weekend?
10
SPEAKER_01
What kind of head start do you think you re getting?
10
SPEAKER_01
That s a surprising new thing, how quickly you can develop a vaccine.
10
SPEAKER_01
Exactly.
10
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Yeah, that s really interesting.
10
SPEAKER_01
But the shadiness around LabLeak.
10
SPEAKER_00
I think the point I didn t make about Brett s style of engaging in this issue is people are using the fact that he was early on LabLeak
10
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to suggest that he was right about ivermectin and about mRNA vaccines and all the rest.
11
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None of that connects.
11
SPEAKER_00
And it was possible to be falsely confident.
11
SPEAKER_00
You shouldn t have been confident about LabLeak.
11
SPEAKER_00
No one should have been confident about LabLeak early, even if it turns out to be LabLeak, right?
11
SPEAKER_00
It was always plausible.
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It was never definite.
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SPEAKER_00
It still isn t definite.
11
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Zoonotic is also quite plausible.
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It certainly was super plausible then.
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Both are politically uncomfortable.
11
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Both at the time were inflammatory.
11
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to be banging on about when we were trying to secure some kind of cooperation from the Chinese, right?
11
SPEAKER_00
So there s a time for these things, and it s possible to be right by accident, right?
11
SPEAKER_00
Your reasoning, the style of reasoning matters whether you re right or not, you know?
11
SPEAKER_00
It s like, because your style of reasoning is dictating what you re going to do on the next topic.
11
SPEAKER_01
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 start to get into policy.
11
SPEAKER_01
It s really- Yeah, it s just trade-offs, yeah.
11
SPEAKER_01
Like transmissibility of the virus.
11
SPEAKER_01
Sure, just knowing if 65% of the population gets vaccinated, what effect would that have?
11
SPEAKER_01
Just even knowing those things, just modeling all those things.
11
SPEAKER_01
Given all the other incentives, I mean, Pfizer, I don t know what to think.
11
SPEAKER_00
But you had the CEO of Pfizer on your podcast.
11
SPEAKER_00
Did you leave that conversation feeling like this is a person who is consciously
11
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reaping windfall profits on a dangerous vaccine and putting everyone at intolerable risk?
11
SPEAKER_00
Or do you think this person, did you think this person was making a good faith attempt to save lives and had no, no bad, no taint of bad incentives?
11
SPEAKER_00
or something.
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SPEAKER_01
The thing I sensed and I felt in part, it was a failure on my part.
11
SPEAKER_01
But I sensed that I was talking to a politician.
11
SPEAKER_01
So it s not thinking of, there was malevolence there, or benevolence.
11
SPEAKER_01
There was a- He just had a job to do.
11
SPEAKER_01
He put on a suit, and I was talking to a suit, not a human being.
11
SPEAKER_01
Now, he said that his son was a big fan of the podcast, which is why he wanted to do it.
11
SPEAKER_01
So I thought I would be talking to a human being.
11
SPEAKER_01
And I asked challenging questions, what I thought the internet thinks otherwise.
11
SPEAKER_01
Every single question in that interview
11
SPEAKER_01
was a challenging one, but it wasn t grilling, which is what people seem to want to do with pharmaceutical companies.
11
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There s a deep distrust of pharmaceutical companies.
11
SPEAKER_00
What s the alternative?
11
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I totally get that windfall profits at a time of public health emergency looks bad.
11
SPEAKER_00
It is a bad look, right?
11
SPEAKER_00
What do, 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?
11
SPEAKER_00
It s like, well, what do we want to encourage and who do we want to get rich?
11
SPEAKER_00
I mean, so like the person who cures cancer,
11
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Do we want that person to get rich or not?
11
SPEAKER_00
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?
11
SPEAKER_00
What are we trying to do?
11
SPEAKER_01
I think it s a very gray area.
11
SPEAKER_01
So what we want is the person who declares that they have a cure for cancer to have authenticity and transparency.
11
SPEAKER_01
I think we re good now as a population smelling bullshit.
11
SPEAKER_01
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 and PR people, that they are, you just smell bullshit.
11
SPEAKER_01
You re not talking to a real human.
11
SPEAKER_01
It just feels like none of it is transparent to us as a public.
11
SPEAKER_01
So like this whole,
11
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a talking point that Pfizer s only interested in helping people just doesn t ring true, even though it very well could be true.
11
SPEAKER_01
It s the same thing with Bill Gates, who seems to be, at scale, helping a huge amount of people in the world.
11
SPEAKER_01
And yet, there s something about the way he delivers that message where people are like, this seems suspicious.
11
SPEAKER_01
What s happening underneath this?
11
SPEAKER_01
There s certain kinds of communication styles that seem to be more,
11
SPEAKER_01
serve as better catalysts for conspiracy theories.
11
SPEAKER_01
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.
11
SPEAKER_01
But also at the same time, there seems to need to be more transparency.
11
SPEAKER_01
And plus, like regulation, that actually makes sense, versus it seems like pharmaceutical companies are susceptible to corruption.
11
SPEAKER_00
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 doing it for good, and they re non-psychopaths trying to get good things done and trying to solve hard problems, and they re not trying to get rich.
11
SPEAKER_00
I mean, many of the people are, it s like,
11
SPEAKER_00
Bad incentives are 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.
11
SPEAKER_00
It s not that there are that many bad people.
11
SPEAKER_00
Yes, it makes the truly bad people that much more remarkable and worth paying attention to,
11
SPEAKER_00
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.
11
SPEAKER_01
You ve had, and I hope still have, a friendship with Elon Musk, especially over the topic of AI.
11
SPEAKER_01
You have a lot of interesting ideas that you both share, concerns that you both share.
11
SPEAKER_01
Well, let me first ask, what do you admire most about Elon?
11
SPEAKER_00
Well, you know, I ve had a lot of fun with Elon.
11
SPEAKER_00
I like Elon a lot.
11
SPEAKER_00
I mean, Elon, I knew as a friend, I like a lot, and...
11
SPEAKER_00
uh you know obviously you know it s it s not going to surprise anyone i mean he s he s done and he s continuing to do amazing things and i think he s um uh you know i think if many of his aspirations are realized the world will be a much better place i think it s it s just it s amazing to see what he s built and what he s attempted to build and what he may yet build and
11
SPEAKER_00
So with Tesla, with SpaceX, with- Yeah, no, I m a fan of almost all of that.
11
SPEAKER_00
I mean, there are wrinkles to a lot of that, or some of that.
11
SPEAKER_01
All humans are full of wrinkles.
11
SPEAKER_00
there s something very Trumpian about how he s acting on Twitter.
11
SPEAKER_00
I mean, Twitter, I think Twitter s, he doesn t, he thinks Twitter s great.
11
SPEAKER_00
He bought the place because he thinks it s so great.
11
SPEAKER_00
I think Twitter s driving him crazy, right?
11
SPEAKER_00
I think he s needlessly complicating his life and harming his reputation and creating a lot of noise and harming a lot of other people.
11
SPEAKER_00
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.
11
SPEAKER_00
I mean, that was not,
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SPEAKER_00
Again, I remain agnostic as to whether or not he can improve the platform.
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SPEAKER_00
It was how he was personally behaving on Twitter, not just toward me, but toward the world.
11
SPEAKER_00
I think when you forward an article about Nancy Pelosi s husband being attacked, not as he was by some lunatic, but that it s just some gay tryst gone awry, that s not what it seems, and you link to a
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SPEAKER_00
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?
11
SPEAKER_00
And it was having its effect.
11
SPEAKER_00
And it matters that he was signal boosting it in front of 130 million people.
11
SPEAKER_00
And so it is with saying that you re, you know, you re
11
SPEAKER_00
your former employee, Yoel Roth, is a pedophile, right?
11
SPEAKER_00
I mean, it s like that has real consequences.
11
SPEAKER_00
It appeared to be complete bullshit, and now this guy s getting inundated with death threats, right?
11
SPEAKER_00
And Elon, all of that s totally predictable.
11
SPEAKER_00
And so he s behaving quite recklessly.
11
SPEAKER_00
And there s a long list of things like that that he s done on Twitter.
11
SPEAKER_00
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 a very adolescent relationship to real problems in our society.
11
SPEAKER_00
And so my problem with how he s behaved is that he s,
11
SPEAKER_00
He s purported to touch real issues by turns, like, okay, do I give the satellites to Ukraine or not?
11
SPEAKER_00
Do I minimize their use of them or not?
11
SPEAKER_00
Should I publicly worry about World War III or not, right?
11
SPEAKER_00
He s doing this shit on Twitter, right?
11
SPEAKER_00
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.
11
SPEAKER_00
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
11
SPEAKER_00
You get banned for, I mean, are you a free speech absolutist if you can t let a swastika show up?
11
SPEAKER_00
I m not even sure that s an enforceable terms of service, right?
11
SPEAKER_00
There are moments to use swastikas that are not conveying hate and not raising the risk of violence.
11
SPEAKER_00
Clip that.
11
SPEAKER_00
But so much of what he s doing, given that he s, again, scale matters.
11
SPEAKER_00
He s doing this in front of 130 million people.
11
SPEAKER_00
That s very different than a million people, and that s very different than 100,000 people.
11
SPEAKER_00
So when I went off the tracks with Elon, he was doing this about COVID, and again, this was a situation where I tried to privately mitigate a friend s behavior, and it didn t work out very well.
11
SPEAKER_01
Did you try to correct him, sort of highlighting things he might be wrong on?
11
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
11
SPEAKER_01
Or did you use the Lex Power Love method?
11
SPEAKER_01
I should write like a pamphlet
11
SPEAKER_00
Well, no, but it was totally coming from a place of love because I was concerned about his reputation.
11
SPEAKER_00
I was concerned about what he... I mean, there was a twofold concern.
11
SPEAKER_00
I could see what was happening with the tweet.
11
SPEAKER_00
I mean, he d had this original tweet that was, I think it was, panic over COVID is dumb or something like that, right?
11
SPEAKER_00
And this is way... This is in March.
11
SPEAKER_00
It s early March 2020.
11
SPEAKER_01
Oh, super early days.
11
SPEAKER_00
Super early.
11
SPEAKER_00
When nobody knew anything, but we saw what was happening in Italy.
11
SPEAKER_00
It was totally kicking off.
11
SPEAKER_01
God, that was a wild time.
11
SPEAKER_00
That s when the toilet paper- Wild, it was totally wild.
11
SPEAKER_00
But that became the most influential tweet on Twitter for that week.
11
SPEAKER_00
I mean, it had more engagement than any other tweet, more than any crazy thing Trump was tweeting.
11
SPEAKER_00
I mean, it went off, again, it was just a nuclear bomb of information.
11
SPEAKER_00
And I could see that people were responding to it like,
11
SPEAKER_00
wait a minute, okay, here s this genius technologist who must have inside information about everything, right?
11
SPEAKER_00
Surely he knows something that is not on the surface about this pandemic.
11
SPEAKER_00
And they re reading, they were reading into it a lot of information that I knew wasn t there, right?
11
SPEAKER_00
And at the time, I didn t even, I didn t think he had any reason to be suggesting that.
11
SPEAKER_00
I think he was just firing off a tweet, right?
11
SPEAKER_00
So I reached out to him in private, and I mean, because it was a private,
11
SPEAKER_00
text conversation.
11
SPEAKER_00
I won t talk about the details, but I m just saying 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 reached out in private and tried to help, genuinely help, because it was just...
11
SPEAKER_00
I thought it was harmful in every sense because it was being misinterpreted and it s like, okay, you can say that panic over anything is dumb, fine, but this was not how this was landing.
11
SPEAKER_00
This was like non-issue conspiracy, there s going to be no COVID in the US, it s going to peter out, it s just going to become a cold.
11
SPEAKER_00
I mean, that s how this was getting received.
11
SPEAKER_00
Whereas at that moment, it was absolutely obvious how big a deal this was gonna be, or that it was gonna, at minimum, going to be a big deal.
11
SPEAKER_01
I don t know if it was obvious, but it was obvious there was a significant probability that it could be a big deal.
11
SPEAKER_01
I remember in March, it wasn t unclear how big, because there were still stories of it, like it s probably going to, the big concern, the hospitals might overfill, but it s gonna die out in two months or something.
11
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, we didn t know, but there was no way we weren t going to have
11
SPEAKER_00
tens of thousands of deaths at a minimum at that point.
11
SPEAKER_00
And it was totally rational to be worried about hundreds of thousands.
11
SPEAKER_00
And when Nicholas Christakis came on my podcast very early, he predicted quite confidently that we would have about a million people dead in the U.S., right?
11
SPEAKER_00
that didn t seem, you know, it was, you know, I think appropriately hedged, but I mean, it was still, it was just like, okay, it s just gonna, you just look at the, we re just kind of riding this exponential and we re, and it s gonna be, you know, it d be very surprising not to have that order of magnitude and not something much, much less.
11
SPEAKER_00
And so anyway, I mean, again, to close the story on Elon,
11
SPEAKER_00
I could see how this was being received, and I tried to get him to walk that back, and then we had a fairly long and detailed exchange on this issue.
11
SPEAKER_00
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 um and then there are other relationships where
11
SPEAKER_00
But again, that s an example where taking the time didn t work, right, privately.
11
SPEAKER_00
There are other relationships where I thought, okay, this is just gonna be more trouble than it s worth, and I just ignored it.
11
SPEAKER_00
And there s a lot of that.
11
SPEAKER_00
And again, I m not comfortable with how this is all netted out, because I don t know if... Frankly, I m not comfortable with how much time in this conversation we ve spent talking about these specific people.
11
SPEAKER_00
Like, what good is it
11
SPEAKER_00
for me to talk about Elon or Brett or any of these people in public.
11
SPEAKER_01
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.
11
SPEAKER_01
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.
11
SPEAKER_01
Like a normal debate.
11
SPEAKER_00
But there s no, there is no, Elon and I shouldn t be debating COVID.
11
SPEAKER_01
You should be.
11
SPEAKER_01
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.
11
SPEAKER_01
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.
11
SPEAKER_01
That s what everybody was doing.
11
SPEAKER_00
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...
11
SPEAKER_00
certain things were not debatable, right?
11
SPEAKER_00
It was absolutely clear where this was going.
11
SPEAKER_00
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?
11
SPEAKER_00
The train had come off the tracks in Italy.
11
SPEAKER_00
We knew we weren t going to seal our borders
12
SPEAKER_00
There were already cases known to many of us personally in the U.S.
12
SPEAKER_00
at that point.
12
SPEAKER_00
He was operating by a very different logic that I couldn t engage with.
12
SPEAKER_01
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, like- 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.
12
SPEAKER_00
It broke down very early at this is, you know,
12
SPEAKER_00
There s nothing to talk about here.
12
SPEAKER_00
It s like either there s a water bottle on the table or there isn t, right?
12
SPEAKER_01
Well, technically, there s only one fourth of a water bottle.
12
SPEAKER_01
So what defines a water bottle?
12
SPEAKER_01
Is it the water inside the water bottle or is it the water bottle?
12
SPEAKER_01
What I m giving you is an example of it s worth a conversation.
12
SPEAKER_00
This is difficult because we had an exchange in private and I want to honor not exposing the details of it, but the details convinced me that there was not a follow-up conversation on that topic.
12
SPEAKER_00
On this topic.
12
SPEAKER_01
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
12
SPEAKER_01
artificial intelligence, you ve had great public and private conversations about this topic.
12
SPEAKER_00
And it seems like- Yeah, and Elon was very formative in my taking that issue seriously.
12
SPEAKER_00
I mean, he and I went to that initial conference in Puerto Rico together, and it was only because
12
SPEAKER_00
he was going and I found out about it through him and I just wrote his coattails to it, you know, that I got dropped in that side of the pool to hear about these concerns at that point.
12
SPEAKER_01
It would be interesting to hear how is your concern
12
SPEAKER_01
evolved with the coming out of Chad GPT 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.
12
SPEAKER_01
There s two questions.
12
SPEAKER_01
One, how s your concern in terms of AGI and superintelligence evolved?
12
SPEAKER_01
And how impressed are you with Chad GPT as a student of the human mind and mind in general?
12
SPEAKER_00
Well, my concern about AGI is unchanged.
12
SPEAKER_00
So I did a, 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.
12
SPEAKER_01
Basically, that once superintelligence is achieved,
12
SPEAKER_01
There s a takeoff, it becomes exponentially smarter, and in a matter of time, we re ants and they re gods.
12
SPEAKER_00
Well yeah, unless we find some way of permanently tethering
12
SPEAKER_00
a super-intelligent, self-improving AI to our value system.
12
SPEAKER_00
And I don t believe anyone has figured out how to do that, or whether that s even possible in principle.
12
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I know people like Stuart Russell, who I just had on my podcast, are trying.
12
SPEAKER_00
Oh, really?
12
SPEAKER_01
Have you released it yet?
12
SPEAKER_00
I haven t released it yet, yeah.
12
SPEAKER_00
Oh, great, that s great.
12
SPEAKER_00
He s been on a previous podcast, but we just recorded this week.
12
SPEAKER_01
Because you haven t done an AI podcast in a while, so that s great.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, yeah, so I just assumed it.
12
SPEAKER_01
He s a good person to talk about alignment with.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so Stuart, I mean, Stuart has been probably more than anyone my guru on this topic.
12
SPEAKER_00
I mean, like just reading his book and doing, I think I ve done two podcasts with him at this point.
12
SPEAKER_01
I think it s called The Control Problem or something like that.
12
SPEAKER_00
His book is human compatible.
12
SPEAKER_01
Human compatible, yeah.
12
SPEAKER_00
He talks about the control problem.
12
SPEAKER_00
And yeah, so I just think the idea that we can define a value function
12
SPEAKER_00
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.
12
SPEAKER_00
I think that s a tall order, and I think there are many more ways, there must be many more ways of designing superintelligence that is not aligned in that way, and is not ever approximating our values in that way.
12
SPEAKER_00
So Stuart s idea, to put it in a very simple way, is that
12
SPEAKER_00
He thinks you don t want to specify the value function up front.
12
SPEAKER_00
You don t want to imagine you could ever write the code in such a way as to admit of no loophole.
12
SPEAKER_00
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.
12
SPEAKER_00
It s always interested in
12
SPEAKER_00
us saying, oh, no, no, that s not what we want, that s not what we intend, stop doing that.
12
SPEAKER_00
No matter how smart it gets, all it wants to do is more perfectly approximate human values.
12
SPEAKER_00
I think there are a lot of problems with that at a high level.
12
SPEAKER_00
I m not a computer scientist, so I m sure there are many problems at a low level that I don t understand.
12
SPEAKER_01
Like how to force a human into the loop always, no matter what.
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SPEAKER_00
There s that and like what humans get a vote and just what is, you know, what do humans value and what is the difference between what we say we value and our revealed preferences, which, I mean, if you just, 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
12
SPEAKER_00
driving ourselves crazy with twitter and living perpetually on the brink of nuclear war and you know just watching you know hot girls in yoga pants on tiktok again and again and again it s like when you re saying that is not this is this is all revealed preference and it s what is an ai to make of that right and what should it optimize like so a part of this is also stewart s observation that
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SPEAKER_00
One of the insidious things about the YouTube algorithm is it s not that it just caters to our preferences.
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SPEAKER_00
It actually begins to change us in ways so as to make us more predictable.
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SPEAKER_00
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.
12
SPEAKER_00
So the main concern is that
12
SPEAKER_00
most of the people in the field seem not to be taking intelligence seriously.
12
SPEAKER_00
As they design more and more intelligent machines, and as they profess to want to design true AGI, they re not, again, they re not spending the time that Stewart is spending trying to figure out how to do this safely, above all.
12
SPEAKER_00
They re just assuming that these,
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SPEAKER_00
these problems are gonna solve themselves as we make that final stride into the end zone, or they re saying very, you know, Pollyanna-ish things like, you know, an AI would never form a motive to harm human, like, why would it ever form a motive to be malicious toward humanity, right, unless we put that motive in there, right?
12
SPEAKER_00
And that s not the concern.
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SPEAKER_00
The concern is that in the presence of
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SPEAKER_00
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, right?
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SPEAKER_00
It s analogous to what we do to
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SPEAKER_00
every other species on Earth.
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SPEAKER_00
I mean, you and I don t consciously form the intention to harm insects on a daily basis, but there are many things we could intend to do that would, in fact, harm insects because, you know, you decide to repave your driveway or whatever you re doing.
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SPEAKER_00
You re just not taking the interest of insects into account because they re so far beneath you in terms of your cognitive horizons.
12
SPEAKER_00
So 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.
12
SPEAKER_00
There s no reason to believe that we re near the summit of intelligence.
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SPEAKER_00
And you can define, maybe there s some forms of intelligence for which this is not true,
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SPEAKER_00
for many relevant forms, like the top 100 things we care about cognitively.
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SPEAKER_00
I think there s every reason to believe that many of those things, most of those things,
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SPEAKER_00
are a lot like chess or Go, where once the machines get better than we are, they re gonna stay better than we are, although they re, I don t know if you caught the recent thing with Go, where this actually came out of Stewart s lab.
12
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, yeah.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_01
One time a human beat a machine.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, they found a hack for that.
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SPEAKER_00
But anyway, ultimately, there s gonna be no looking back, and then the question is,
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SPEAKER_00
what do we do in relationship to these systems that are more competent than we are in every relevant respect?
12
SPEAKER_00
Because it will be a relationship.
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SPEAKER_00
The people who think we re just gonna figure this all out without thinking about it in advance, the solutions are just gonna find themselves, seem not to be taking
12
SPEAKER_00
the prospect of really creating autonomous superintelligence seriously.
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SPEAKER_00
Like, what does that mean?
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SPEAKER_00
It s every bit as independent and ungovernable, ultimately,
12
SPEAKER_00
as us having created, I mean, just imagine if we created a race of people that were 10 times smarter than all of us.
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SPEAKER_00
Like, how would we live with those people?
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SPEAKER_00
They re 10 times smarter than us, right?
12
SPEAKER_00
Like, they begin to talk about things we don t understand.
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SPEAKER_00
They begin to want things we don t understand.
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SPEAKER_00
They begin to view us as obstacles to them, so they re solving those problems or gratifying those desires.
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SPEAKER_00
We become the chickens or the monkeys in their presence.
12
SPEAKER_00
And I think that
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SPEAKER_00
But for some amazing solution of the sort that Stuart is imagining, that we could somehow anchor their reward function permanently, no matter how intelligent scales, I think it s really worth worrying about this.
12
SPEAKER_00
I do buy the sci-fi
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SPEAKER_00
that this is an existential risk if we don t do it well.
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SPEAKER_01
I worry that we don t notice it.
12
SPEAKER_01
I m deeply impressed with Chad GPT, and I m worried that it will become super intelligent.
12
SPEAKER_01
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.
12
SPEAKER_01
that there s a superintelligent system that s controlling our behavior.
12
SPEAKER_00
Well, I think that s true even before, far before superintelligence, even before general intelligence.
12
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I think just the narrow intelligence of these algorithms and of what something like, you know, Chad GPT can do, you know,
12
SPEAKER_00
I mean, it s just far.
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SPEAKER_00
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 of,
12
SPEAKER_01
on any facts, it s, yeah, it s super scary, and it was, it s... Do you think it s a giant leap in terms of the development towards AGI, Chad GPT, or we still, is this just an impressive little toolbox?
12
SPEAKER_01
So, like, when do you think the singularity s coming?
12
SPEAKER_01
Or is it T, it doesn t matter if it s eventually?
12
SPEAKER_00
I have no intuitions on that front apart from the fact that if we continue to make progress, it will come.
12
SPEAKER_00
So it s just, you just have to assume we continue to make progress.
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SPEAKER_00
There s only two assumptions.
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SPEAKER_00
You have to assume substrate independence.
12
SPEAKER_00
So there s no reason why this can t be done in silico.
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SPEAKER_00
It s just, we can build arbitrarily intelligent
12
SPEAKER_00
There s nothing magical about having this done in the wetware of our own brains.
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SPEAKER_00
I think that is true and I think that s scientifically parsimonious to think that that s true.
12
SPEAKER_00
And then you just have to assume we re going to keep making progress.
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SPEAKER_00
It doesn t have to be any special rate of progress.
12
SPEAKER_00
It doesn t have to be Moore s law.
12
SPEAKER_00
it can just be we just keep going.
12
SPEAKER_00
At a certain point we re going to be in relationship to minds, leaving consciousness aside.
12
SPEAKER_00
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, but leaving consciousness aside,
12
SPEAKER_00
they re gonna be more competent than we are.
12
SPEAKER_00
And then that s like the aliens have landed.
12
SPEAKER_00
That s literally, that s an encounter with, again, leaving aside the possibility that something like Stuart s path is actually available to us.
12
SPEAKER_00
But it is hard to picture
12
SPEAKER_00
if what we mean by intelligence, all things considered, and it s truly general, if that scales and
12
SPEAKER_00
you know, begins to build upon itself, how you maintain that perfect, slavish devotion until the end of time in those systems.
12
SPEAKER_00
The tether to humans?
12
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
12
SPEAKER_01
I think my gut says that that tether is not, there s a lot of ways to do it.
12
SPEAKER_01
So it s not this increasingly impossible problem.
12
SPEAKER_00
So I have no, 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.
12
SPEAKER_01
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.
12
SPEAKER_01
So even Chad GPT is just trained on human data.
12
SPEAKER_00
Right.
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SPEAKER_01
I don t see where the takeoff happens where you completely go above human wisdom.
12
SPEAKER_01
The current impressive aspect of Chad GPT is that s using collective intelligence of all of us.
12
SPEAKER_00
From what I glean, again, from people who know much more about this than I do,
12
SPEAKER_00
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, right?
12
SPEAKER_00
They re not generalizing in the way they need to.
12
SPEAKER_00
They re certainly not learning like human children.
12
SPEAKER_00
And so there s brittle and strange ways.
12
SPEAKER_00
It s not to say that the human path is the only path, and maybe we might learn better lessons by ignoring the way brains work.
12
SPEAKER_00
We know that they don t generalize and use abstraction the way we do.
12
SPEAKER_00
And so, they have strange holes in their competence.
12
SPEAKER_01
But the size of the holes is shrinking every time.
12
SPEAKER_01
And that s, so the intuition starts to slowly fall apart.
12
SPEAKER_01
The intuition is like, surely it can t be this simple to achieve superintelligence.
12
SPEAKER_01
But it s becoming simpler and simpler.
12
SPEAKER_01
So I don t know.
12
SPEAKER_01
The progress is quite incredible.
12
SPEAKER_01
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.
12
SPEAKER_01
So we re going to be living through some very interesting times.
13
SPEAKER_01
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.
13
SPEAKER_01
Can you clarify the nature of this contact?
13
SPEAKER_01
That you were contacted by?
13
SPEAKER_00
I ve got very little to say on this.
13
SPEAKER_00
He has much more to say.
13
SPEAKER_00
I think he went down this rabbit hole further than I did.
13
SPEAKER_00
which wouldn t surprise anyone.
13
SPEAKER_00
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.
13
SPEAKER_00
It wasn t clear to me who this person was or how this person got my cell phone number.
13
SPEAKER_00
They didn t seem, it didn t seem like we were getting punked.
13
SPEAKER_00
I mean, the person seemed credible to me.
13
SPEAKER_01
And they were talking to you about the release of different videos on UFOs.
13
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and this is when there was a flurry of activity around this.
13
SPEAKER_00
There was a big New Yorker article on UFOs, and there was rumors of congressional hearings, I think, coming, and the videos that were being debunked or not.
13
SPEAKER_00
And so this person contacted both of us, I think around the same time.
13
SPEAKER_00
And I think he might ve contacted Rogan or other, Eric is just the only person I ve spoken to about it, I think, who I know was contacted.
13
SPEAKER_00
And the,
13
SPEAKER_00
What happened is the person kept writing a check that he didn t cash.
13
SPEAKER_00
He kept saying, okay, next week I m gonna, I understand this is sounding spooky and you have no reason to really trust me, but next week I m gonna put you on a Zoom call with people who you will recognize and they re gonna be former heads of the CIA and people who just, you re gonna, within five seconds of being on the Zoom call, you ll know this is not a hoax.
13
SPEAKER_00
And I said, great, just let me know, just send me the Zoom link, right?
13
SPEAKER_00
And I went, that happened maybe three times, you know, there was just one phone conversation, and then it was just texts, you know, just a bunch of texts.
13
SPEAKER_00
And I think Eric spent more time with this person, and I m not, I haven t spoken to him about it, I know he spoke about it publicly, but...
13
SPEAKER_00
So 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.
13
SPEAKER_01
So you made a comment, which is interesting, that you ran the, which I really appreciate, that you ran the thought experiment of saying, okay, maybe we do have alien spacecraft, or just the thought experiment the aliens did visit, and then this very kind of nihilistic, sad thought that it wouldn t matter.
13
SPEAKER_01
it wouldn t affect your life.
13
SPEAKER_01
Can you explain that?
13
SPEAKER_00
Well, no, I think many people noticed this.
13
SPEAKER_00
I mean, this was a sign of how crazy the news cycle was at that point, right?
13
SPEAKER_00
It s 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.
13
SPEAKER_00
It s like I was amazed to notice in myself
13
SPEAKER_00
that I wasn t more interested in figuring out what was going on.
13
SPEAKER_00
And I considered, okay, wait a minute.
13
SPEAKER_00
If this is true, this is the biggest story in anyone s lifetime.
13
SPEAKER_00
I mean, contact with alien intelligence is by definition the biggest story in anyone s lifetime, in human history.
13
SPEAKER_00
Why isn t this just,
13
SPEAKER_00
totally captivating.
13
SPEAKER_00
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.
13
SPEAKER_00
And I view that, I mean, one as a, to some degree, an understandable defense mechanism against the bogus claims that have been made about this kind of thing in the past.
13
SPEAKER_00
you know, the general sense is probably bullshit or it probably has some explanation that is purely terrestrial and not surprising.
13
SPEAKER_00
And there is somebody who...
13
SPEAKER_00
What s his name?
13
SPEAKER_00
Mick West, I forget.
13
SPEAKER_00
Is he a YouTuber?
13
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, Mick West.
13
SPEAKER_00
He debunks stuff.
13
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I mean, I have since seen some of those videos.
13
SPEAKER_00
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.
13
SPEAKER_00
And I m surprised we don t haven t seen more of that like there was a 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 you know his his video only had like 50 000 views on it or whatever um but again it seemed like a fairly credible debunking I haven t seen debunkings of his debunkings but
13
SPEAKER_01
I think there is, but he s basically saying that there is possible explanations for it.
13
SPEAKER_01
And usually in these kinds of contexts, if there s a possible explanation, even if it seems unlikely, it s going to be more likely than an alien civilization visiting us.
13
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so the extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence principle, which I think is generally true.
13
SPEAKER_01
Well, with aliens, I think generally, I think there should be some humility about what they would look like when they show up.
13
SPEAKER_01
I tend to think they re already here.
13
SPEAKER_00
The amazing thing about this AI conversation, though, is that we re talking about a circumstance where
13
SPEAKER_00
we would be designing the aliens.
13
SPEAKER_00
And there s every reason to believe that eventually this is gonna happen.
13
SPEAKER_00
So I m not at all skeptical about the coming reality of the aliens, that we re gonna build them.
13
SPEAKER_01
Now here s the thing, does this apply to when superintelligence shows up?
13
SPEAKER_01
Will this be trending on Twitter for a day?
13
SPEAKER_01
And then we ll go on to complain about something Sam Harris once again said in his podcast the next day?
13
SPEAKER_01
You tend to trend on Twitter, even though you re not on Twitter, which is great.
13
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I haven t noticed.
13
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I did notice when I was on, but... You have this concern about...
13
SPEAKER_01
AGI basically, same kind of thing, that we would just look the other way.
13
SPEAKER_01
Is there something about this time where even like World War III, which has been throwing around very casually, concerningly so, even that, the news cycle wipes that away?
13
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
13
SPEAKER_00
Well, I think we have this
13
SPEAKER_00
this general problem that we can t make certain information, even unequivocally certain information, emotionally salient.
13
SPEAKER_00
Like we respond quite readily to certain things.
13
SPEAKER_00
I mean, as we talked about, we respond to the,
13
SPEAKER_00
The little girl who fell down a well, I mean, that just, that gets 100% of our emotional resources.
13
SPEAKER_00
But the abstract probability of nuclear war, right, even a high probability, even just, even an intolerable probability, even if we put it at
13
SPEAKER_00
30%, right?
13
SPEAKER_00
It s just like that s 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, and it s just 24 hours a day.
13
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I think people who... This is pre-Ukraine.
13
SPEAKER_00
I think the people who have made it their business to
13
SPEAKER_00
you know, professionally to think about the risk of nuclear war and to mitigate it, you know, people like Graham Allison or William Perry or...
13
SPEAKER_00
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%.
13
SPEAKER_00
They were living with this sword of Damocles over our heads.
13
SPEAKER_00
Now, you might wonder whether anyone can have reliable intuitions about the probability of that kind of thing.
13
SPEAKER_00
The status quo is truly alarming.
13
SPEAKER_00
We ve got ICBMs on, leave aside smaller exchanges and tactical nukes and how we could have a world war based on incremental changes.
13
SPEAKER_00
We ve got
13
SPEAKER_00
the biggest bombs aimed at the biggest cities in both directions.
13
SPEAKER_00
And it s old technology, right?
13
SPEAKER_00
And it s, you know, and it s vulnerable to some lunatic deciding to launch or misreading, you know, bad data.
13
SPEAKER_00
And we know we ve been saved from nuclear war.
13
SPEAKER_00
I think at least twice by, you know, Soviet submarine commanders deciding, I m not going to pass this up the chain of command, right?
13
SPEAKER_00
It s like, this is, this is almost certainly an error.
13
SPEAKER_00
And it turns out it was an error.
13
SPEAKER_00
And it s like, and we need people
13
SPEAKER_00
I mean, in that particular case, like he saw, I think it was five, what seemed like five missiles launched from the US to Russia.
13
SPEAKER_00
And he reasoned if America was going to engage in a first strike, they d launch more than five missiles, right?
13
SPEAKER_00
So this has to be fictional.
13
SPEAKER_00
And then he waited long enough to decide that it was fictional.
13
SPEAKER_00
The probability of a nuclear war happening by mistake or some other species of inadvertence, you know, misunderstanding, technical malfunction, that s intolerable.
13
SPEAKER_00
Forget about the intentional use of it by people who are, you know,
13
SPEAKER_00
driven crazy by some ideology.
13
SPEAKER_01
And more and more technologies enable a kind of scale of destruction.
13
SPEAKER_00
And misinformation plays into this picture in a way that is especially scary.
13
SPEAKER_00
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.
13
SPEAKER_01
But that could change the nature of truth and then we, that might change the engine we have for skepticism.
13
SPEAKER_01
The more you sharpen it, the more you have deep fakes.
13
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and we might have AI and digital watermarks that help us.
13
SPEAKER_00
Maybe we ll not trust any information that hasn t come through specific channels, right?
13
SPEAKER_00
I mean, so in my world,
13
SPEAKER_00
It s like I no longer feel the need to respond to anything other than what I put out in my channels of information.
13
SPEAKER_00
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.
13
SPEAKER_00
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.
13
SPEAKER_00
It s like, unless I put it out, you know, you can t be sure that I actually said it, you know?
13
SPEAKER_00
I mean, it s just... But I don t know what it s like to live like that for all forms of information.
13
SPEAKER_00
And I mean, strangely, I think it may require a
13
SPEAKER_00
a greater siloing of information in the end.
13
SPEAKER_00
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.
13
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, or just knowing that it s gonna be an arms race to authenticate information.
13
SPEAKER_00
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.
13
SPEAKER_00
And again, I don t even know if that s technically possible and maybe whatever the tools
13
SPEAKER_00
available for this will be commodified and the cost will be driven to zero so quickly that everyone will be able to do it.
13
SPEAKER_00
It could be like encryption.
13
SPEAKER_01
And it will be proven and tested most effectively first, of course, as always in porn.
13
SPEAKER_01
which is where most of human innovation technology happens first.
13
SPEAKER_01
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.
13
SPEAKER_01
Will those societies be industrial-based?
13
SPEAKER_01
How will they be governed?
13
SPEAKER_01
How will criminal infractions be dealt with?
13
SPEAKER_01
When you read or watch sci-fi, what comes closest to sounding logical?
13
SPEAKER_01
Do you think about our society beyond Earth?
13
SPEAKER_01
If we colonize Mars, if we colonize space?
13
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, well, I think I have a pretty humbling picture of that.
13
SPEAKER_00
I mean, so, because we re still gonna be the apes that we are.
13
SPEAKER_00
So when you imagine colonizing Mars,
13
SPEAKER_00
you have to imagine a first fist fight on Mars.
13
SPEAKER_00
You have to imagine a first murder on Mars.
13
SPEAKER_00
Also infidelity.
13
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, extramarital affairs on Mars.
13
SPEAKER_00
So it s gonna get really homely and boring really fast, I think.
13
SPEAKER_00
It s like only the spacesuits or the other exigencies of just living in that atmosphere or lack thereof will limit
13
SPEAKER_00
how badly we can behave on Mars.
13
SPEAKER_01
But do you think most of the interaction will be still in meat space versus digital?
13
SPEAKER_01
Do you think there ll be, do you think we re like living through a transformation of a kind where we re going to be doing more and more interaction in digital space?
13
SPEAKER_01
Like everything we ve been complaining about Twitter, is it possible that Twitter s just the early days of a broken system that s actually giving birth to a better working system that s ultimately digital?
13
SPEAKER_00
I think we re going to experience a pendulum swing back into the real world.
13
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I think many of us are experiencing that now anyway.
13
SPEAKER_00
I mean, just wanting to have face-to-face encounters and spend less time on our phones and less time online.
13
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I think maybe everyone isn t going in that direction, but
13
SPEAKER_00
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?
13
SPEAKER_00
And the people who were never, basically, I mean, I know, I have a lot of friends who are never on Twitter.
13
SPEAKER_00
And they actually never understood what I was doing on Twitter.
13
SPEAKER_00
It s like, they just like, it wasn t that they were seeing it and then reacting to it, they just didn t know, it s like,
13
SPEAKER_00
It s like I m not on Reddit either, but I don t spend any time thinking about not being on Reddit, right?
13
SPEAKER_00
It s like I m just not on Reddit.
13
SPEAKER_01
Do you think the pursuit of human happiness is better achieved, more effectively achieved outside of Twitter world?
13
SPEAKER_00
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.
13
SPEAKER_00
And it s just, it became very clear to me that
13
SPEAKER_00
it was an unrewarding use of my attention.
13
SPEAKER_00
Now, it s not to say there isn t some digital platform that s conceivable that would be useful and rewarding, but
13
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Yeah, I mean, we just have, you know, our life is doled out to us in moments, and we re continually solving this riddle of what is gonna suffice to make this moment engaging and meaningful and aligned with who I wanna be now and how I want the future to look, right?
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We have this tension between being in the present and becoming in the future.
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And, you know, it s a seeming paradox.
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Again, it s not really a paradox, but it can seem like... I do think the ground truth for personal well-being is to find a mode of being where you can pay attention to the present moment.
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And this is, you know, meditation by another name.
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you can pay attention to the present moment with sufficient 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.
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Like you can be happy now before anything happens.
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that 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.
14
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So the ability to catch and observe consciousness, that in itself is a source of happiness.
14
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Yeah, without being lost in thought.
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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.
14
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It can even be scary, but it can be...
14
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even being scared is captivating.
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It gets their attention, whatever it is.
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Sebastian Junger wrote a great book about people s experience in war here.
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Strangely, it can be the best experience anyone s ever had because everything, it s like only the moment matters.
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The
14
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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.
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You re not thinking about Twitter.
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It s like you re just fully immersed in the present moment.
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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
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engage the present moment directly, regardless of what s happening.
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You don t need to be in a war.
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You don t need to be having sex.
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You don t need to be on drugs.
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You don t need to be surfing.
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You don t need nothing.
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It doesn t have to be a peak experience.
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It can be completely ordinary, but you can recognize that
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in some basic sense there s only this, and everything else is something you re thinking.
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You re thinking about the past, you re thinking about the future, and thoughts themselves have no substance, right?
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It s fundamentally mysterious that any thought
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ever really commandeers your sense of who you are and makes you anxious or afraid or angry or whatever it is.
14
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And the more you discover that, the half-life of all these negative emotions that blow all of us around get much, much shorter, right?
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SPEAKER_01
And you can literally just, you know, the anger that would have kept you angry for hours or days
14
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lasts, you know, four seconds because you just, the moment it arises, you recognize it and you can get off.
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You can decide, at minimum, you can decide whether it s useful to stay angry at that moment.
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And, you know, obviously it usually isn t.
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And the illusion of free will is one of those thoughts.
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Yeah, it s all just happening, right?
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Like even the mindful and meditative response to this is just happening.
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It s just like even the moments where you recognize or not recognize is just happening.
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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.
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It s just a new way of being.
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in the world.
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Is there a difference between intellectually knowing free will is an illusion and really experiencing it?
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SPEAKER_00
What s the longest you ve been able to experience, escape the illusion of free will?
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Well, it s always obvious to me when I pay attention.
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Whenever I m mindful, the term of jargon in the Buddhist and increasingly outside the Buddhist context is mindfulness, right?
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But there are sort of different levels of mindfulness and there s different
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degrees of insight into this.
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But yes, I mean, what I m calling evidence of lack of free will and lack of, you know, lack of the self.
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I ve got two sides of the same coin.
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There s a sense of being a subject in the middle of experience to whom all experience refers.
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The sense of I, the sense of me.
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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.
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I do think that gets interrupted in ways that get unrecognized.
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I think people are constantly losing the sense of I, they re losing the sense of subject-object distance.
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but they re not recognizing it.
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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.
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And that s just the flip side of the coin of free will.
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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
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That s the false starting point.
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When you find that there s no one in the middle of the boat, 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.
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Again, even when you re doing things, this does not negate the difference between voluntary and involuntary behavior.
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It s like, I can voluntarily reach for this, but when I m paying attention, I m aware that
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everything is just happening, like just the intention to move is just arising, right?
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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 where I lurched for it versus I move slow.
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I mean, I m not
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I can never run the counterfactuals.
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All of this opens the door to an even more disconcerting picture along the same lines, which subsumes this conversation about free will, and it s the question of whether
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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.
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So I mean, what if only the actual is possible?
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What if there was, what if, so we live with this feeling of possibility, we live with the sense that
14
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Let me tell you, so I have two daughters.
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I could have had a third child, right?
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So what does it mean to say that I could have had a third child?
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SPEAKER_01
You don t have kids, I don t think?
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SPEAKER_00
So- Not that I know of.
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SPEAKER_00
Yes.
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SPEAKER_00
So the possibility might be there.
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SPEAKER_00
Right.
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So what do we mean when we say,
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you could have had a child, or you might have a child in the future.
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What is the space in reality?
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What s the relationship between possibility and actuality and reality?
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Is there a reality in which non-actual things are nonetheless real?
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And so we have other categories of non,
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concrete things.
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We have things that don t have spatial, temporal dimension, but they re nonetheless, they nonetheless exist.
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So like, you know, the integers, right?
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So numbers.
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There s a reality, there s an abstract reality to numbers.
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And this is, it s philosophically interesting to think about these things.
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So they re not like, in some sense, they re real,
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And they re not merely invented by us, they re discovered because they have structure that we can t impose upon them, right?
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It s not like, they re not fictional characters like, you know, I mean, Hamlet and Superman also exist in some sense, but they exist at a level of our own fiction and abstraction.
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But it s like, there are true and false statements you can make about Hamlet.
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There are true and false statements you can make about Superman because our fiction, the fictional worlds we ve created have a certain kind of structure.
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But again, this is all abstract.
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It s all abstractable from any of its concrete instantiations.
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It s not just in the comic books and just in the movies.
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It s in our ongoing ideas about these characters.
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But natural numbers or the integers don t,
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function quite that way.
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I mean, they re similar, but they also have a structure that s purely a matter of discovery.
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You can t just make up whether numbers are prime.
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If you give me two integers of a certain size, you mentioned two enormous integers,
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If I were to say, okay, well, between those two integers, there are exactly 11 prime numbers, right?
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That s a very specific claim about which I can be right or wrong, whether or not anyone knows I m right or wrong.
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There s a domain of facts there, but it s an abstract reality that relates in some way that s philosophically interesting, metaphysically interesting to what we call real reality, the spatial temporal order, the physics of things.
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possibility, at least in my view, occupies a different space.
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And this is something, again, my thoughts on this are pretty inchoate, and I think I need to talk to
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a philosopher of physics and or a physicist about how this may interact with things like the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that s an interesting, right, exactly.
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SPEAKER_00
So I wonder if discoveries 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.
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SPEAKER_01
But even, that s just more,
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So if I took that seriously, that s a case of, and the truth is that happens 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 the farther you go in space, right?
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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?
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So, I mean, infinity is just so big that our intuitions of probability completely break down.
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But what I m suggesting is
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maybe probability isn t a thing, right?
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Maybe there s only actuality.
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Maybe there s only what happens, and at every point along the way, our notion of what could ve happened or what might ve happened is just that, it s just a thought about what could ve happened or might ve happened.
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SPEAKER_00
So it s a fundamentally different thing.
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If you can imagine a thing, that doesn t make it real.
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SPEAKER_00
That s where that possibility exists, it s in your imagination.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and possibility itself is a kind of spooky idea because it too has a sort of structure, right?
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So like if I m gonna say, you know, you could have had a daughter, right, last year.
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So we re saying that s possible, but not actual.
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There are things that are true and not true about that daughter.
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It has a kind of structure.
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SPEAKER_00
I feel like there s a lot of fog around that possibility.
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SPEAKER_00
It feels like almost like a useful narrative.
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SPEAKER_01
But what does it mean?
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So like, what does it mean if we say, you know, I just did that, but it s conceivable that I wouldn t have done that, right?
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SPEAKER_01
Like it s possible that I just threw this cap, but I might not have done that.
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SPEAKER_00
So you re taking it very temporally close to the original, like what would appear as a decision.
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whenever we re saying something s possible, but not actual, right?
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Like this thing just happened, but it s conceivable, it s possible that it wouldn t have happened, or that it would have happened differently.
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In what does that possibility consist?
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Where is that?
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For that to be real, for the possibility to be real, what claim are we making about the universe?
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SPEAKER_00
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?
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SPEAKER_01
Right, yeah, I m just extending it beyond human action.
14
SPEAKER_01
Ah, okay.
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This goes to the physics of things.
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This is just everything.
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We re always telling ourselves a story that includes possibility.
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Possibility is really compelling for some reason.
14
SPEAKER_01
Well, yeah, 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
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is completely dependent on this notion of possibility.
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Every regret is based on the sense that something else, I could have done something else, something else could have happened.
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Every disposition to worry about the future is based on the feeling that there s this range of possibilities, it could go either way.
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I mean, whether or not there s such a thing as possibility, 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.
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So if you can do something, just do it.
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And if you can t, your worrying is just causing you to suffer twice over, right?
14
SPEAKER_01
You re going to get the medical procedure next week anyway.
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SPEAKER_01
How much time between now and next week do you want to spend worrying about it?
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SPEAKER_01
The worry doesn t accomplish anything.
14
SPEAKER_00
How much do physicists think about possibility?
14
SPEAKER_01
Well, they think about it in terms of probability more often, but probability just describes
14
SPEAKER_01
And again, this is a place where I might be out of my depth and need to talk to somebody to debunk this, but the- To do therapy with a physicist.
14
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
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But probability, it seems, just describes a pattern of actuality that we ve observed, right?
14
SPEAKER_01
I mean, there are certain things we observe,
14
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And those are the actual things that have happened.
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And we have this additional story about probability.
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I mean, we have the frequency with which things happen, have happened in the past.
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You know, I can flip a fair coin and know, I know in the abstract that I have a belief that in the limit that those flips, those tosses should converge on 50% heads and 50% tails.
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I know I have a story as to why it s not going to be exactly 50% within any arbitrary timeframe.
14
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But in reality, all we ever have are the observed tosses.
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And then we have an additional story that, oh, it came up heads, but it could have come up tails.
14
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Why do we think that about that last toss?
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And what are we claiming is true about the physics of things if we say it could have been otherwise?
14
SPEAKER_00
I think we re claiming that probability is true.
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SPEAKER_00
that just, it allows us to have a nice model about the world.
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SPEAKER_00
It gives us hope about the world.
14
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
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It seems that possibility has to be somewhere to be effective.
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It s a little bit like 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 impose their work on the world, right?
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We see their evidence.
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But they re not reducible to any specific set of instances, right?
14
SPEAKER_01
So there s some structure there, but the structure isn t just a matter of the actual things.
14
SPEAKER_01
We have the actual billiard balls that are banging into each other.
14
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All of that actuality can be explained by what actual things are actually doing.
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SPEAKER_01
But then we have this notion that in addition to that, we have the laws of nature that are explaining this action.
14
SPEAKER_01
But how are the laws of nature an additional thing, in addition to just the actual things that actually affect causality?
15
SPEAKER_02
they are an additional thing, how are they effective if they re not among the actual things that are just actually banging around?
15
SPEAKER_01
And so to some degree- I see.
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Possibly it has to be hiding somewhere for the laws of nature to be- To be possible.
15
SPEAKER_01
For anything to be possible, it has to have- It has to have- A closet somewhere, I m sure, is where all the possibility goes.
15
SPEAKER_02
It has to be attached to something.
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SPEAKER_02
So.
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SPEAKER_01
You don t think many worlds is that.
15
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, well.
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SPEAKER_01
Because many worlds still exist.
15
SPEAKER_02
Well, because we re in this strand of that multiverse.
15
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_02
Right, so it s still, still you have just a local instance of what is actual.
15
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_02
And then if it proliferates elsewhere where you can t be affected by it.
15
SPEAKER_01
Many worlds.
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SPEAKER_01
More actuality.
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SPEAKER_01
You can t really connect with the other.
15
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
15
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
15
SPEAKER_02
And so many worlds are just a statement of basically everything that can happen, happens somewhere.
15
SPEAKER_02
I mean, maybe that s not an entirely kosher formulation of it, but it seems pretty close.
15
SPEAKER_02
But there s whatever happens, right?
15
SPEAKER_02
In fact, relativistically, there s a
15
SPEAKER_02
There s an, you know, Einstein s original notion of a block universe seems to suggest this.
15
SPEAKER_02
And 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.
15
SPEAKER_02
I don t hear it discussed much, but the idea of a block universe is that, you know, space-time exists as a totality.
15
SPEAKER_02
And our sense that we are traveling through space-time
15
SPEAKER_02
where there s a real difference between the past and the future, that that s an illusion of just our, you know, the weird slice we re taking of this larger object.
15
SPEAKER_02
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.
15
SPEAKER_02
And they re just, you know, if we re living in anything like that, then there s no such thing as,
15
SPEAKER_02
possibility, it would seem, is just what is actual.
15
SPEAKER_02
So, as a matter of our experience, moment to moment,
15
SPEAKER_02
I think it s totally compatible with that being true, that there is only what is actual.
15
SPEAKER_02
And that sounds, to the naive ear, that sounds like it would be depressing and disempowering and confining, but it s anything but.
15
SPEAKER_02
It s actually, it s a circumstance of pure discovery.
15
SPEAKER_02
Like you have no idea
15
SPEAKER_02
what s going to happen next, right?
15
SPEAKER_02
You don t know who you re going to be tomorrow.
15
SPEAKER_02
You re only by tendency seeming to resemble yourself from yesterday.
15
SPEAKER_02
I mean, there s way more freedom in all of that than it seems true to many people.
15
SPEAKER_02
And yet the basic insight is that you re not
15
SPEAKER_02
The real freedom is the recognition that you re not in control of anything.
15
SPEAKER_02
Everything is just happening, including your thoughts and intentions and moods.
15
SPEAKER_01
So life is a process of continuous discovery.
15
SPEAKER_02
You re part of the universe.
15
SPEAKER_02
You are just this.
15
SPEAKER_02
It s the miracle that the universe is illuminated to itself, as itself, where you sit.
15
SPEAKER_02
And you re continually discovering what your life is.
15
SPEAKER_02
And then you have this layer at which you re telling yourself a story.
15
SPEAKER_02
that you already know what your life is, and you know exactly who you should be and what s about to happen, or you re struggling to form a confident opinion about all of that.
15
SPEAKER_02
And yet there is this fundamental mystery to everything, even the most familiar experience.
15
SPEAKER_01
We re all NPCs in a most marvelous video game.
15
SPEAKER_02
Maybe, although my sense of gaming does not run as deep as to know what I m committing to.
15
SPEAKER_00
It s a non-playing character.
15
SPEAKER_00
You re more of a Mario Kart guy, I can tell.
15
SPEAKER_02
I was an original video gamer, but it s been a long time since I... I was there for Pong.
15
SPEAKER_02
I remember when I saw the first Pong in a restaurant.
15
SPEAKER_02
I think it was like Benihana s or something, they had a Pong table, and that was an amazing moment.
15
SPEAKER_01
You, Sam Harris, might live from Pong to the invention and deployment of a super intelligent system.
15
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, well, that happened fast, if it happens any time in my lifetime.
15
SPEAKER_01
From Pong to AGI.
15
SPEAKER_01
What kind of things do you do purely for fun that others might consider a waste of time?
15
SPEAKER_02
Purely for fun?
15
SPEAKER_01
because meditation doesn t count, because most people would say that s not a waste of time.
15
SPEAKER_01
Is there something like Pong that s a deeply embarrassing thing you would never admit?
15
SPEAKER_02
I don t think, well, I mean.
15
SPEAKER_02
Once or twice a year, I will play a round of golf, which many people would find embarrassing.
15
SPEAKER_02
They might even find my play embarrassing, but it s fun.
15
SPEAKER_00
Do you find it embarrassing?
15
SPEAKER_02
No.
15
SPEAKER_02
I mean, I love... Golf just takes way too much time, so I can only squander a certain amount of time on it.
15
SPEAKER_02
I do love it.
15
SPEAKER_02
It s a lot of fun.
15
SPEAKER_01
But you have no control over your actual performance.
15
SPEAKER_01
You re ever discovering.
15
SPEAKER_02
I do have control over my mediocre performance, but I don t have enough control as to make it really good.
15
SPEAKER_02
But happily, I m in the perfect spot because I don t invest enough time in it to care how I play.
15
SPEAKER_02
So I just have fun when I play.
15
SPEAKER_01
Well, I hope there ll be a day where you play around golf with the former president, Donald Trump.
15
SPEAKER_02
And I would love to be- I would bet on him if we played golf.
15
SPEAKER_02
I m sure he s a better golfer.
15
SPEAKER_01
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?
15
SPEAKER_01
What s the source of hope for you?
15
SPEAKER_02
Well, it comes back to a few of the things we ve talked about.
15
SPEAKER_02
I know that most people are good and are mostly converging on the same core values, right?
15
SPEAKER_02
It s like we re not surrounded by psychopaths.
15
SPEAKER_02
The thing that finally convinced me to get off Twitter was how different life was seeming through the lens of Twitter.
15
SPEAKER_02
I just got the sense that there s way more psychopaths or effective psychopaths than I realized.
15
SPEAKER_02
And then I thought, okay, this isn t real.
15
SPEAKER_02
This is either a strange context in which actually decent people are behaving like psychopaths, or it s a bot army or something that I don t have to take seriously.
15
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I just think most people, if we can get the incentives right, I think there s no reason why we can t really thrive collectively.
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There s enough wealth to go around, there s enough, you know, there s no...
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there s no effective limit, you know, I mean, again, within the limits of what s physically possible, but we re nowhere near the limit on abundance.
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You know, on this, forget about going to Mars, on this, the one rock, right?
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It s like we could make this place incredibly beautiful and stable if we just did enough work to
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solve some rather longstanding political problems.
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The problem of incentives.
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So to you, the basic characteristics of human nature are such that we ll be okay if the incentives are okay.
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We ll do pretty good.
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I m worried about the asymmetries that, you know, it s easier to break things than to fix them.
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It s easier to light a fire than to put it out.
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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?
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So it s easier, it s like,
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A thousand years ago, it was simply impossible for one person to range the lives of millions, much less billions.
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Now that s getting to be possible.
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So on the assumption that we re always going to have a sufficient number of crazy individuals or
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malevolent individuals, we have to figure out that asymmetry somehow.
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And so there s some cautious exploration of emergent technology that we need to get our head screwed on straight about.
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So like, so gain-of-function research, like just how much do we want to democratize all the relevant technologies there?
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Do we want really, you really want to
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Give everyone the ability to order nucleotides in the mail and give them the blueprints for viruses online because you re a free speech absolutist and you think all PDFs need to be exportable everywhere.
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Many people are confused about my take on free speech because I ve come down on the unpopular side of some of these questions, but my overriding concern is that in many cases I m worried about the free speech of
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the 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?
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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?
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That s your free speech, right?
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That s the side of my free speech concern for Twitter, right?
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It s not that every Nazi has the right to be
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to algorithmic speech on Twitter.
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I think if you own Twitter, you should be, you or the, you know, whether it s just Elon or, you know, in the world where it wasn t Elon, just the people who own Twitter, and the board and the shareholders and the employees, these people need to, should be free to decide what they want to promote or not.
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I view them as publishers more, you know, more than as platforms in the end, and that has other implications.
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But I do worry about this problem of misinformation and algorithmically and otherwise supercharged misinformation.
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And I think, I do think we re at a bottleneck now.
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I mean, I guess it could be the hubris of every present generation to think that their moment is especially important.
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But I do think with the emergence of these technologies,
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or some kind of bottleneck where we really have to figure out how to get this right.
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And if we do get this right, if we figure out how to not drive ourselves crazy by giving people access to all possible information and misinformation at all times, I think, yeah, there s no limit to how happily we could collaborate with billions of creative, fulfilled people.
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It s just... And trillions of robots, some of them sex robots, but that s another topic.
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Robots that are running the right algorithm, whatever that algorithm is.
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whatever you need in your life to make you happy.
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Sam, the first time we talked is one of the huge honors of my life.
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I ve been a fan of yours for a long time.
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The few times you were respectful but critical to me means the world.
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And thank you so much for helping me and caring enough and caring enough about the world and for everything you do.
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But I should say that the few of us that try to put love in the world on Twitter miss you on Twitter.
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Well, enjoy yourselves.
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Don t break anything, kids.
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Have a good party without me.
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Thanks so much.
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Very happy to do this.
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Thanks for the invitation.
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Thank you.
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Great to see you again.
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Thanks for listening to this conversation with Sam Harris.
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To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
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And now, let me leave you with some words from Martin Luther King Jr.
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Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.
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Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.