Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs
嘉宾：Sam Harris
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The following is a conversation with Sam Harris,
his second time on the podcast.
As I said two years ago,
when I first met and spoke with Sam,
he's one of the most influential,
pioneering thinkers of our time.
As the host of the Making Sense podcast,
creator of the Waking Up app,
and the author of many seminal books
on human nature and the human mind,
including The End of Faith,
The Moral Landscape,
Lying,
Free Will,
and Waking Up.
In this conversation,
besides our mutual fascination with AGI and free will,
we do also go deep into controversial,
challenging topics of Donald Trump,
Hunter Biden,
January 6th,
vaccines,
lab leak,
Kanye West,
and several key figures at the center of public discourse,
including Joe Rogan and Elon Musk,
both of whom have been friends of Sam
and have become friends of mine.
Somehow,
in an amazing life trajectory
that I do not deserve in any way,
and in fact believe is probably a figment of my imagination.
And if it's all right,
please allow me to say a few words
about this personal aspect of the conversation,
of discussing Joe,
Elon,
and others.
What's been weighing heavy on my heart
since the beginning of the pandemic,
now three years ago,
is that many people I look to for wisdom in public discourse
stop talking to each other as often,
with respect,
humility,
and love,
when the world needed those kinds of conversations the most.
My hope is that they start talking again.
They start being friends again.
They start noticing the humanity that connects them
that is much deeper than the disagreements that divide them.
So let me take this moment to say,
with humility and honesty,
why I look up to and I'm inspired by Joe, Elon, and Sam.
I think Joe Rogan is important to the world
as a voice of compassionate curiosity
and open-mindedness to ideas,
both radical and mainstream,
sometimes with humor,
sometimes with brutal honesty,
always pushing for more kindness in the world.
I think Elon Musk is important to the world
as an engineer,
leader,
entrepreneur,
and human being who takes on the hardest problems
that face humanity
and refuses to accept the constraints
of conventional thinking
that made the solutions to these problems seem impossible.
I think Sam Harris is important to the world
as a fearless voice
who fights for the pursuit of truth
against growing forces of echo chambers
and audience capture,
taking unpopular perspectives
and defending them with rigor and resilience.
I both celebrate and criticize all three privately,
and they criticize me,
usually more effectively,
for which I always learn a lot and always appreciate.
Most importantly,
there is respect and love for each other as human beings.
The very thing that I think the world needs
most now in a time of division and chaos.
I will continue to try to mend divisions,
to try to understand,
not deride,
to turn the other cheek if needed,
to return hate with love.
Sometimes people criticize me for being naive,
cheesy,
simplistic,
all of that.
I know,
I agree,
but I really am speaking from the heart,
and I'm trying.
This world is too fucking beautiful not to try.
In whatever way I know how.
I love you all.
This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.
To support it,
please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now, dear friends,
here's Sam Harris.
What is more effective
at making a net positive impact on the world,
empathy or reason?
- It depends on what you mean by empathy.
There are two,
at least two kinds of empathy.
There's the cognitive form,
which is,
I would argue even a species of reason.
It's just understanding another person's point of view.
You understand why they're suffering,
or why they're happy,
or what,
you have a theory of mind
about another human being that is accurate.
And so you can navigate
in relationship to them more effectively.
And then there's another layer entirely,
not incompatible with that,
but just distinct,
which is what people often mean by empathy,
which is more a kind of emotional contagion.
Like you feel depressed,
and I begin to feel depressed along with you
because it's contagious.
We're so close,
and I'm so concerned about you,
and your problems become my problems,
and it bleeds through.
Now, I think both of those capacities are very important,
but the emotional contagion piece,
and this is not really my thesis,
this is something I have more or less learned
from Paul Bloom,
the psychologist who wrote a book on this topic
titled "Against Empathy."
The emotional social contagion piece
is a bad guide rather often for ethical behavior
and ethical intuitions.
- Oh boy.
- And I'll give you the clear example of this,
which is we find stories
with a single identifiable protagonist
who we can effortlessly empathize with
far more compelling than data.
So if I tell you,
this is the classic case of the little girl
who falls down a well,
this is somebody's daughter,
you see the parents distraught on television,
you hear her cries from the bottom of the well,
the whole country stops.
I mean, there was an example of this 20, 25 years ago,
I think, where it was just wall to wall on CNN,
this is just the perfect use of CNN.
It was 72 hours or whatever it was of continuous coverage
of just extracting this girl from a well.
So we effortlessly pay attention to that,
we care about it,
we will donate money toward it.
I mean, it's just, it marshals 100% of our compassion
and altruistic impulse.
Whereas if you hear that there's a genocide raging
in some country you've never been to
and never intended to go to,
the numbers don't make a dent
and we find the story boring,
we'll change the channel in the face of a genocide.
It doesn't matter.
And it literally, perversely,
it could be 500,000 little girls
have fallen down wells in that country
and we still don't care.
So it's, you know, many of us have come to believe
that this is a bug rather than a feature
of our moral psychology.
And so empathy plays an unhelpful role there.
So ultimately, I think,
when we're making big decisions about what we should do
and how to mitigate human suffering
and what's worth valuing
and how we should protect those values,
I think reason is the better tool.
But it's not that I would want to dispense
with any part of empathy either.
- Well, there's a lot of dangers to go on there.
But briefly to mention,
you've recently talked about effective altruism
on your podcast.
I think you mentioned some interesting statement,
I'm going to horribly misquote you,
but that you'd rather live in a world,
like it doesn't really make sense,
but you'd rather live in a world
§02Transcript · 07:36–17:26
where you care about maybe your daughter and son
more than 100 people that live across the world,
something like this.
Like where the calculus is not always perfect,
but somehow it makes sense to live in a world
where it's irrational in this way,
and yet empathetic in the way you've been discussing.
- Right, I'm not sure what the right answer is there,
or even whether there is one right answer.
There could be multiple peaks
on this part of the moral landscape.
But so the opposition is between an ethic
that's articulated by someone like the Dalai Lama,
or really any exponent of classic Buddhism,
would say that the ultimate enlightened ethic
is true dispassion with respect to friends and strangers.
The mind of the Buddha would be truly dispassionate,
you would love and care about all people equally.
And by that light, it seems some kind of ethical failing,
or at least a failure to fully actualize
compassion in the limit, or enlightened wisdom in the limit,
to care more, or even much more, about your kids
than the kids of other people,
and to prioritize your energy in that way.
So you spend all this time trying to figure out
how to keep your kids healthy and happy,
and you'll attend to their minutest concerns,
and however superficial.
And again, there's a genocide raging
in Sudan or wherever, and it takes up
less than 1% of your bandwidth.
I'm not sure it would be a better world
if everyone was running the Dalai Lama program there.
I think some prioritization of one's nearest and dearest
ethically might be optimal,
because we'll all be doing that,
and we'll all be doing that in a circumstance
where we have certain norms, and laws,
and other structures that force us
to be dispassionate where that matters.
So when I go to, when my daughter gets sick,
and I have to take her to a hospital,
I really want her to get attention,
and I'm worried about her more than I'm worried
about everyone else in the lobby.
But the truth is, I actually don't want
a totally corrupt hospital.
I don't want a hospital that treats my daughter
better than anyone else in the lobby
because she's my daughter, and I've bribed
the guy at the door, or whatever,
or the guy's a fan of my podcast,
or whatever the thing is.
You don't want starkly corrupt, unfair situations.
And when you sort of get pressed down
the hierarchy of Maslow's needs,
individually and societally,
a bunch of those variables change,
and they change for the worse, understandably.
But yeah, when everyone's corrupt,
and you're in a state of collective emergency,
you've got a lifeboat problem,
you're scrambling to get into the lifeboat,
yeah, then fairness, and norms,
and the other vestiges of civilization
begin to get stripped off.
We can't reason from those emergencies
to normal life.
I mean, in normal life, we want justice,
we want fairness, we're all better off for it,
even when the spotlight of our concern
is focused on the people we know,
the people who are our friends,
the people who are family,
people we have good reason to care about.
We still, by default, want a system
that protects the interests of strangers, too.
And we know that, generally speaking,
and just in game theoretic terms,
we're all gonna tend to be better off
in a fairer system than a corrupt one.
- One of the failure modes of empathy
is our susceptibility to anecdotal data.
Just a good story will get us to not think clearly.
But what about empathy in the context
of just discussing ideas with other people,
and then there's a large number of people,
like in this country, you know, red and blue,
half the population believes certain things
on immigration or on the response to the pandemic
or any kind of controversial issue,
even if the election was fairly executed.
Having an empathy for their worldview,
trying to understand where they're coming from,
not just in the explicit statement of their idea,
but the entirety of like the roots
from which their idea stems,
that kind of empathy while you're discussing ideas.
What is, in your pursuit of truth,
having empathy for the perspective
of a large number of other people
versus raw mathematical reason?
- I think it's important,
but it only takes you so far, right?
It doesn't get you to truth, right?
It's not, truth is not decided by democratic principles,
and certain people believe things
for understandable reasons,
but those reasons are nonetheless bad reasons, right?
They don't scale, they don't generalize,
they're not reasons anyone should adopt for themselves
or respect epistemologically,
and yet their circumstance is understandable
and it's something you can care about, right?
And so, yeah, like, let me just take,
I think there's many examples of this
that you might be thinking of,
but one that comes to mind
is I've been super critical of Trump, obviously,
and I've been super critical of certain people
for endorsing him or not criticizing him
when he really made it patently obvious who he was,
you know, if there had been any doubt initially.
There was no doubt when we have a sitting president
who's not agreeing to a peaceful transfer of power, right?
So I'm critical of all of that,
and yet the fact that many millions of Americans
didn't see what was wrong with Trump
or bought into the, didn't see through his con, right?
I mean, they bought into the idea
that he was a brilliant businessman
who might just be able to change things
because he's so unconventional
and so, you know, his heart is in the right place.
You know, he's really a man of the people,
even though he's a, you know,
gold-plated everything in his life.
They bought the myth somehow of, you know,
largely because they had seen him on television
for almost a decade and a half
pretending to be this genius businessman
who could get things done.
It's understandable to me that many very frustrated people
who have not had their hopes and dreams actualized,
who have been the victims of globalism
and many other, you know, current trends,
it's understandable that they would be confused
and not see the liability of electing
a grossly incompetent, morbidly narcissistic person
into the presidency.
So I don't, so which is to say that I don't blame,
there are many, many millions of people
who I don't necessarily blame for the Trump phenomenon,
but I can nonetheless bemoan the phenomenon
as indicative of, you know,
very bad state of affairs in our society, right?
So there's two levels to it.
I mean, one is I think you have to call a spade a spade
when you're talking about how things actually work
and what things are likely to happen or not,
but then you can recognize that people
have very different life experiences.
And yeah, I mean, I think empathy and, you know,
probably the better word for what I would hope to embody
there is compassion, right?
Like really, you know, to really wish people well,
you know, and to really wish, you know,
strangers well, effortlessly wish them well.
I mean, to realize that there is no opposition between,
in the bottom, there's no real opposition
between selfishness and selflessness
because why is selfishness really takes into account
other people's happiness?
I mean, you know, which do you,
do you want to live in a society where you have everything,
but most other people have nothing?
Or do you want to live in a society where you're surrounded
by happy, creative, self-actualized people
who are having their hopes and dreams realized?
I think it's obvious that the second society is much better,
however much you can guard your good luck.
- But what about having empathy for certain principles
that people believe, for example, the pushback,
the other perspective on this, 'cause you said,
bought the myth of Trump as the great businessman.
There could be a lot of people that are supporters of Trump
who could say that Sam Harris bought the myth
that we have this government of the people, by the people,
that actually represents the people,
as opposed to a bunch of elites
who are running a giant bureaucracy that is corrupt,
that is feeding themselves,
and they're actually not representing the people.
And then here's this chaos agent,
Trump, who speaks off the top of his head.
Yeah, he's flawed in all this number of ways.
He's a more comedian
than he is a presidential type of figure.
And he's actually creating the kind of chaos
that's going to shake up this bureaucracy,
§03Transcript · 17:29–28:06
shake up the elites that are so uncomfortable,
'cause they don't want the world to know
about the game they got running on everybody else.
So that's, you know. - Yeah, yeah.
- That's the kind of perspective that they would take
and say, yeah, yeah, there's these flaws that Trump has,
but this is necessary.
- I agree with the first part.
So I haven't bought the myth that it's,
you know, a truly representative democracy
in the way that we might idealize.
And, you know, on some level,
I mean, this is a different conversation,
but on some level, I'm not even sure
how much I think it should be, right?
I'm not sure we want, in the end,
everyone's opinion given equal weight
about just what we should do about anything.
And I include myself in that.
I mean, there are many topics around which
I don't deserve to have a strong opinion
because I don't know what I'm talking about, right?
Or what I would be talking about if I had a strong opinion.
So, and I think we'll probably get to that,
to some of those topics,
because I've declined to have certain conversations
on my podcast just because I think I'm the wrong person
to have that conversation, right?
And I think it's important to see those bright lines
in one's life and in the moment,
politically and ethically.
So yeah, I think,
so leave aside the viability of democracy.
I'm under no illusions that all of our institutions
are worth preserving precisely as they have been
up until the moment this great orange wrecking ball
came swinging through our lives.
But I just, it was a very bad bet to elect someone
who is grossly incompetent and worse than incompetent,
genuinely malevolent in his selfishness, right?
And this is something we know based on literally decades
of him being in the public eye, right?
He's not a public servant in any normal sense of that term.
And he couldn't possibly give an honest or sane answer
to the question you asked me about empathy and reason
and like, how should we, what should guide us?
I genuinely think he is missing some necessary moral
and psychological tools, right?
And this is, I can feel compassion for him
as a human being 'cause I think having those things
is incredibly important and genuinely loving other people
is incredibly important and knowing what all that's about
is that's really the good stuff in life.
And I think he's missing a lot of that.
But I think we don't wanna promote people
to the highest positions of power in our society
who are far outliers in pathological terms, right?
We want them to be far outliers in the best case
in wisdom and compassion and some of the things you've,
some of the topics you've brought up.
I mean, we want someone to be deeply informed.
We want someone to be unusually curious,
unusually alert to how they may be wrong
or getting things wrong consequentially.
He's none of those things.
And insofar as we're gonna get normal mediocrities
in that role, which I think is often the best
we could expect, let's get normal mediocrities in that role,
not once in a generation narcissists and frauds.
I mean, it's like,
we just take honesty as a single variable, right?
I think you want, yes, it's possible that most politicians
lie at least some of the time.
I don't think that's a good thing.
I think people should be generally honest
even to a fault.
Yes, there are certain circumstances where lying
I think is necessary.
It's kind of on a continuum of self-defense and violence.
So it's like, if you're gonna,
if the Nazis come to your door and ask you
if you've got Anne Frank in the attic,
I think it's okay to lie to them.
But Trump, arguably there's never been a person
that anyone could name in human history
who's lied with that kind of velocity.
I mean, it's just, he was just a blizzard of lies,
great and small, to pointless and effective.
But it's just, it says something fairly alarming
about our society that a person of that character
got promoted.
And so, yes, I have compassion and concern
for half of the society who didn't see it that way.
And that's gonna sound elitist and smug or something
for anyone who's on that side listening to me.
But it's genuine.
I mean, I understand that like, I barely have the,
I'm like one of the luckiest people in the world
and I barely have the bandwidth to pay attention
to half the things I should pay attention to
in order to have an opinion about half the things
we're gonna talk about, right?
So how much less bandwidth is somebody
who's working two jobs or a single mom
who's raising multiple kids, even a single kid?
It's just, it's unimaginable to me
that people have the bandwidth to really track this stuff.
And so then they jump on social media
and they see, they get inundated by misinformation
and they see what their favorite influencer just said.
And now they're worried about vaccines.
And it's just, we're living in an environment
where the information space has become so corrupted
and we've built machines to further corrupt it.
You know, I mean, we've built a business model
for the internet that it further corrupts it.
So it is just, it's chaos in informational terms.
And I don't fault people for being confused
and impatient and at their wits end.
And yes, Trump was an enormous fuck you
to the establishment.
And that was understandable for many reasons.
- To me, Sam Harris, the great Sam Harris
is somebody I've looked up to for a long time
as a beacon of voice of reason.
And there's this meme on the internet,
and I would love you to steel man the case for it
and against, that Trump broke Sam Harris's brain.
That there's something is disproportionately
to the actual impact that Trump had on our society.
He had an impact on the ability of balanced,
calm, rational minds to see the world clearly,
to think clearly.
You being one of the beacons of that.
Is there a degree to which he broke your brain?
Otherwise known as Trump derangements.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- In a medical condition.
- 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 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 in the final moment, not to see how Trump
was so untenable it was to still support someone
who a sitting president who was not committing
to a peaceful transfer of power.
I mean, if that wasn't a bright line for you,
you have been deranged by something.
Because that was one minute to midnight
for our democracy as far as I'm concerned.
And I think it really was but for the integrity
of a few people that we didn't suffer
some real constitutional crisis and real emergency
after January 6th.
I mean, if Mike Pence had caved in
and decided to not certify the election, right?
Literally you can count on two hands
the number of people who held things together
at that moment.
And so it wasn't for want of trying on Trump's part
that we didn't succumb to some real,
truly uncharted catastrophe with our democracy.
So the fact that that didn't happen is not a sign
that those of us who were worried that it was
so close to happening were exaggerating the problem.
I mean, it's like you almost got run over by a car
but you didn't.
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.
And came very close to something truly terrible.
So I think that's where we were
and I think we shouldn't do that again.
So the fact that he's still, he's coming back around
as potentially a viable candidate.
I'm not spending much time thinking about it, frankly,
because I'm waiting for the moment
where it requires some thought.
I mean, it took up,
I don't know how many podcasts I devoted to the topic.
It wasn't that, I mean, it wasn't that many in the end
against the number of podcasts I devoted to other topics.
But there are people who look at Trump
and just find him funny, entertaining,
not especially threatening.
He's like not a, it's just good fun to see somebody
who's like, who's just not taking anything seriously.
And it's just putting a stick in the wheel
of business as usual again and again and again and again.
And they don't really see anything much at stake, right?
It doesn't really matter if we don't support NATO.
It doesn't really matter if he says he trusts Putin
more than our intelligence services.
I mean, none of this, it doesn't matter if he's,
on the one hand, saying that he loves
§04Transcript · 28:09–37:59
the leader of North Korea, and on the other,
threatening, threatens to bomb them back to the Stone Age,
right, on Twitter.
It all can be taken in the spirit
of kind of reality television.
It's like, this is the part of the movie
that's just fun to watch, right?
And I understand that.
I can even inhabit that space for a few minutes at a time.
But there's a deeper concern that we're in the process
of entertaining ourselves to death, right,
that we're just not taking things seriously.
And this is a problem I've had with several other people
we might name who just appear to me
to be goofing around at scale.
And they lack a kind of moral seriousness.
I mean, they're touching big problems
where lives hang in the balance,
but they're just fucking around.
And I think there are really important problems
that we have to get our head straight around.
And we need, you know, it's not to say
that institutions don't become corrupt.
I think they do.
And I think, and I'm quite worried that,
you know, both about the loss of trust in our institutions
and the fact that trust has eroded for good reason, right,
that they have become less trustworthy.
I think, you know, they've become infected by,
you know, political ideologies that are not truth tracking.
I mean, I worry about all of that.
But I just think we need institutions.
We need to rebuild them.
We need experts who are real experts.
We need to value expertise over, you know,
amateurish speculation and conspiracy thinking
and just, you know, and bullshit.
- What kind of amateur speculation
are we doing on this very podcast?
- I'm usually alert to the moments
where I'm just guessing
or where I actually feel like I'm talking
from within my wheelhouse.
And I try to telegraph that a fair amount with people.
So yeah, I mean, but it's not, it's different.
Like, I mean, you can invite someone onto your podcast
who's an expert about something
that you're not an expert about.
And then you, in the process
of getting more informed yourself,
your audience is getting more informed.
You're asking smart questions
and you might be pushing back at the margins,
but you know that when push comes to shove on that topic,
you really don't have a basis to have a strong opinion.
And if you were 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.
But there's a paradox to how we value authority in science
that most people don't understand.
And I think we should at some point unravel that
because it's the basis for a lot of public confusion.
And frankly, it's the basis for a lot of criticism
I've received on these topics,
where people think that I'm against free speech
or I'm an establishment shill,
or it's like, I just think I'm a credentialist.
I just think people with PhDs from Ivy League universities
should run everything.
It's not true, but there's a ton of,
there's a lot to cut through to get to daylight there
because people are very confused
about how we value authority
in the service of rationality generally.
- You've talked about it, but it's just interesting,
the intensity of feeling you have.
You've had this famous phrase about Hunter Biden
and children in the basement.
Can you just revisit this case?
So let me give another perspective
on the situation of January 6th and Trump in general.
It's possible that January 6th and things of that nature
revealed that our democracy is actually pretty fragile.
And that Trump is not a malevolent
and ultra-competent malevolent figure,
but is simply a jokester.
And he just, by creating the chaos,
revealed that it's all pretty fragile.
Because you're a student of history
and there's a lot of people like Vladimir Lenin, Hitler,
who are exceptionally competent at controlling power,
at being executives and taking that power,
controlling the generals,
controlling all the figures involved,
and certainly not tweeting,
but working in the shadows behind the scenes to gain power.
And they did so extremely competently,
and that is how they were able to gain power.
The pushback with Trump, he was doing none of that.
He was creating what he's very good at, creating drama,
sometimes for humor's sake, sometimes for drama's sake,
and simply revealed that our democracy is fragile.
And so he's not this once in a generation horrible figure.
- Once in a generation narcissist.
No, I don't think he's a truly scary,
sinister, Putin-like, or Hitler,
much less Hitler-like figure, not at all.
I mean, he's not ideological.
He doesn't care about anything beyond himself.
So it's not, no, no, he's much less scary
than any really scary totalitarian, right?
I mean, and he's--
- He's more brave in your world than 1984.
- This is what Eric Weinstein never stops badgering me about,
but he's still wrong, Eric.
My analogy for Trump was that he's an evil Chauncey Gardner.
I don't know if you remember the book or the film
being there with Peter Sellers,
but Peter Sellers is this gardener
who really doesn't know anything,
but he gets recognized as this wise man
and gets promoted to immense power in Washington
because he's speaking in these kind of,
in a semblance of wisdom,
he's got these very simple aphorisms,
or what seem to be aphorisms.
He's just talking, all he cares about is gardening.
He's just talking about his garden all the time,
but he'll say something, but yeah, in the spring,
the new shoots will bloom,
and people read into that some kind of genius insight
politically, and so he gets promoted,
and so that's the joke of the film.
For me, Trump has always been someone
like an evil Chauncey Gardner.
He's, it's not to say he's totally,
yes, he has a certain kind of genius.
He's got a genius for creating a spectacle around himself.
Right, he's got a genius for getting the eye of the media
always coming back to him,
but it's only, it's a kind of,
it's a kind of 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 wanna have a reputation for, right?
It's like it's pure, the pure pornography of attention,
right, and he just wants more of it.
I think the truly depressing and genuinely scary thing
was that we have a country that,
at least half of the country,
given how broken our society is in many ways,
we have a country that didn't see anything wrong with that,
bringing someone who obviously doesn't know
what he should know to be president
and who's obviously not a good person, right,
obviously doesn't care about people,
can't even pretend to care about people really, right,
in a credible way.
And so, I mean, if there's a silver lining to this,
it's along the lines you just sketched.
It shows us how vulnerable our system is
to a truly brilliant and sinister figure, right?
I mean, like I think we really dodged a bullet.
Yeah, someone far more competent and conniving
and ideological could have exploited our system
in a way that Trump didn't.
And that's, yeah, so if we plug those holes eventually,
that would be a good thing
and he would have done a good thing for our society, right?
I mean, one of the things we realized,
and I think nobody knew, I mean, I certainly didn't know it
and I didn't hear anyone talk about it,
is how much our system relies on norms rather than laws.
- Yeah, civility almost.
- Yeah, it's just like it's quite possible
that he never did anything illegal, truly illegal.
I mean, I think he probably did a few illegal things,
but like illegal such that he really should be
thrown in jail for it.
At least that remains to be seen.
So all of the chaos, all of the diminishment
of our stature in the world,
all of the just the opportunity costs
of spending years focused on nonsense,
all of that was just norm violations.
All that was just all a matter
of not saying the thing you should say,
but that doesn't mean they're insignificant, right?
It's not that it's like, it's not illegal
for a sitting president to say,
no, I'm not gonna commit to a peaceful transfer of power,
right, we'll wait and see whether I win.
If I win, the election was valid,
if I lose, it was fraudulent, right?
- But aren't those humorous perturbations
to our system of civility such that we know
what the limits are and now we start to think that
§05Transcript · 38:02–47:35
and have these kinds of discussions?
- That wasn't a humorous perturbation
because he did everything he could,
granted he wasn't very competent,
but he did everything he could to try to steal the election.
I mean, the irony is he claimed to have an election stolen
from him all the while doing everything he could to steal it,
declaring it fraudulent in advance,
trying to get the votes to not be counted
as the evening wore on,
knowing that they were gonna be disproportionately
Democrat votes because of the position he took
on mail-in ballots.
I mean, all of it was fairly calculated.
The whole circus of the clown car
that crashed into Four Seasons Landscaping, right,
and you got Rudy Giuliani with his hair dyed
and you got Sidney Powell
and all these grossly incompetent people
lying as freely as they could breathe
about election fraud, right?
And all of these things are getting thrown out
by largely Republican election officials
and Republican judges.
It wasn't for want of trying
that he didn't maintain his power in this country.
He really tried to steal the presidency.
He just was not competent
and the people around him weren't competent.
So that's a good thing
and it's worth not letting that happen again.
- But he wasn't competent
so he didn't do everything he could.
- Well, no, he did everything he could.
He didn't do everything that could have been done
by someone more competent.
- Right, but the tools you have as a president,
you could do a lot of things.
You can declare emergencies, especially during COVID.
You could postpone the election.
You can create military conflict,
that, you know, any kind of reason
to postpone the election.
There's a lot of weird stuff.
- But he tried to do things
and he would have to have done those things
through other people
and there are people who refuse to do those things.
There are people who said they would quit.
They would quit publicly, right?
I mean, you start,
again, there are multiple books written about
the last hours of this presidency
and the details are shocking
in what he tried to do and tried to get others to do
and it's awful, right?
I mean, it's just awful that we were that close
to something,
to a true unraveling of our political process.
I mean, it's the only time in our lifetime
that anything like this has happened
and it's deeply embarrassing, right?
If we're on the world stage.
It's just like, we looked like a banana republic there
for a while and we're the lone superpower.
It's not good, right?
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?
It's all just for the lulz.
There's a nihilism and cynicism to all of that,
which again, in certain people, it's understandable.
Frankly, it's not understandable
if you've got a billion dollars
and you have a compound in Menlo Park or wherever.
It's like, there are people who are cheerleading this stuff
who shouldn't be cheerleading this stuff
who know that they can get on their Gulf Stream
and fly to their compound in New Zealand
if everything goes to shit, right?
So there's a cynicism to all of that
that I think we should be deeply critical of.
- What I'm trying to understand is not,
and analyze, is not the behavior
of this particular human being,
but the effect it had in part on the division between people.
And to me, the degree, the meme of Sam Harris's brain
being broken by Trump represents,
you're like the person I would look to
to bridge the division.
- Well, I don't think there is something profitably
to be said to someone who's truly captivated
by the personality cult of Trumpism, right?
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?
- You don't think so?
- No, I mean, I haven't tried with Candace,
but I've tried with many people
who are in that particular orbit.
I mean, I've had conversations with people
who won't admit that there's anything wrong with Trump,
anything.
- So I'd like to push for the empathy versus reason.
'Cause when you operate in the space of reason, yes,
but I think there's a lot of power in you showing,
in you, Sam Harris, showing that you're willing
to see the good qualities of Trump, publicly showing that.
I think that's the way to win over Candace Owens.
- But he has so few of them.
He has fewer good qualities than virtually anyone
I can name, right?
So he's funny.
I'll grant you that he's funny.
He's a good entertainer.
- There's others.
Look at just policies and actual impacts he had.
- I've admitted that.
No, no, so I've admitted that many of his policies
I agree with, many, many of his policies.
So probably more often than not, at least on balance,
I agreed with his policy that we should take China
seriously as an adversary, right?
And I think, I mean, again, you have to,
there's a lot of fine print to a lot of this
'cause the way he talks about these things
and many of his motives that are obvious
are things that I don't support.
But I mean, take immigration.
I think there's, it's obvious that we should have control
of our borders, right?
Like I don't see the argument for not having control
of our borders.
We should let in who we wanna let in
and we should keep out who we wanna keep out
and we should have a sane immigration policy.
So I didn't necessarily think it was a priority
to build the wall, but I didn't,
I never criticized the impulse to build the wall
because if tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands
of people are coming across that border
and we are not in a position to know who's coming,
that seems untenable to me.
So, and I can recognize that many people in our society
are on balance the victims of immigration
and there is in many cases, a zero sum contest
between the interests of actual citizens
and the interests of immigrants, right?
So I think we should have control of our borders.
We should have a sane and compassionate immigration policy.
We should let in refugees, right?
So I did, Trump on refugees was terrible,
but no, like I would say 80% of the policy concerns
people celebrated in him are concerns
that I either share entirely or certainly sympathize with.
Right, so like that's not the issue.
The issue is--
- A threat to democracy and some fundamental--
- The issue is largely what you said it was.
It's not so much the person,
it's the effect on everything he touches, right?
He just, he has this superpower of deranging
and destabilizing almost everything he touches
and sullying and compromising the integrity
of almost anyone who comes into his orbit.
I mean, so you looked at these people who served
as chief of staff or in various cabinet positions,
people had real reputations for probity
and level-headedness, whether you share their politics
or not, I mean, these were real people.
These were not, some of them were goofballs,
but many people who just got totally trashed
by proximity to him and then trashed by him
when they finally parted company with him.
Yeah, I mean, it's just people bent over backwards
to accommodate his norm violations
and it was bad for them and it was bad for our system.
But none of that discounts the fact that we have a system
that really needs proper house cleaning.
Yes, there are bad incentives and entrenched interests.
And I'm not a fan of the concept of the deep state,
but 'cause it has been so propagandized,
but yes, there's something like that,
that is not flexible enough to respond intelligently
to the needs of the moment, right?
So there's a lot of rethinking of government
and of institutions in general that I think we should do,
but we need smart, well-informed, well-intentioned people
to do that job.
And the well-intentioned part is hugely important, right?
Just give me someone who is not the most selfish person
anyone has ever heard about in their lifetime, right?
And what we got with Trump was literally
the one most selfish person I think anyone could name.
I mean, and again, there's so much known about this man.
§06Transcript · 47:38–57:05
That's the thing, it was like, it predates his presidency.
We knew this guy 30 years ago.
And this is why to come back to those inflammatory comments
about Hunter Biden's laptop,
the reason why I can say with confidence
that I don't care what was on his laptop
is that there is, and that includes any evidence
of corruption on the part of his father, right?
Now, there's been precious little of that
that's actually emerged.
So it's like, there is no, as far as I can tell,
there's not a big story associated with that laptop
as much as people bang on about a few emails.
But even if there were just obvious corruption, right?
Like Joe Biden was at this meeting and he took
this amount of money from this shady guy for bad reasons.
Given how visible the lives of these two men have been,
I mean, given how much we know about Joe Biden
and how much we know about Donald Trump
and how they have lived in public
for almost as long as I've been alive, both of them,
the scale of corruption can't possibly balance out
between the two of them.
If you show me that Joe Biden has this secret life
where he's driving a Bugatti
and he's living like Andrew Tate, right?
And he's doing all these things I didn't know about.
Okay, then I'm gonna start getting a sense that,
all right, maybe this guy is way more corrupt
than I realized.
Maybe there is some deal in Ukraine or with China
that is just, like this guy is not who he seems,
he's not the public servant he's been pretending to be.
He's been on the take for decades and decades
and he's just, he's as dirty as can be.
He's all mobbed up and it's a nightmare.
And he can't be trusted, right?
That's possible if you show me that his life
is not at all what it seems.
But on the assumption that I,
having looked at this guy for literally decades, right?
And knowing that every journalist
has looked at him for decades,
just how many affairs is he having?
Just how much, how many drugs is he doing?
How many houses does he have?
What are the obvious conflicts of interest?
You hold that against what we know about Trump, right?
And I mean, the litany of indiscretions
you can put on Trump's side
that testify to his personal corruption,
to testify to the fact that he has no ethical compass,
there's simply no comparison, right?
So that's why I don't care about what's on the laptop.
Now, if you tell me Trump is no longer running
for president in 2024 and we can put Trumpism behind us
and now you're saying,
listen, there's a lot of stuff on that laptop
that makes Joe Biden look like a total asshole.
Okay, I'm all ears, right?
I mean, it was a forced, in 2020,
it was a forced choice between a sitting president
who wouldn't commit to a peaceful transfer of power
and a guy who's obviously too old to be president
who has a crack addicted son who lost his laptop.
And I just knew that I was gonna take Biden
in spite of whatever litany of horrors
was gonna come tumbling out of that laptop.
- And that might involve sort of,
so the actual quote is,
"Hunter Biden literally could have had
"the corpses of children in the basement."
There's a dark humor to it, right?
Which is, I think you speak to,
"I would not have cared.
"There's nothing, it's Hunter Biden, it's not Joe Biden.
"Whatever the scope of Joe Biden's corruption is,
"it is infinitesimally compared to the corruption
"we know Trump was involved in.
"It's like a firefly to the sun,"
is what you're speaking to.
But let me make the case that you're really focused
on the surface stuff,
that it's possible to have corruption
that masquerades in the thing we mentioned,
which is civility.
You can spend hundreds of billions of dollars
or trillions towards 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.
And that, the military industrial complex,
everybody's very nice, everybody's very civil,
just very upfront.
Here's how we're spending the money.
Yeah, sometimes somehow disappears in different places,
but that's the way war is complicated.
And everyone is very polite.
There's no Coke and strippers or whatever is on the laptop.
It's very nice and polite.
In the meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of civilians die.
Hate, just an incredible amount of hate is created
because people lose their family members,
all that kind of stuff,
but there's no strippers and Coke on a laptop.
- Yeah, but it's not just superficial.
It is, when someone only wants wealth and power and fame,
that is their objective function, right?
They're like a robot that is calibrated
just to those variables, right?
And they don't care about the risks we run
on any other front.
They don't care about environmental risk,
pandemic risk, nuclear proliferation risk, none of it, right?
They're just tracking fame and money
and whatever can personally redound to their self-interest
along those lines.
And they're not informed about the other risks
we're running really.
In Trump, you had a president
who was repeatedly asking his generals,
"Why couldn't we use our nuclear weapons?
Why can't we have more of them?
Why do I have fewer nuclear weapons than JFK?"
Right, as though that were a sign
of anything other than progress, right?
And this is the guy who's got the button, right?
I mean, somebody's following him around with a bag
waiting to take his order to launch, right?
That is a, it's just, it's a risk we should never run.
One thing Trump has going for him, I think,
is that he doesn't drink or do drugs, right?
I don't know, people allege that he does speed,
but let's take him at his word.
He's not deranging himself with pharmaceuticals, at least,
but apart from Diet Coke, but--
- There's nothing wrong, just for the record,
let me push back on that.
There's nothing wrong with Diet Coke.
- Nothing wrong with Diet Coke, yeah.
- I mean, it's consumed in a very large amount.
- I occasionally have some myself.
- There's no medical, there's no scientific evidence
that I observed the negatives of, you know,
all those studies about aspartame and all that.
I don't know.
- I hope you're right.
Yeah, I mean, everything you said
about the military-industrial complex is true, right?
And we've been worrying about that
on both sides of the aisle for a very long time.
I mean, that phrase came from Eisenhower.
It's, I mean, so much of what ails us
is a story of bad incentives, right?
And bad incentives are so powerful
that they corrupt even good people, right?
How much more do they corrupt bad people, right?
Like, so it's like, you want,
at minimum, you want reasonably good people,
at least non-pathological people,
in the system trying to navigate
against the grain of bad incentives.
And better still, all of us can get together
and try to diagnose those incentives and change them, right?
And we will really succeed
when we have a system of incentives
where the good incentives are so strong
that even bad people are effortlessly behaving
as though they're good people
because they're so successfully incentivized
to behave that way, right?
That's, and so it's almost the inversion
of our current situation.
So yes, and you say I changed my mind about the war.
Not quite.
I mean, I was never a supporter of the war in Iraq.
I was always worried that it was a distraction
from the war in Afghanistan.
I was a supporter of the war in Afghanistan,
and I will admit in hindsight,
that looks like, you know,
at best, a highly ambiguous and painful exercise,
but more likely a fool's errand, right?
It's like that, you know, it did not turn out well.
It wasn't for want of trying.
I don't, you know, I have not done a deep dive
on all of the failures there,
and maybe all of these failures are failures in principle.
I mean, maybe it's just,
maybe that's not the kind of thing
that can be done well by anybody, whatever our intentions.
But yeah, the move to Iraq always seemed questionable to me,
and when we knew the problem,
the immediate problem at that moment, you know,
al-Qaeda was in Afghanistan,
and, you know, and then bouncing to Pakistan.
Anyway, you know, so yes,
but my sense of the possibility of nation building,
my sense of, you know,
insofar as the neocon spirit of, you know,
responsibility and idealism,
§07Transcript · 57:10–1:06:14
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.
Yeah, some of that has definitely changed
for me in my thinking.
And there are obviously cultural reasons
why it failed in Afghanistan,
and if you can't change the culture,
you're not gonna force a change at gunpoint in the culture,
or it certainly seems that that's not gonna happen.
And it took us, you know, over 20 years
to apparently to realize that.
- That's one of the things you realize with the wars,
there's not going to be a strong signal
that things are not working.
You can just keep pouring money into a thing,
a military effort.
- Well, also there are signs of it working too.
You have all the stories of girls now going to school,
right, you know, the girls are getting battery acid
thrown in their faces by religious maniacs,
and then we come in there and we stop that,
and now girls are getting educated,
and that's all good, and our intentions are good there.
And I mean, we're on the right side of history there.
Girls should be going to school.
You know, Malala Yousafzai should have the Nobel Prize,
and she shouldn't have been shot in the face
by the Taliban, right?
We know what the right answers are there.
The question is, what do you do when there are enough,
in this particular case, religious maniacs,
who are willing to die and let their children die
in defense of crazy ideas?
And moral norms that belong in the seventh century.
And it's a problem we couldn't solve,
and we couldn't solve it even though we spent,
you know, trillions of dollars to solve it.
- This reminded me of the thing that you and Jack Dorsey
jokingly had for a while, the discussion about banning
Donald Trump from Twitter.
But does any of it bother you,
now that Twitter files came out, that,
I mean, this has to do with sort of the Hunter laptop,
Hunter Biden laptop story.
Does it bother you that there could be a collection
of people that make decisions about who to ban and not?
And that could be susceptible to bias
and to ideological influence?
- Well, I think it always will be,
or in the absence of perfect AI, it always will be.
- And this becomes relevant with AI as well.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- There's some censorship on AI happening.
And it's an interesting question there as well.
- I don't think Twitter is as important
as people think it is, right?
And I used to think it was more important when I was on it,
and now that I'm off of it, I think it's,
I mean, first let me say it's just
an unambiguously good thing, in my experience,
to delete your Twitter account, right?
It's like, it is just, even the good parts of Twitter
that I miss were bad in the aggregate,
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,
and had my attention divert.
And I was not a crazy Twitter addict.
I mean, I was probably a pretty normal user.
I mean, I was not someone who was tweeting
multiple times a day or even every day, right?
I mean, I probably, I think I probably averaged
something like one tweet a day, I think I averaged.
But in reality, it was like,
there'd be like four tweets one day,
and then I wouldn't tweet for the better part of a week.
But I was looking a lot because it was my newsfeed.
I was just following 200 very smart people,
and I just wanted to see what they were paying attention to.
They would recommend articles,
and I would read those articles.
And then when I would read an article
that I thought I should signal boost,
I would tweet, and so all of that seemed good.
And like, that's all separable
from all of the odious bullshit that came back at me
in response to this,
largely in response to this Hunter Biden thing.
But even the good stuff has a downside.
And it comes at just this point of,
your phone is this perpetual stimulus of,
which is intrinsically fragmenting of time and attention.
And now my phone is much less of a presence in my life.
And it's not that I don't check Slack or check email.
I mean, I use it to work,
but my sense of just what the world is
and my sense of my place in the world,
the sense of where I exist as a person
has changed a lot by deleting my Twitter account.
I mean, I had a, and it's just,
and the things that I think,
I mean, we all know this phenomenon.
I mean, we say of someone, that person's too online, right?
Like, what does it mean to be too online?
And where do you draw that boundary?
How do you know?
What constitutes being too online?
Well, in some sense, just being,
I think being on social media at all is to be too online.
I mean, given what it does to,
given the kinds of information it,
it signal boosts.
And given the impulse it kindles in each of us
to reach out to our audience in specific moments
and in specific ways, right?
It's like, there are lots of moments now
where I have an opinion about something,
but there's nothing for me to do with that opinion, right?
Like there's no Twitter, right?
So like there are lots of things
that I would have tweeted in the last months
that are not the kind of thing
I'm gonna do a podcast about.
I'm not gonna roll out 10 minutes
on that topic on my podcast.
I'm not gonna take the time to really think about it.
But had I been on Twitter,
I would have reacted to this thing in the news
or this thing that somebody did, right?
- What do you do with that thought now?
- I just let go of it.
- Like chocolate ice cream is the most delicious thing ever.
- Yeah, it's usually not that sort of thing,
but it's just,
but then you look at the kinds of problems
people create for themselves.
You look at the life deranging
and reputation destroying things that people do.
And I look at the things that have,
the analogous things that have happened to me.
I mean, the things that have really bent my life around
professionally over the past decade.
So much of it is Twitter.
I mean, honestly, in my case,
almost 100% of it was Twitter.
The controversies I would get into,
the things I would think I would have to respond to,
like I would release a podcast on a certain topic.
I would see some blowback on Twitter.
You know, it would give me the sense
that there was some signal that I really had to respond to.
Now that I'm off Twitter,
I recognize that most of that was just,
it was totally specious, right?
It was not something I had to respond to.
But yet I would then do a cycle of podcasts
responding to that thing that like,
taking my foot out of my mouth
or taking someone else's foot out of my mouth.
And it became this self-perpetuating cycle,
which, I mean, if you're having fun, great.
I mean, if it's generative of useful information
and engagement professionally and psychologically, great.
And there was some of that on Twitter.
I mean, there were people who I've connected with
because I just, you know,
one of us DMed the other on Twitter
and it was hard to see how that was gonna happen otherwise.
But it was largely just a machine
for manufacturing unnecessary controversy.
- Do you think it's possible to avoid the drug of that?
So now that you've achieved this zen state,
is it possible for somebody like you
to use it in a way that doesn't pull you into the whirlpool?
And so anytime there's attacks, you just,
I mean, that's how I tried to use it.
- Yeah, but it's not the way I wanted to use it.
It's not the way it promises itself as a--
- You want it to have debate.
- I wanted to actually communicate with people.
I wanted to hear from the person because,
again, it's like being in Afghanistan, right?
It's like there are the potted cases
where it's obviously good, right?
It's like in Afghanistan,
the girl who's getting an education,
that is just here, that's why we're here.
That's obviously good.
I have those moments on Twitter where it's like,
okay, I'm hearing from a smart person
who's detected an error I made in my podcast or in a book,
or they've just got some great idea
about something that I should spend time on.
And I would never have heard from this person
in any other format.
§08Transcript · 1:06:15–1:15:16
And now I'm actually in dialogue with them.
And it's fantastic.
That's the promise of it, to actually talk to people.
And so I kept getting lured back into that.
No, the sane or sanity-preserving way of using it
is just as a marketing channel.
You just put your stuff out there
and you don't look at what's coming back at you.
And that's, I'm on other social media platforms
that I don't even touch.
I mean, my team posts stuff on Facebook and on Instagram.
I never even see what's on there.
- So you don't think it's possible to see something
and not let it affect your mind?
- No, that's definitely possible.
But the question is,
and I did that for vast stretches of time, right?
And, but then the promise of the platform
is dialogue and feedback, right?
So like, so why am I, if I know for whatever reason,
I'm gonna see like 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,
who's a bot, right?
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 not because I couldn't recalibrate
and find equanimity again with all the nastiness
that was coming back at me,
and not that I couldn't ignore it for vast stretches of time,
but I could see that I kept coming back to it
hoping that it would be something that I could use,
a real tool for communication.
And I was noticing that it was insidiously changing
the way I felt about people,
both people I know and people I don't know, right?
Like people I, you know, mutual friends of ours
who are behaving in certain ways on Twitter,
which just seemed insane to me.
And then that became a signal I felt like
I had to take into account somehow, right?
You're seeing people at their worst,
both friends and strangers.
And I felt that it was as much as I could sort of
try to recalibrate for it,
I felt that I was losing touch
with what was real information
because people are performing, people are faking,
people are not themselves,
or you're seeing people at their worst.
And so I felt like, all right,
what's being advertised to me here on a,
not just a daily basis, you know, an hourly basis,
or, you know, an increment sometimes of, you know,
multiple times an hour.
I mean, I probably check Twitter, you know,
at minimum 10 times a day,
and maybe I was checking it 100 times a day on some days,
right, where things were really active
and I was really engaged with something.
What was being delivered into my brain there
was subtly false information
about how dishonest and,
you know, just generally unethical,
totally normal people are capable of being, right?
It was like, it is a funhouse mirror.
I was seeing the most grotesque versions
of people who I know, right?
People who I know I could sit down at dinner with
and they would never behave this way,
and yet they were coming at me on Twitter.
It was essentially turning ordinary people
into sociopaths, right?
It's like people are just,
you know, and there are analogies that many of us have made.
It's like, one analogy is road rage, right?
Like people behave in the confines of a car
in ways that they never would
if they didn't have this metal box around them,
you know, moving at speed.
And it's, you know, all of that becomes quite hilarious
and, you know, obviously dysfunctional
when they actually have to stop at the light
next to the person they just flipped off,
and they 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 wanna fight with.
- That's one of the heartbreaking things is to see,
see people who I know, who I admire,
who I know are friends, be everything from snarky
to downright mean, derisive towards each other.
It doesn't make any sense.
Like this, this is the only place where I've seen
people I really admire who have had a calm head
about most things, like really be shitty to other people.
It's probably the only place I've seen that.
And I don't, I tend, I choose to maybe believe
that that's not really them.
There's something about the system.
Like if you go paintballing, if you,
Jordan Peterson and whoever go paintballing.
- You're gonna shoot your friends, yeah.
- 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.
But it's sometimes hard to remind yourself of that.
- Well, and I think I was guilty of that, definitely.
You know, I don't think, there's nothing,
I don't think I ever did anything
that I really feel bad about.
But yeah, it was always pushing me
to the edge of snideness somehow.
And it's just not healthy.
It's not, it's not, so the reason why I deleted
my Twitter account in the end was that
it was obviously making me a worse person.
And so, and yeah, is there some way to be on there
where it's not making you a worse person?
I'm sure there is, but it's,
given the nature of the platform
and given what was coming back at me on it,
the way to do that is just to basically
use it as a one-way channel of communication,
just marketing.
You know, it's like, here's what I'm paying attention to.
Look at it if you want to, and you just push it out,
and then you don't look at what's coming back at you.
- I put out a call for questions on Twitter,
and actually, quite surprisingly, there's a lot of good,
I mean, they're like, even if they're critical,
they're like being thoughtful, which is nice.
- I used it that way too, and that was what kept me hooked.
- But then there's also TouchBalls69 wrote a question.
Ask why-- - I can't imagine.
This is part of it, but one way to solve this is,
you know, we gotta get rid of anonymity for this.
- Let me ask the question.
Ask Sam why he sucks was the question.
- Yeah, that's good, well,
one reason why I sucked was Twitter.
That was, and I've since solved that problem, so.
TouchBalls-- - 69.
- 69? - Yeah.
- TouchBalls69 should be happy that I suck
a little bit less now that I'm off Twitter.
I don't have to hear from TouchBalls69 on the regular.
- The fact that you have to see that,
it probably can have a negative effect,
just even in moderation, just to see that there is,
like for me, the negative effect is slightly losing faith
in the underlying kindness of humanity.
- Yeah, that was for me, yeah.
- You can also just reason your way out of it,
saying that this is anonymity and this is kind of fun
and this kind of, just the shit show of Twitter, it's okay,
but it does mentally affect you a little bit.
- Like I don't read too much into that kind of comment.
It's like, it's just, that's just trolling,
and it's, you know, I get what's, I get,
I understand the fun the person is having
on the other side of that.
It's like-- - Do you, though?
- I do, well, I do, I don't, I mean,
I don't behave that way, but I do,
and for all I know, that person could be 16 years old,
right, so it's like-- - It could be also
an alt-icon for Elon, I don't know.
- Well, yeah, that's right, yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, I'm pretty sure Elon would just tweet that
under his own name at this point.
- Oh, man, you love each other.
Okay, so the, do you think, so speaking of which,
now that Elon has taken over Twitter,
is there something that he could do
to make this platform better?
This Twitter and just social media in general,
but because of the aggressive nature of his innovation
that he's pushing, is there any way to make Twitter
a pleasant place for Sam Harris?
- Maybe. - Like in the next five years?
- I don't know, I think I'm agnostic as to whether or not
he or anyone could make a social media platform
that really was healthy.
- So you were just observing yourself week by week,
seeing the effect it has on your mind
and on how much you're actually learning
and growing as a person, and it was negative.
- Yeah, and I'd also seen the negativity
in other people's lives.
I mean, it's obviously, I mean, he's not gonna admit it,
but I think it's obviously negative for Elon, right?
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,
§09Transcript · 1:15:18–1:25:28
I was also seeing the Funhaus mirror on his side of Twitter,
and it was just even more exaggerated.
It's like, when I was asking myself,
why is he spending his time this way?
I then reflected on why, you know,
why was I spending my time this way, to a lesser degree,
right, and at lesser scale and at lesser risk, frankly,
right, and so, and it was just so,
it's not just Twitter, I mean,
this isn't part an internet phenomenon.
It's like the whole Hunter Biden mess
that you-- - Explored.
- Explored.
That was based, I mean, I was on somebody's podcast,
but that was based on a clip taken from that podcast,
which was highly misleading as to the general shape
of my remarks on that podcast.
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,
not functioning by a spirit of charity,
but the clip was quite distinct from the podcast itself.
The reality is, is that we're living in an environment now
where people are so lazy and their attention
is so fragmented that they only have time for clips.
99% of people will see a clip and will assume
there's no relevant context I need to understand
what happened in that clip, right?
And obviously the people who make those clips know that,
right, and they're doing it quite maliciously.
And in this case, the person who made that clip
and subsequent clips of other podcasts
was quite maliciously trying to engineer, you know,
some reputational immolation for me.
And being signal boosted by Elon and other prominent people
who can't take the time to watch anything other than a clip,
even when it's their friend
or someone who's ostensibly their friend in that clip,
right, so it's a total failure,
an understandable failure of ethics
that everyone is so short on time
and they're so fucking lazy that,
and we now have these contexts in which we react
so quickly to things, right?
Like Twitter is inviting an instantaneous reaction
to this clip that it's just too tempting
to just say something
and not know what you're even commenting on.
And most of the people who saw that clip
don't understand what I actually think
about any of these issues.
And the irony is people are 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.
And we're all living and dying by clips now
and it's dysfunctional.
- See, I think it's possible to create a platform.
I think we will keep living on clips,
but when I saw that clip of you talking about children
and so on, just knowing that you have a sense of humor,
you just went to a dark place in terms of humor.
So I didn't even bother.
And then I knew that the way clips work
is that people will use it for virality's sake,
but giving a person benefit of the doubt,
that's not even the right term.
It's not like I was, it's really like interpreting it
in the context of knowing your past.
- The truth is you even need,
like I even give Trump the benefit of the doubt
when I see a clip of Trump.
'Cause there are famous clips of Trump
that are very misleading
as to what he was saying in context.
And I've been honest about that.
Like the whole, there were good people on both sides
scandal around his remarks after Charlottesville.
The clip that got exported and got promoted by everyone
left of center, from Biden on down,
the New York Times, CNN, there's nobody that I'm aware of
who has honestly apologized
for what they did with that clip.
He did not say what he seemed to be saying in that clip
about the Nazis at Charlottesville, right?
And I have always been very clear about that.
So it's just, even people who I think should be marginalized
and people who should be defenestrated
because they really are terrible people
who are doing dangerous things and for bad reasons,
I think we should be honest about
what they actually meant in context, right?
And this goes to anyone else we might talk about
who's more, where the case is much more confusing.
But yeah, so everyone's, it's just so,
and then I'm sure we're gonna get to AI,
but the prospect of being able to manufacture clips
with AI and deep fakes
and that where it's gonna be hard for most people
most of the time to even figure out
whether they're in the presence of something real,
forget about being divorced from context,
there was no context.
I mean, that's a misinformation apocalypse
that we are right on the cusp of and it's terrifying.
- Or it could be just a new world
like where Alice going to Wonderland
where humor is the only thing we have and it will save us.
Maybe in the end, Trump's approach to social media
was the right one after all,
nothing is true and everything's absurd.
- Yeah, but we can't live that way.
People function on the basis of what they assume is true.
Right, they think-- - People have functioned.
- To do anything, it's like, I mean,
you have to know what you think is gonna happen
or you have to at least give a probabilistic weighting
over the future, 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.
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?
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?
Like we're gonna be manufacturing fake journal articles.
I mean, I'm sure someone's using ChatGPT
for this reader as we speak.
And if it's not credible,
if it's not persuasive now to most people,
I mean, honestly, I don't think we're gonna,
I'll be amazed if it's a year before
we can actually create journal articles
that it would take a PhD to debunk
that are completely fake.
And there are people who are celebrating this kind of,
coming cataclysm, but it's just,
there are the people who don't have anything to lose
who are celebrating it or just are so confused
that they just don't even know what's at stake.
And then there are the people who have met,
the few people who we could count on a few hands
who have managed to insulate themselves,
or at least imagine they've insulated themselves
from the downside here enough
that they're not implicated in the great unraveling
we are witnessing or could witness.
- The shaking up of what is true.
So actually that returns us to experts.
Do you think experts can save us?
Is there such thing as expertise and experts in something?
How do you know if you've achieved it?
- I think it's important to acknowledge upfront
that there's something paradoxical
about how we relate to authority,
especially within science.
And I don't think that paradox is going away
and it doesn't have to be confusing.
It's just, and it's not truly a paradox.
It's just like there are different moments in time.
So it is true to say that within science
or within 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.
So it doesn't matter if you're a Nobel laureate,
you can be wrong.
The thing you could, the last sentence you spoke
could be total bullshit.
And it's also possible for someone who's deeply uninformed
to be right about something,
or to be right for the wrong reasons,
or someone just gets lucky, or someone,
or, and there are middling cases
where you have like a backyard astronomer
who's got no credentials, but he just loves astronomy
and he's got a telescope and he's spent a lot of time
looking at the night sky, and he discovers a comet
that no one else has seen,
not even the professional expert astronomers.
And I gotta 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?
So it's true that truth is orthogonal
to the reputational concerns we have among apes
who are talking about the truth.
But it is also true that most of the time,
real experts are much more reliable than frauds
or people who are not experts, right?
So, and expertise really is a thing, right?
And when you're flying an airplane in a storm,
you don't want just randos come into the cockpit saying,
§10Transcript · 1:25:32–1:35:19
"Listen, I've got a new idea about how to,
how we should tweak these controls," right?
You want someone who's a trained pilot
and that training gave them something, right?
It gave them a set of competences and intuitions
and they know what all those dials and switches do, right?
And I don't, right?
I shouldn't be flying that plane.
So when things really matter,
and putting this at 30,000 feet in a storm
sharpens this up, we want real experts to be in charge,
right?
And we are at 30,000 feet a lot of the time
on a lot of issues, right?
And whether they're public health issues,
whether it's a geopolitical emergency like Ukraine,
I mean, climate change, I mean, just pick your topic.
There are real problems and the clock
is rather often ticking and their solutions
are non-obvious, right?
And so expertise is a thing and deferring to experts
much of the time makes a lot of sense.
It's at minimum, it prevents,
you get a spectacular errors of incompetence
and just foolhardiness.
But even in the case of some,
where you're talking about someone,
I mean, people like ourselves who are like,
we're well-educated, we're not the worst possible candidates
for the Dunning-Kruger effect.
When we're going into a new area where we're not experts,
we're fairly alert to the possibility that we don't,
it's not as simple as things seem at first
and we don't know how our tools translate to this new area.
We can be fairly circumspect,
but we're also, because we're well-educated,
and we're pretty quick studies,
we can learn a lot of things pretty fast
and we can begin to play a language game
that sounds fairly expert, right?
And in that case, the invitation to do your own research,
is when times are good,
I view as an invitation to waste your time pointlessly,
right, when times are good.
Now, the truth is times are not all that good, right?
And we have the ongoing public display
of failures of expertise.
We have experts who are obviously corrupted
by bad incentives.
We've got experts who perversely won't admit they were wrong
when they in fact are demonstrated to be wrong.
We've got institutions that have been captured
by political ideology that's not truth tracking.
I mean, this whole woke encroachment
into really every place,
whether it's universities or science journals
or government, I mean, it's just like,
that has been genuinely deranging.
So there's a lot going on where experts
and the very concept of expertise
has seemed to discredit itself.
But the reality is that there is a massive difference
when anything matters,
when there's anything to know about anything,
there is a massive difference most of the time
between someone who has really done the work
to understand that domain and someone who hasn't.
And if I get sick or someone close to me gets sick,
you know, I have a PhD in neuroscience, right?
So I can read a medical journal article
and understand a lot of it, right?
And I, you know, so I'm just fairly conversant
with medical terminology.
And I understand its methods
and I'm alert to the difference because I've,
because in neuroscience,
I've spent hours and hours in journal clubs,
diagnosing and analyzing the difference
between good and bad studies.
I'm alert to the difference between good and bad studies
in medical journals, right?
And I understand that bad studies can get published
and, you know, et cetera.
And experiments can be poorly designed.
I'm alert to all of those things.
But when I get sick or when someone close to me gets sick,
I don't pretend to be a doctor, right?
I've got no clinical experience.
I don't go down the rabbit hole on Google
for days at a stretch trying to become a doctor,
much less a specialist in the domain of problem
that has been visited upon me or my family, right?
So if someone close to me gets cancer,
I don't pretend to be an oncologist.
I don't go out and start,
I don't start reading, you know, in journals of oncology
and try to really get up to speed as an oncologist
because it's,
one, it's a bad and potential
and very likely misleading use of my time, right?
And it's,
if I decide, if I had, if I had a lot of runway,
if I decided, okay, it's really important for me
to know everything I can.
At this point, I wanna, I know someone's gonna get cancer.
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?
So I'm gonna take the next four years
and spend most of my time on cancer.
Okay, I could do that, right?
I still think that's a waste of my time.
I still think at the end of,
even at the end of those four years,
I'm not gonna be the best person to form intuitions
about what to do in the face of the next cancer
that I have to confront.
I'm still 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.
What I'm not advocating,
I'm not advocating a blind trust and authority.
Like if you get cancer
and you're talking to one oncologist
and they're recommending some course of treatment,
by all means, get a second opinion, get a third opinion.
But it matters that those opinions
are coming from real experts and not from
Robert Kennedy Jr. who's telling you that you got it
because you got a vaccine, right?
It's like, it's just,
we're swimming in a sea of misinformation
where you've got people who are moving the opinions
of millions of others who should not have an opinion
on these topics.
Like there is no scenario in which
you should be getting your opinion about vaccine safety
or climate change or the war in Ukraine
or anything else that we might wanna talk about
from Candace Owens, right?
It's just like she's not a relevant expert
on any of those topics.
And what's more, she doesn't seem to care, right?
And she's living in a culture
that has amplified that not caring into a business model
and an effective business model, right?
So it's just,
and there's something very Trumpian about all that.
Like that's the problem, the problem is the culture.
It's not these specific individuals.
So the paradox here is that expertise is a real thing
and we defer to it a lot as a labor-saving device
and just based on the reality
that it's very hard to be a polymath, right?
And specialization is a thing, right?
And so there are people who specialize
in a very narrow topic.
They know more about that topic than the next guy,
no matter how smart that guy or gal is.
And that those differences matter.
But it's also true that when you're talking about facts,
sometimes the best experts are wrong.
The scientific consensus is wrong.
You get a sea change in the thinking of a whole field
because one person who's an outlier for whatever reason
decides, okay, I'm gonna prove this point
and they prove it, right?
So somebody like the doctor who believed
that stomach ulcers were not due to stress
but were due to H. pylori infections, right?
So he just drank a vial of H. pylori bacteria
and proved and quickly got an ulcer
and convinced the field that at minimum,
H. pylori was involved in that process.
Okay, so yes, everyone was wrong.
That doesn't disprove the reality of expertise.
It doesn't disprove the utility of relying on experts
most of the time, especially in an emergency,
especially when the clock is ticking,
especially when you're in this particular cockpit
and you only have one chance to land this plane, right?
You want the real pilot at the controls.
- But there's just a few things to say.
So one, you mentioned this example with cancer
and doing your own research.
There are several things that are different
about our particular time in history.
One, doing your own research
has become more and more effective
because you can read, the internet made information
a lot more accessible,
so you can read a lot of different meta-analyses.
You can read blog posts that describe to you
exactly the flaws in the different papers
that make up the meta-analyses.
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.
§11Transcript · 1:35:24–1:44:40
For example, I don't know, I don't wanna overstate things,
but if you suffer from depression, for example,
then you could go to an expert and a doctor
that prescribes you some medication,
but you could also challenge some of those ideas
and seeing like, what are the different medications,
what are the different side effects,
what are the different solutions to depression,
all that kind of stuff.
And I think depression is just a really difficult problem
that's very, I don't wanna, again, state incorrect things,
but I think there's a lot of variability
of what depression really means.
So being introspective about the type of depression you have
and the different possible solutions you have,
just doing your own research as a first step
before approaching a doctor
or as you have multiple opinions
could be very beneficial in that case.
Now, that's depression,
that's something that's been studied for a very long time.
With a new pandemic that's affecting everybody,
with the airplane equated to like 9/11 or something,
did a new emergency just happen?
And everybody, every expert in the world
is publishing on it and talking about it.
So doing your own research there
could be exceptionally effective in asking questions.
And then there's a difference between experts,
virologists, and it's actually a good question,
who is exactly the expert in a pandemic?
But there's the actual experts
doing the research and publishing stuff,
and then there's the communicators of that expertise.
And the question is, if the communicators are flawed
to a degree where doing your own research
is actually the more effective way
to figure out policies and solutions,
because you're not competing with experts,
you're competing with the communicators of expertise.
That could be WHO, CDC in the case of the pandemic,
or politicians, or political type of science figures
like Anthony Fauci.
There's a question there
of the effectiveness of doing your own research
in that context.
And the competing forces there,
incentives that you've mentioned,
is you can become quite popular by being contrarian,
by saying everybody's lying to you,
all the authorities are lying to you,
all the institutions are lying to you.
So those are the waters you're swimming in.
But I think doing your own research
in that kind of context could be quite effective.
- Let me be clear.
I'm not saying you shouldn't do any research.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't be informed
about an issue.
I'm not saying you shouldn't read articles
on whatever the topic is.
And yes, if I got cancer or someone close to me got cancer,
I probably would read more about cancer
than I've read thus far about cancer.
And I've read some.
So I'm not making a virtue of ignorance
and a blind obedience to authority.
And again, I recognize that authorities
can discredit themselves or they can be wrong.
They can be wrong even when there's no discredit.
There's just, there's a lot we don't understand
about the nature of the world.
But still this vast gulf between truly informed opinion
and bullshit exists.
It always exists.
And conspiracy thinking is rather often,
most of the time, a species of bullshit,
but it's not always wrong.
There are real conspiracies
and there really are just awful corruptions
of born of bad incentives within our scientific processes,
within institutions.
And again, we've mentioned a lot of these things in passing,
but what woke political ideology did
to scientific communication during the pandemic was awful.
And it was really corrosive of public trust,
especially on the right.
For understandable reasons.
I mean, it was just, it was crazy,
some of the things that were being said and still is.
And these cases are all different.
So you take depression.
We just don't know enough about depression
for anyone to be that confident about anything.
And there are many different modalities
in which to interact with it as a problem.
So there's, yes, pharmaceuticals
have whatever promise they have,
but there's certainly reason to be concerned
that they don't work well for everybody.
And I mean, it's obvious they don't work well for everybody,
but they do work for some people.
But again, depression is a multifactorial problem
and there are different levels at which to influence it.
And there are things like meditation,
there are things like just life changes.
And one of the perverse things about depression
is that when you're depressed,
all of the things that would be good for you to do
are precisely the things you don't wanna do.
You don't have any energy to socialize,
you don't wanna get things done,
you don't wanna exercise.
And all of those things, if you got those up and running,
they do make you feel better in the aggregate.
But the reality is that there are clinical level depressions
that are so bad that it's just,
we just don't have good tools for them.
And it's not enough to tell,
there's no life change someone's gonna embrace
that is going to be an obvious remedy for that.
The pandemic, I mean, pandemics are obviously
a complicated problem,
but I would consider it much simpler than depression
in terms of what's on the menu to be chosen
among the various choices.
- Just less multifactorial.
- The logic by which you would make those choices, yeah.
So it's like, we have a virus, we have a new virus.
It's some version of bad, it's human transmissible.
We're still catching up,
we're catching up to every aspect of it.
- We don't know how it spreads.
- We don't know how-
- How effective masks are.
- Well, at a certain point, we knew it was respiratory,
but we knew-
- But how respiratory, what that means.
- Yeah, and whether it's spread by fomites,
and like all that, we were confused about a lot of things.
And we're still confused.
It's been a moving target this whole time,
and it's been changing this whole time.
And our responses to it have been,
we ramped up the vaccines as quickly as we could,
but too quick for some, not quick enough for others.
We could have done human challenge trials
and got them out more quickly with better data.
And I think that's something we should probably look at
in the future, because to my eye,
that would make ethical sense to do challenge trials.
- And so much of my concern about COVID,
I mean, many people are confused
about my concern about COVID.
My concern about COVID has, for much of the time,
not been narrowly focused on COVID itself,
how dangerous I perceive COVID to be as a illness.
It has been, for the longest time,
even more a concern about our ability to respond
to a truly scary pathogen next time.
For, outside those initial months,
give me the first six months to be quite worried
about COVID and the unraveling of society.
- And the supply of toilet paper.
- You wanna secure a steady supply of toilet paper.
But beyond that initial period,
when we had a sense of what we were dealing with
and we had every hope that the vaccines
are actually gonna work,
and we knew we were getting those vaccines
in short order, right?
Beyond that, and we knew just how dangerous
the illness was and how dangerous it wasn't.
For years now, I've just been worrying about this
as a failed dress rehearsal for something much worse.
Right, I think what we prove to ourselves
at this moment in history is that
we have built informational tools
that we do not know how to use,
and we have made ourselves,
we've basically enrolled all of human society
into a psychological experiment that is deranging us
and making it virtually impossible
to solve coordination problems
that we absolutely have to solve next time
when things are worse.
- Do you understand who's at fault
for the way this unraveled?
The way we didn't seem to have the distrust in institutions
and the institution of science that grew
like seemingly exponentially,
or got revealed through this process.
Who's at fault here?
And what's to fix?
- So much blame to go around,
but so much of it is not a matter of
bad people conspiring to do bad things.
It's a matter of incompetence and misaligned incentives
and just ordinary, you know,
plain vanilla dysfunction.
§12Transcript · 1:44:42–1:53:47
But my problem was that people like you,
people like Brett Weinstein,
people that I look to for reasonable,
difficult conversations on difficult topics
have a little bit lost their mind,
became emotional and dogmatic in style of conversation,
perhaps not in the depth of actual ideas,
but they're, you know,
a tweet something of that nature,
and not about you,
but just it feels like the pandemic
made people really more emotional than before.
- And then Kimball Musk responded,
I think something I think you probably would agree with,
maybe not.
I think it was the combo of Trump and the pandemic.
Trump triggered the far left to be way more active
than they could have been without him.
And then the pandemic handed big government,
nanny state, lefties a huge platform on a silver platter,
a one-two punch, and here we are.
- Well, I would agree with some of that.
I'm not sure how much to read into the nanny state concept,
but yeah, like basically got people on the far left
really activated and then gave control to,
I don't know if you say nanny state,
but just control to government
that when executed poorly
has created a complete distrust in government.
- My fear is that there was going to be
that complete distrust anyway,
given the nature of the information space,
given the level of conspiracy thinking,
given the gaming of these tools by an anti-vax cult.
I mean, there really is an anti-vax cult
that just ramped up its energy during this moment.
- But it's a small one.
- It's not to say that everything,
every concern about vaccines is a species of,
it was born of misinformation or born of this cult,
but there is a cult that is just,
and the core of Trumpism is a cult.
I mean, QAnon is a cult.
And so there's a lot of lying
and there's a lot of confusion.
It's almost impossible to exaggerate
how confused some people are
and how fully their lives are organized
around that confusion.
I mean, there are people who think
that the world's being run by pedophile cannibals
and that Tom Hanks and Oprah Winfrey
and Michelle Obama are among those cannibals.
I mean, adjacent to the pure crazy,
there's the semi-crazy,
and adjacent to the semi-crazy,
there's the grifting opportunist asshole.
And the layers of bad faith are hard to fully diagnose,
but the problem is all of this is getting signal boosted
by an outrage machine
that is preferentially spreading misinformation.
It has a business model that is guaranteed
that is preferentially sharing misinformation.
- Can I actually just on a small tangent,
how do you defend yourself against the claim
that you're a pedophile cannibal?
- It's difficult.
- Here's the case I would make,
because I don't think you can use reason.
I think you have to use empathy.
You have to understand--
- But what, like, part of it, I mean,
I find it very difficult to believe
that anyone believes these things.
I mean, I think that there's,
and I'm sure there's some number of people
who are just pretending to believe these things,
because it's just, again,
this is sort of like the 4chanification of everything.
It's just Pepe the Frog, right?
Like, none of this is what it seems.
They're not signaling an alliance
with white supremacy or neo-Nazism,
but they're not not doing it.
Like, they just don't fucking care.
It's just cynicism overflowing its banks, right?
It's just fun to wind up the normies, right?
Like, look at all the normies who don't understand
that a green frog is just a green frog,
even when it isn't just a green frog, right?
It's like, it's just gumming up
everyone's cognitive bandwidth with bullshit, right?
I get that that's fun if you're a teenager
and you just wanna vandalize our newsphere,
but at a certain point, we have to recognize
that real questions of human welfare are in play, right?
It's like, there are wars getting fought or not fought,
and there's a pandemic raging,
and there's medicine to take or not take.
But I mean, to come back to this issue of COVID,
I don't think I got so out of balance around COVID.
I think people are quite confused
about what I was concerned about.
I mean, yes, there was a period where I was crazy
because anyone who was taking it seriously was crazy
'cause they had no idea what was going on.
And so it's like, yes, I was wiping down packages
with alcohol wipes, right?
Because people thought it was transmissible by touch, right?
And then when we realized that was no longer the case,
I stopped doing that.
But so again, it was a moving target,
and a lot of things we did in hindsight
around masking and school closures
looked fairly dysfunctional, right?
But unnecessary.
- I think the criticism that people would say
about your talking about COVID,
and maybe you can correct me,
but you were against skepticism
of the safety and efficacy of the vaccine.
So people who get nervous about the vaccine,
but don't fall into the usual anti-vax camp,
which I think there was a significant enough number,
they're getting nervous.
I mean, especially after the war in Afghanistan and Iraq,
I too was nervous about anything
where a lot of money could be made.
And you just see how the people who are greedy,
they come to the surface all of a sudden.
And a lot of them that run institutions,
actually really good human beings,
I know a lot of them,
but it's hard to know how those two combine together
when there's hundreds of billions,
trillions of dollars to be made.
And so that skepticism,
I guess the sense was that you weren't open enough
to the skepticism.
- I understand that people have that sense.
I'll tell you how I thought about it and think about it.
One, again, it was a moving target.
So there was a point in the timeline
where it was totally rational to expect
that the vaccines were both working,
both they were reasonably safe
and that COVID was reasonably dangerous.
And that the trade-off for basically everyone
was it was rational to get vaccinated,
given the level of testing
and how many people had been vaccinated before you,
given what we were seeing with COVID,
that that was a forced choice.
You're eventually gonna get COVID,
and the question is,
do you wanna be vaccinated when you do?
There was a period where that forced choice,
where it was just obviously reasonable to get vaccinated,
especially because there was every reason to expect
that while it wasn't a perfectly sterilizing vaccine,
it was going to knock down transmission a lot,
and that matters.
And so it wasn't just a personal choice.
You were actually being a good citizen
when you decided to run whatever risk
you were gonna run to get vaccinated,
because there are people in our society
who actually can't get vaccinated.
I mean, I know people who can't take any vaccines.
They're so allergic to, I mean,
they in their own person seem to justify
all of the fears of the anti-vax cult.
I mean, it's like they're the kind of person
who Robert Kennedy Jr. can point to and say,
"See, vaccines will fucking kill you," right?
Because of the experience,
and we're still, I know people who have kids
who fit that description, right?
So we should all feel a civic responsibility
to be vaccinated against egregiously awful
and transmissible diseases
for which we have relatively safe vaccines
to keep those sorts of people safe.
- And there was a period of time
when it was thought that the vaccine
could stop transmission.
- Yes, and so again, all of this has begun to shift.
I don't think it has shifted as much
as Brett Weinstein thinks it's shifted,
but yes, there are safety concerns
around the mRNA vaccines, especially for young men, right?
As far as I know, that's the purview
of actual heightened concern.
But also, there's now a lot of natural immunity out there.
Basically, everyone who was gonna get vaccinated
has gotten vaccinated.
The virus has evolved to the point in this context
where it seems less dangerous.
Again, I'm going more on the seemings
than on research that I've done at this point,
§13Transcript · 1:53:50–2:03:16
but I'm certainly less worried about getting COVID.
I've had it once.
I've been vaccinated.
So you ask me now,
how do I feel about getting the next booster?
I don't know that I'm going to get the next booster, right?
So I was somebody who was waiting in line
at four in the morning,
hoping to get some overflow vaccine
when it was first available.
And that was, at that point, given what we knew,
or given what I thought I knew
based on the best sources I could consult
and based on anecdotes that were too vivid to ignore,
both data and personal experience,
it was totally rational for me to want to get that vaccine
as soon as I could.
And now, I think it's totally rational
for me to do a different kind of cost-benefit analysis
and wonder, listen, do I really need to get a booster?
How many of these boosters am I going to get
for the rest of my life, really?
And how safe is the mRNA vaccine for a man of my age?
And do I need to be worried about myocarditis?
All of that is completely rational to talk about now.
My concern is that at every point along the way,
I was the wrong person,
and Brett Weinstein was the wrong person,
and there's many other people I could add to this list,
to have strong opinions about any of this stuff.
- I just disagree with that.
I think, yes, in theory, I agree 100%,
but I feel like experts failed at communicating.
Not at doing-- - They did.
- And I just feel like you and Brett Weinstein
actually have the tools with the internet,
given the engine you have in your brain
of thinking for months at a time
deeply about the problems that face our world,
that you actually have the tools
to do pretty good thinking here.
The problem I have with experts--
- But there would be deference to experts
and pseudo-experts behind all of that.
- Well, the papers, you would stand
on the shoulders of giants,
but you can surf those shoulders
better than the giants themselves, it seems.
- But I knew we were gonna disagree about that.
I saw his podcast where he brought on these experts
who had, many of them, had the right credentials,
but for a variety of reasons,
they didn't pass the smell test for me.
One larger problem, and this goes back to the problem
of how we rely on authority in science,
is that you can always find a PhD or an MD
to champion any crackpot idea.
I mean, it is amazing, but you could find PhDs and MDs
who would sit up there in front of Congress
and say that they thought smoking was not addictive,
or that it was not harmful to,
there was no direct link between smoking and lung cancer.
You could always find those people.
But some of the people Brett found
were people who had obvious tells, to my point of view,
to my eye, and I saw them on,
some of the same people were on Rogan's podcast, right?
And it's hard, because if a person
does have the right credentials,
and they're not saying something floridly mistaken,
and we're talking about something where
they're genuine unknowns, right?
Like how much do we know
about the safety of these vaccines, right?
It's, at that point, not a whole hell of a lot.
I mean, we have no long-term data on mRNA vaccines,
but to confidently say that millions of people
are gonna die because of these vaccines,
and to confidently say that ivermectin is a panacea,
right, ivermectin is the thing that prevents COVID, right?
There was no good reason to say
either of those things at that moment.
And so, given that that's where Brett was,
I felt like there was just no, there was nothing to debate.
We're both the wrong people
to be getting into the weeds on this.
We're both gonna defer to our chosen experts.
His experts look like crackpots to me,
and, or at least the ones who are most vociferous
on those edgiest points, it seemed most--
- And your experts seem like, what is the term,
mass hysteria, I forgot the term.
- Well, no, but it's like with climate science.
I mean, this old, it's received as a canard
in half of our society now,
but the claim that 97% of climate scientists
agree that human-caused climate change is a thing, right?
So do you go with the 97% most of the time,
or do you go with the 3% most of the time?
It's obvious you go with the 97% most of the time
for anything that matters.
It's not to say that the 3% are always wrong.
Again, there are, things get overturned.
And yes, as you say,
and I've spent much more time worrying about this
on my podcast than I've spent worrying about COVID,
our institutions have lost trust for good reason, right?
And it's an open question whether
we can actually get things done
with this level of transparency and pseudo-transparency,
given our information ecosystems.
Like, can we fight a war, really fight a war
that we may have to fight, like the next Nazis?
Can we fight that war when everyone with an iPhone
is showing just how awful it is
that little girls get blown up when we drop our bombs, right?
Like, could we as a society do what we might have to do
to actually get necessary things done
when we're living in this panopticon
of just, you know, everyone's a journalist, right?
Everyone's a scientist, everyone's an expert,
everyone's got direct contact with the facts,
or a semblance of the facts, I don't know.
- I think yes, and I think voices like yours
are exceptionally important,
and I think there's certain signals you send
in your ability to steal me on the other side,
in your empathy, essentially.
So that's the fight, that's the mechanism
by which you resist the dogmatism of this binary thinking.
And then if you become a trusted person
that's able to consider the other side,
then people will listen to you as the aggregator,
as the communicator of expertise.
'Cause the virologists haven't been able
to be good communicators.
I still, to this day, don't really know
what is the, what am I supposed to think
about the safety and efficacy of the vaccines today?
As it stands today, what are we supposed to think?
What are we supposed to think about testing?
What are we supposed to think about
the effectiveness of masks or lockdowns?
Where's the great communicators on this topic
that consider all the other conspiracy theories,
all the communication that's out there,
and actually aggregate it together
and be able to say this is actually
what's most likely the truth.
And also some of that has to do with humility,
epistemic humility, knowing that you can't
really know for sure.
Just like with depression, you can't really know for sure.
Where's the, I'm not seeing those communications
being effectively done, even still today.
- Well, the jury is still out on some of it.
And again, it's a moving target.
And some of it, I mean, it's complicated.
Some of it's a self-fulfilling dynamic where,
so like lockdowns, in theory, lockdowns,
a lockdown would work if we could only do it.
But we can't really do it.
And there's a lot of people who won't do it
because they're convinced that it's,
this is the totalitarian boot,
finally on the neck of the good people
who are always having their interests
traduced by the elites, right?
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?
Okay, you have a society that is now immune to reason, right?
'Cause there are absolutely certain pathogens
that we should lock down for next time, right?
And it was completely rational in the beginning
of this thing to lock down, given,
to attempt to lock down, we never really locked down,
to attempt some semblance of a lockdown
just to, quote, bend the curve,
to spare our healthcare system,
given what we were seeing happening in Italy, right?
Like that moment was not hard to navigate,
at least in my view.
It was obvious at the time.
In retrospect, my views on that haven't changed,
except for the fact that I recognize
maybe it's just impossible,
given the nature of people's response
to that kind of demand, right?
We live in a society that's just not gonna lock down.
- Unless the pandemic is much more deadly.
- Right, so that's a point I made,
which was maliciously clipped out from some other podcast
when someone's trying to make it look like,
I wanna see children die.
Look, it's a pity more children didn't die from COVID, right?
This is actually the same person who,
and that's the other thing that got so poisoned here.
§14Transcript · 2:03:20–2:12:40
It's like that person, this psychopath,
or effective psychopath,
who's creating these clips of me on podcasts,
this second clip of me seeming to say
that I wish more children died during COVID,
but it was so clear in context what I was saying
that even the clip betrayed the context,
so it didn't actually work.
This psycho, and again,
I don't know whether he actually is a psychopath,
but he's behaving like one
because of the incentives of Twitter.
This is somebody who Brett signal boosted
as a very reliable source of information, right?
He kept retweeting this guy at me, against me, right?
And this guy, at one glance,
I knew how unreliable this guy was, right?
But I think I'm not at all,
one thing I think I did wrong,
one thing that I do regret,
one thing I have not sorted out for myself
is how to navigate the professional and personal pressure
that gets applied at this moment
where you have a friend or an acquaintance
or someone you know who's behaving badly in public
or behaving badly,
behaving in a way that you think is bad in public,
and they have a public platform
where they're influencing a lot of people,
and you have your own public platform
where you're constantly getting asked to comment
on what this friend or acquaintance or colleague is doing.
- I haven't known what I think is ethically right
about the choices that seem forced on us
at moments like this.
So I've criticized you in public
about your interview with Kanye.
Now, in that case, I reached out to you in private first
and told you exactly what I thought,
and then when I was gonna get asked in public
or when I was touching that topic on my podcast,
I more or less said the same thing
that I said to you in private, right?
Now, that was how I navigated that moment.
I did the same thing with Elon,
at least at the beginning.
We have maintained good vibes,
which is not what I wanna say about Elon.
- I don't think, I disagree with you,
'cause good vibes in the moment,
there's a deep core of good vibes that persists through time
between you and Elon, and I would argue probably
between some of the other folks you mentioned.
- I think with Brett, I failed to reach out in private
to the degree that I should have,
and we never really had,
we had tried to set up a conversation in private
that never happened, but there was some communication,
but it would have been much better for me
to have made more of an effort in private than I did
before it spilled out into public,
and I would say that's true with other people as well.
- What kind of interaction in private
do you think you should have with Brett?
Because my case would be beforehand, and now still.
The case I would like, and this part of the criticism
you sent my way, maybe it's useful to go to that direction.
Actually, let's go to that direction,
because I think I disagree with your criticism
as you stated publicly, but this is very--
- You're talking about your interview with Connie?
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The thing you criticized me for
is actually the right thing to do with Brett.
Okay, you said, "Lex could have spoken with Connie
"in such a way as to have produced a useful document.
"He didn't do that because he has a fairly naive philosophy
"about the power of love."
- Let's see if you can maintain that philosophy
in the presence of this criticism.
- Let's go.
No, it's beautiful.
He seemed to think that if he just got through
the minefield to the end of the conversation,
where the two of them still were feeling good
about one another and they can hug it out,
that would be by definition a success.
So let me make the case for this power of love philosophy.
And first of all, I love you, Sam.
You're still an inspiration and somebody I deeply admire.
Okay. - Back at you.
- To me, in the case of Kanye,
it's not only that you get through the conversation
and have hugs, it's that the display
that you're willing to do that has power.
So even if it doesn't end in hugging,
the actual, the turning the other cheek,
the act of turning the other cheek itself communicates
both to Kanye later and to the rest of the world
that we should have empathy and compassion towards each other.
There is power to that.
Maybe that is naive, but I believe in the power of that.
So it's not that I'm trying to convince Kanye
that some of his ideas are wrong,
but I'm trying to illustrate that just the act of listening
and truly trying to understand the human being,
that opens people's minds to actually questioning
their own beliefs more.
It takes them out of the dogmatism,
deescalates the kind of dogmatism that I've been seeing.
So in that sense, I would say the power of love
is the philosophy you might apply to Bret
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.
Like making a strong case, like what are you doing?
This is gonna get a lot of people in trouble.
But instead just saying, like being a friend
in the dumbest of ways, being like respectful,
sending love their way, and just having a conversation
outside of all of this.
Like basically showing that like,
removing the emotional attachment to this debate,
even though you are very emotionally attached
because in the case of COVID specifically,
there is a very large number of lives at stake.
But removing all of that and remembering
that you have a friendship.
- Yeah, well, so I think these are highly
non-analogous cases, right?
So your conversation with Kanye misfired
from my point of view for a very different reason.
It has to do with Kanye.
I mean, so Kanye, I don't know, I've never met Kanye,
so obviously I don't know him.
But I think he's either obviously
in the midst of a mental health crisis
or he's a colossal asshole.
Or both, I mean, those aren't mutually exclusive.
So one of three possibilities,
he's either mentally ill, he's an asshole,
or he's mentally ill and an asshole.
- I think all three of those possibilities
are possible for the both of us as well.
- No, I would argue none of those are likely
for either of us, but--
- Possible.
- Not to say we don't have our moments, but.
So the reason not to talk to Kanye,
so I think you should have had the conversation
you had with him in private, that's great.
And I've got no criticism of what you said
had it been in private.
In public, I just thought you're not doing him a favor.
If he's mentally ill, right,
he's in the middle of a manic episode,
or I'm not a clinician, but I've heard it said of him
that he is bipolar, you're not doing him a favor
sticking a mic in front of him
and letting him go off on the Jews or anything else.
Right?
We know what he thought about the Jews,
we know that there's not much illumination
that's gonna come from him on that topic.
And if it is a symptom of his mental illness
that he thinks these things, well then,
you're not doing him a favor making that even more public.
If he's just an asshole and he's just an 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.
And I'm saying you can do that with love.
I mean, that's the other thing here is that
I don't agree that compassion and love always have
this patient, embracing, acquiescent face, right?
They don't always feel good to the recipient, right?
There is a sort of wisdom that you can wield
compassionately in moments like that
where someone's full of shit and you just make it
absolutely clear to them and to your audience
that they're full of shit.
And there's no hatred being communicated.
In fact, you could just, it's like,
listen, I'm gonna do everyone a favor right now
and just take your foot out of your mouth.
And the truth is, I just wouldn't have aired
the conversation.
Like, I just don't think it was a document
that had to get out there, right?
I get that many people,
this is not a signal you're likely to get
from your audience, right?
Like, I get that many people in your audience thought,
oh my God, that's awesome.
You're talking to Kanye and you're doing it in Lex style,
where it's just love and you're not treating him
§15Transcript · 2:12:42–2:21:51
like a pariah.
And you're holding this tension between
he's this creative genius who does work we love,
and yet he's having this moment that's so painful.
And what a tightrope walk.
And I get that maybe 90% of your audience saw it that way.
They're still wrong.
And I still think that was on balance
not a good thing to put out into the world.
- You don't think it opens up the mind and heart
of people that listen to that?
Just seeing a person--
- If it does, it's opening up in the wrong direction
where just gale force nonsense is coming in, right?
I think we should have an open mind and an open heart,
but there's some clear things here
that we have to keep in view.
One is the mental illness component is its own thing.
I don't pretend to understand what's going on with him,
but insofar as that's the reason he's saying what he's saying
do not put this guy on camera and let no one see it.
- Sorry, on that point, real quick,
I had a bunch of conversation with him offline
and I didn't get a sense of mental illness.
That's why I chose to sit down.
And I didn't get it.
I mean, mental illness is such a...
- But when he shows up in a gimp hood
on Alex Jones's podcast,
either that's more genius performance in his world
or he's unraveling further.
- I wouldn't put that under mental illness.
I think there's another conversation to be had
about how we treat artists.
- Right.
- Because they're weirdos.
They're very, I mean,
taking words from Kanye as if he's like Christopher Hitchens
or something like that,
like very eloquent, researched,
written many books on history and politics
and geopolitics, on psychology.
Kanye didn't do any of that.
He's an artist just spouting off.
And so there's a different style of conversation
and a different way to treat the words
that are coming out of his mouth.
- Let's leave the mental illness aside.
So if we're gonna say that there's no reason
to think he's mentally ill,
and this is just him being creative
and brilliant and opinionated,
well, then that falls into the asshole bucket for me.
It's like, then he's someone...
And honestly, the most offensive thing about him
in that interview, from my point of view,
is not the antisemitism, which we can talk about,
'cause I think there are problems just letting him
spread those memes as well.
But the most offensive thing
is just how delusionally egocentric he is
or was coming off in that interview and in others.
Like he has an estimation of himself
as this omnibus genius
not only to rival Shakespeare, to exceed Shakespeare.
I mean, he's like, he is the greatest mind
that has ever walked among us.
And he's more or less explicit on that point.
And yet he manages to talk for hours
without saying anything actually interesting or insightful
or factually illuminating.
So it's complete delusion of a very Trumpian sort.
It's like when Trump says he's a genius
who understands everything,
but nobody takes him seriously,
and one wonders whether Trump takes himself seriously,
Kanye seems to believe, he seems to believe his own press.
He actually thinks he's just a colossus.
And he may be a great musician.
It's certainly not my wheelhouse
to compare him to any other musicians.
But one thing that's patently obvious from your conversation
is he's not who he thinks he is intellectually or ethically
or in any other relevant way.
And so when you couple that
to the antisemitism he was spreading,
which was genuinely noxious and ill-considered
and has potential knock-on effects in the black community.
I mean, there's an ambient level of antisemitism
in the black community that is worth worrying about
and talking about anyway.
There's a bunch of guys playing the knockout game
in Brooklyn, just punching Orthodox Jews in the face.
And I think letting Kanye air his antisemitism
that publicly only raises the likelihood of that
rather than diminishes it.
- I don't know.
So let me say just a couple of things.
So one, my belief at the time was it doesn't,
it decreases it.
Showing empathy while pushing back
decreases the likelihood of that.
It does, it might on the surface look
like it's increasing it,
but that's simply because the antisemitism
or the hatred in general is brought to the surface.
And then people talk about it.
But I should also say that you're one of the only people
that wrote to me privately criticizing me.
And like out of the people I really respect and admire,
and that was really valuable.
That like I had to, painful,
'cause I had to think through it for a while.
And it still haunts me because the other kind of criticism
I got a lot of, people basically said,
things towards me based on who I am that they hate me.
Just--
- You mean antisemitic things?
Or that you-- - Yeah, antisemitic things.
I just hate the word antisemitic.
It's like racist.
- But here's the reality.
So I'm someone, so I'm Jewish,
although obviously not religious.
I have never taken,
I've been a student of the Holocaust, obviously.
I know a lot about that.
And there's reason to be a student of the Holocaust.
But in my lifetime and in my experience,
I have never taken antisemitism very seriously.
I have not worried about it.
I have not made a thing of it.
I've done exactly one podcast on it.
I had Barry Weiss on my podcast when her book came out.
But it really is a thing.
And it's something we have to keep an eye on societally
because it's a unique kind of hatred.
It's unique in that it seems,
it's knit together with, it's not just ordinary racism.
It's knit together with lots of conspiracy theories
that never seem to die out.
It can by turns equally animate the left
and the right politically.
I mean, what's so perverse about antisemitism,
look in the American context,
with the far right, with white supremacists,
Jews aren't considered white.
So they hate us in the same spirit
in which they hate black people or brown people
or anyone who's not white.
But on the left, Jews are considered extra white.
I mean, we're the extra beneficiaries
of white privilege, right?
And in the black community, that is often the case, right?
We're a minority that has thrived.
And it seems to stand as a counterpoint
to all of the problems that other minorities suffer,
in particular, African-Americans in the American context.
And yeah, Asians are now getting a little bit of this,
like the model minority issue.
But Jews have had this going on for centuries and millennia,
and it never seems to go away.
And again, this is something that I've never focused on,
but this has been at a slow boil
for as long as we've been alive.
And there's no guarantee it can't suddenly become
much, much uglier than we have any reason
to expect it to become, even in our society.
And so there's kind of a special concern
at moments like that,
where you have an immensely influential person
in a community who already has a checkered history
with respect to their own beliefs about the Jews
and the conspiracies and all the rest.
And he's just messaging, not especially fully opposed
by you and anyone else who's giving him the microphone
at that moment to the world.
And so that made my spidey sense tingle.
- Yeah, it's complicated.
The stakes are very high.
And 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.
I believe in the power, especially given who I am,
not always, but sometimes, often turning the other cheek.
- Oh, yeah, and again, things change
when they're for public consumption.
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.
Like if you're in an elevator,
like if I'm in an elevator with strangers,
I do not feel, and I hear someone say something stupid,
I don't feel an intellectual responsibility
to turn around in the confines of that space with them
§16Transcript · 2:21:56–2:31:24
and say, "Listen, that thing you just said
"about X, Y, or Z is completely false,
"and here's why," right?
But if somebody says it in front of me
on some public dais where I'm actually talking about ideas,
that's when there's a different responsibility
that comes online.
- The question is how you say it, how you say it.
- Or even whether you say anything in those.
I mean, there are moments,
there are definitely moments to privilege civility
or just to pick your battles.
I mean, sometimes it's just not worth it
to get into it with somebody out in real life.
- I just believe in the power of empathy,
both in the elevator and when a bunch of people
are listening, that when they see you
willing to consider another human being's perspective,
it just gives more power to your words after.
- Well, yeah, but until it doesn't.
'Cause you can extend charity too far, right?
It can be absolutely obvious
what someone's motives really are,
and they're dissembling about that, right?
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 putting pressure on a bad actor.
And again, the mental illness component here
makes it very difficult to think about
what you should or shouldn't have said to Kanye.
- So I think the topic of platforming is pretty interesting.
What's your view on platforming controversial people?
Let's start with the old, would you interview Hitler
on your podcast, and how would you talk to him?
Oh, and follow-up question.
Would you interview him in 1935, '41, and then '45?
- Well, I think we have an uncanny valley problem
with respect to this issue of whether or not
to speak to bad people, right?
So if a person's sufficiently bad, right?
If they're all the way out of the valley,
then you can talk to them, and it's just,
it's totally unproblematic to talk to them.
Because you don't have to spend any time
signaling to your audience that you don't agree with them.
And if you're interviewing Hitler,
you don't have to say, "Listen, I just gotta say,
"before we start, I don't agree with the whole
"genocide thing, and I just think you're killing
"mental patients in vans, and that was all bad,
"that was a bad look, Adolf."
So you just, it can go without saying
that you don't agree with this person,
and you're not platforming them to signal boost
their views, you're just trying to,
if they're sufficiently evil, you can go into it
very much as an anthropologist would.
You just wanna understand the nature of evil, right?
You just wanna understand this phenomenon,
like how is this person who they are, right?
And that strikes me as a intellectually interesting
and morally necessary thing to do, right?
So yes, I think you always interview Hitler.
- Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
- Well, when you know, once he's Hitler--
- But when do you know it?
- Once he's legitimately Hitler.
- But when do you know it?
Is genocide really happening?
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- It's not '42, '43?
- No, no, no, if you're on the cusp of it
where it's just he's someone who's gaining power
and you don't wanna help facilitate that,
then there's a question of whether you can undermine him
while pushing back against him in that interview, right?
So there are people I wouldn't talk to
just because I don't wanna give them oxygen
and I don't think that in the context of my interviewing them
I'm gonna be able to take the wind out of their sails
at all, right?
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.
It's like they can light many small fires
and it just takes too much time to put them out.
- That's more like on the topic of vaccines, for example,
having a debate on the efficacy of vaccines.
- Yeah.
It's not that I don't think sunlight
is usually the best disinfectant, I think it is.
Even these asymmetries aside,
I mean, it is true that a person
can always make a mess faster than you can clean it up,
right, but still there are debates worth having
even given that limitation.
And they're the right people to have those specific debates.
And there's certain topics where, you know,
I'll debate someone just because
I'm the right person for the job
and it doesn't matter how messy they're gonna be.
It's just worth it because I can make my points land
at least to the right part of the audience.
- So some of it is just your own skill and competence
and also interest in preparing correctly?
- Well, yeah, yeah, and the nature of the subject matter.
But there are other people who just by default,
I would say, well, there's no reason
to give this guy a platform.
And there are also people who are so confabulatory
that they're making such a mess with every sentence
that insofar as you're even trying to interact
with what they're saying,
you're by definition going to fail
and you're going to seem to fail
to a sufficiently large uninformed audience
where it's gonna be a net negative for the cause of truth
no matter how good you are.
So like, for instance, I think talking to Alex Jones
on any topic for any reason is probably a bad idea
because I just think he's just neurologically wired
to just utter a string of sentences.
He'll get 20 sentences out,
each of which contains more lies than the last.
And there's not time enough in the world
to run down, and certainly not time enough
in the span of a conversation,
to run down each of those leads to bedrock
so as to falsify it.
I mean, he'll just make shit up.
Or make shit up and then weave it in with half-truths
and micro-truths that give some semblance of credibility
to somebody out there.
I mean, apparently millions of people out there.
And there's just no way to untangle that
in real time with him.
- I have noticed that you have an allergic reaction
to confabularization.
- Confabulation, yeah.
- Confabulation.
That if somebody says something a little micro-untruth,
it really stops your brain.
- Here I'm not talking about micro-untruths,
I'm just talking about making up things out of whole cloth.
Just like, if someone says something,
well, what about, and then the thing they put
at the end of that sentence is just a set of pseudofacts,
right, that you can't possibly authenticate or not
in the span of that conversation.
They will, you know, whether it's about UFOs
or anything else, right,
they will seem to make you look like an ignoramus
when in fact everything they're saying is specious,
right, whether they know it or not.
I mean, there's some people who are just crazy,
there's some people who are just bullshitting
and they're not even tracking whether it's true,
it just feels good, and then some people
are consciously lying about things.
- But don't you think there's just a kind of jazz
masterpiece of untruth that you should be able
to just wave off by saying like,
well, none of that is backed up by any evidence
and just almost like take it to the humor place?
- Well, yeah, but the thing is,
I mean, the place I'm familiar with doing this
and not doing this is on specific conspiracies
like 9/11 truth, right?
Like, the 9/11, so because of my,
because of what 9/11 did to my intellectual life,
I mean, it really just, you know,
it sent me down a path for the better part of a decade.
Like I became a critic of religion.
I don't know if I was ever gonna be a critic of religion,
right, but it happened to be in my wheelhouse
'cause 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
and so I was, you know,
I devoted more than a full decade of my life
to just, you know, what is real here?
What is possible?
What is the nature of subjective reality
and how does it relate to reality at large
and is there anything to, you know,
who was someone like Jesus or Buddha
and are these people frauds or are they,
are these just myths or is there really a continuum
of insight to be had here that is interesting?
So I spent a lot of time on that question
through my 20, the full decade of my 20s.
- And that was launched in part by 9/11 Truth Hour?
- No, but then when 9/11 happened,
I had spent all this time reading religious books,
understanding, empathically understanding
the motivations of religious people, right,
knowing just how fully certain people believe
what they say they believe, right?
§17Transcript · 2:31:25–2:41:22
So I took religious convictions very seriously
and then people started flying planes into our buildings
and so I knew that there was something to be said about--
- Allegedly.
- The core doctrines of Islam, yeah, exactly.
So I went down, so that became my wheelhouse for a time,
you know, terrorism and jihadism and related topics
and so the 9/11 truth conspiracy thing
kept, you know, getting aimed at me
and the question was, well, do I wanna debate these people?
- Yeah, Alex Jones, perhaps.
- Yeah, so Alex Jones, I think, was an early purveyor
of it, although I don't think I knew who he was
at that point.
And so, and privately, I had some very long debates
with people who, you know, one person in my family
went way down that rabbit hole and I just, you know,
every six months or so, I'd literally write
the two-hour email, you know, that would try to,
try to deprogram 'em, you know, however ineffectually
and so I went back and forth for years on that topic
with, in private, with people, but I could see
the structure of the conspiracy, I could see the nature
of how impossible it was to play whack-a-mole
sufficiently well so as to convince anyone of anything
who was not seeing the problematic structure
of that way of thinking.
I mean, it's not actually a thesis,
it's a proliferation of anomalies that don't,
you can't actually connect all the dots
that are being pointed to, they don't connect
in a coherent way, they're incompatible theses
that are not, and their incompatibility
is not being acknowledged.
But they're running this algorithm of things are,
things are never what they seem, there's always
malicious conspirators doing things perfectly.
We see all, we see evidence of human incompetence
everywhere else, no one can tie their shoes,
you know, expertly anywhere else, but over here,
people are perfectly competent,
they're perfectly concealing things,
like thousands of people are collaborating,
you know, inexplicably, I mean, incentivized by what,
who knows, they're collaborating to murder
thousands of their neighbors and no one is breathing
a peep about it, no one's getting caught on camera,
no one's breathed a word of it to a journalist,
and so I've dealt with that style of thinking
and I know what it's like to be in the weeds
of a conversation like that and the person will say,
okay, well, but what do you make of the fact
that all those F-16s were flown 800 miles out to sea
on the morning of 9/11 doing an exercise
that hadn't even been scheduled for that day,
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,
so like that detail, hadn't even been scheduled
for that day, it was inexplicably run that day,
so how long would it take to track that down, right,
the idea that this is anomalous,
like there was an F-16 exercise run on,
and it wasn't even supposed to be run that day, right?
Someone like Alex Jones, their speech pattern
is to pack as much of that stuff in as possible
at the highest velocity that the person can speak
and unless you're knocking down each one of those things
to that audience, you appear to just be uninformed,
you appear to just not be,
wait a minute, he didn't know about the F-16s?
- Yeah, sure.
- He doesn't know about Project Mockingbird?
You haven't heard about Project Mockingbird?
I just made up Project Mockingbird, I don't know what it is,
but that's the kind of thing that comes tumbling out
in a conversation like that,
that's the kind of thing, frankly,
I was worried about in the COVID conversation
because not that someone like Brett would do it consciously,
but someone like Brett is swimming
in a sea of misinformation on social,
living on Twitter, getting people,
sending the blog post and the study from the Philippines
that showed that in this cohort, Ivermectin did X, right,
and to actually run anything to ground, right,
you have to actually do the work
journalistically and scientifically
and run it to ground, right?
So for some of these questions,
you actually have to be a statistician to say,
okay, they used the wrong statistics in this experiment.
Now, yes, we could take all the time to do that
or we could at every stage along the way
in a context where we have experts we can trust
go with what 97% of the experts are saying about X,
about the safety of mRNA,
about the transmissibility of COVID,
about whether to wear masks or not wear masks.
And I completely agree that that broke down
unacceptably over the last few years,
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.
It was, I think it was a symptom of that
and a cause of that, right?
And I think we're living in an environment where
people, we've basically, we have trained ourselves
not to be able to agree about facts on any topic,
no matter how urgent, right?
What's flying in our sky?
What's happening in Ukraine?
Is Putin just denazifying Ukraine?
I mean, like, there are people who we respect
who are spending time down that particular rabbit hole.
Like this is, maybe there are a lot of Nazis in Ukraine
and that's the real problem.
Right, maybe Putin's,
maybe Putin's not the bad actor here, right?
How much time do I have to spend
empathizing with Putin to the point of thinking,
well, maybe Putin's got a point and it's like,
what about the polonium and the nerve agents
and the killing of journalists and the Navalny?
And like, does that count?
Well, no, listen, I'm not paying so much attention to that
because I'm following all these interesting people
on Twitter and they're giving me
some pro-Putin material here.
And there is a, there are some Nazis in Ukraine.
It's not like there are no Nazis in Ukraine.
How am I gonna weight these things?
I think people are being driven crazy by Twitter.
- Yeah.
But you're kind of speaking to conspiracy theories
that pollute everything.
And then, but every example you gave
is kind of a bad faith style of conversation.
- But it's not necessarily knowingly bad faith by,
I mean, the people who are worried about Ukrainian Nazis,
to my, I mean, they're some of the same people.
They're the same people who are worried about
ivermectin got suppressed.
Like ivermectin is really a panacea,
but it got suppressed for,
because no one could make billions on it.
It's the same, it's literally,
in many cases, the same people and the same efforts
to unearth those facts.
- And you're saying it's very difficult
to have conversations with those kinds of people.
What about a conversation with Trump himself?
Would you do a podcast with Trump?
- No, I don't think so.
I don't think I'd be learning anything about him.
It's like with Hitler,
and I'm not comparing Trump to Hitler.
- But Clipse guy, here's your chance.
You got this one.
- With certain world historical figures,
I would just feel like, okay,
this is an opportunity to learn something
that I'm not gonna learn.
I think Trump is among the most superficial people
we have ever laid eyes on.
Like he is in public view, right?
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.
And I think,
so I think the liability of,
for instance, I think Joe Rogan was very wise
not to have Trump on his podcast.
I think all he would have been doing is,
he would have put himself in a situation
where he couldn't adequately contain
the damage Trump was doing,
and he was just gonna make Trump seem cool
to a whole new,
a potentially new cohort of his massive audience, right?
I mean, they would have had a lot of laughs.
Trump's funny.
The entertainment value of things is so influential.
I mean, there was that one debate where Trump
got a massive laugh on his line,
"Only Rosie O'Donnell," right?
The truth is we're living in a political system
where if you can get a big laugh during a political debate,
you win.
It doesn't matter who you are.
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
the threat of nuclear war or anything else.
We're monkeys, right?
And we like to laugh.
- Well, 'cause you brought up Joe.
He's somebody like you I look up to.
§18Transcript · 2:41:25–2:50:56
I've learned a lot from him
because I think who he is privately as a human being,
also he's kind of the voice of curiosity to me.
He inspired me that,
so unending open-minded curiosity,
much like you are the voice of reason.
They recently had a podcast,
Joe had recently had a podcast with Jordan Peterson,
and he brought you up saying they still have a hope for you.
- Yeah, I saw that clip, yeah.
- Any chance you talk to Joe again
and reinvigorate your friendship?
- Yeah, well, I reached out to him privately
when I saw that clip.
- Did you use the power of love?
- Joe knows I love him and consider him a friend, right?
So there's no issue there.
He also knows I'll be happy to do his podcast
when we get that together.
So I've got no policy of not talking to Joe
or not doing his podcast.
I mean, I think we got a little sideways
along these same lines where we've talked about
Brett and Elon and other people.
It was never to that degree with Joe
because Joe's in a very different lane, right?
He's, and consciously so.
I mean, Joe is a standup comic who interviews,
who just is interested in everything,
interviews the widest conceivable variety of people
and just lets his interests collide with their expertise
or lack of expertise.
I mean, he's, again, it's a super wide variety of people.
He'll talk about anything
and he can always pull the rip cord saying,
I don't know what the fuck I'm saying.
I'm a comic, I'm stoned.
We just drank too much, right?
Like it's very entertaining.
It's all in, to my eye, it's all in good faith.
I think Joe is an extraordinarily ethical, good person.
- Also doesn't use Twitter.
Doesn't really use Twitter.
- Yeah, yeah.
The crucial difference though is that because he
is an entertainer first.
I mean, I'm not saying he's not smart
and he doesn't understand things.
He, I mean, what's potentially confusing
is he's very smart and he's also very informed.
His full-time job is taught, you know,
when he's not doing standup
or doing color commentary for the UFC,
his full-time job is talking to lots of very smart people
at great length.
So he's created a, you know,
the Joe Rogan University for himself
and he's gotten a lot of information crammed into his head.
So it's not that he's uninformed,
but he can always, when he feels that he's uninformed
or when it turns out he was wrong about something,
he can always pull the ripcord and say,
I'm just a comic, we were stoned, it was fun.
You know, don't take medical advice from me.
I don't play a doctor on the internet, right?
I can't quite do that, right?
You can't quite do that.
We're in different lanes.
I'm not saying you and I are in exactly the same lane,
but for much of Joe's audience,
I'm just this establishment shill
who's just banging on about, you know,
the universities and medical journals.
It's not true, but that would be the perception.
And as a counterpoint to a lot of what's being said
on Joe's podcast or, you know,
certainly Brett's podcast on these topics,
I can see how they would form that opinion.
But in reality, if you listen to me long enough,
you hear that I've said as much
against the woke nonsense as anyone,
even any lunatic on the right
who can only keep that bright,
that bright, shining object in view, right?
So there's nothing that Candace Owens has said
about wokeness that I haven't said about wokeness
as far, insofar as she's speaking rationally about wokeness.
But we have to be able to keep multiple things in view,
right?
If you could only look at the problem of wokeness
and you couldn't acknowledge the problem of Trump
and Trumpism and QAnon
and the explosion of irrationality
that was happening on the right
and bigotry that was happening on the right,
you were just disregarding half of the landscape.
And many people took half of the problem in recent years.
The last five years is a story of many people
taking half of the problem
and monetizing that half of the problem.
And getting captured by an audience
that only wanted that half of the problem
talked about in that way.
And this is the larger issue of audience capture,
which is very, I'm sure it's an ancient problem,
but it's a very helpful phrase
that I think comes to us courtesy
of our mutual friend, Eric Weinstein.
And audience capture is a thing.
And I believe I've witnessed many casualties of it.
And if there's anything I've been on guard against
in my life, professionally, it's been that.
And when I noticed that I had a lot of people in my audience
who didn't like my criticizing Trump,
I really leaned into it.
And when I noticed that a lot of the other cohort
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.
There are people who have created, knowingly or not,
there are people who've created
different incentives for themselves
because of how they've monetized their podcast
and because of the kind of signal
they've responded to in their audience.
And I worry about, Brett would consider this
a totally invidious ad hominem thing to say,
but I really do worry that that's happened to Brett.
I 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.
It's just, it makes no sense.
- Do you think in part audience capture can explain that?
- I absolutely think it can, yeah.
- What about, do you, like for example,
do you feel pressure to not admit
that you made a mistake on COVID
or made a mistake on Trump?
I'm not saying you feel that way,
but do you feel this pressure?
So you've attacked audience capture
within the way you do stuff,
so you don't feel as much pressure from the audience,
but within your own ego?
- I mean, again, the people who think I'm wrong
about any of these topics are gonna think,
okay, you're just not admitting that you're wrong,
but now we're having a dispute about specific facts.
There are things that I believed about COVID
or worried might be true about COVID two years ago
that I no longer believe or I'm not so worried about now,
and vice versa.
I mean, things have flipped.
Certain things have flipped upside down.
The question is, was I wrong?
So here's a cartoon version of it,
but this is something I said probably 18 months ago,
and it's still true.
You know, when I saw what Brett was doing on COVID,
let's call it two years ago,
I said, even if he is right,
even if it turns out that ivermectin is a panacea
and the mRNA vaccines kill millions of people,
he's still wrong right now.
His reasoning is still flawed right now.
His facts still suck right now,
and his confidence is unjustified now.
That was true then.
That will always be true then,
and not much has changed for me to revisit
any of my time points along the way.
Again, I will totally concede that if I had teenage boys
and their schools were demanding that they be vaccinated
with the mRNA vaccine,
I would be powerfully annoyed, right?
Like I wouldn't know what I was gonna do,
and I would be doing more research about myocarditis,
and I'd be badgering our doctors,
and I would be worried that we have a medical system
and a pharmaceutical system and a healthcare system
and a public health system that's not incentivized
to look at any of this in a fine-grained way,
and they just want one blanket admonition
to the entire population,
just take the shot, you idiots.
I view that largely as a result, a panicked response
to the misinformation explosion that happened
and the populist resistance animated by misinformation
that just made it impossible to get anyone to cooperate.
So it's just, part of it is, again,
a pendulum swing in the wrong direction,
somewhat analogous to the woke response to Trump
and the Trumpist response to woke, right?
So a lot of people have just gotten pushed around
for bad reasons, but understandable reasons.
§19Transcript · 2:50:58–3:00:33
But yes, there are caveats to my,
things have changed about my view of COVID,
but the question is, if you roll back the clock 18 months,
was I wrong to want to platform Eric Topol,
a very well-respected cardiologist on this topic,
or Nicholas Christakis to talk about the network effects
of whether we should close schools, right?
He's written a book on COVID,
network effects are his wheelhouse,
both as an MD and as a sociologist.
There was a lot that we believed we knew
about the efficacy of closing schools during pandemics,
right, during the Spanish flu pandemic and others, right?
But there's a lot we didn't know about COVID.
We didn't know how negligible the effects would be on kids
compared to older people.
We didn't know, like the-
- My problem, I really enjoyed your conversation
with Eric Topol, but also didn't.
So he's one of the great communicators in many ways
on Twitter, like distillation of the current data,
but he, I hope I'm not overstating it,
but there is a bit of an arrogance from him
that I think could be explained by him being exhausted
by being constantly attacked by conspiracy theory,
like anti-vaxxers.
To me, the same thing happens with people
that start drifting to being right-wing,
is they get attacked so much by the left,
they become almost irrational and arrogant
in their beliefs.
And I felt your conversation with Eric Topol
did not sufficiently empathize with people
that have skepticism, but also did not sufficiently
communicate uncertainty we have.
So like many of the decisions you made,
many of the things you were talking about,
were kind of saying there's a lot of uncertainty,
but this is the best thing we could do now.
- Well, it was a forced choice.
You're gonna get COVID, do you wanna be vaccinated
when you get it?
That was always, in my view, an easy choice.
And it's up until you start breaking apart the cohorts
and you start saying, okay, wait a minute,
there is this myocarditis issue in young men.
Let's talk about that.
Before that story emerged, it was just clear that
if it's not knocking down transmission
as much as we had hoped,
it is still mitigating severe illness and death.
And I still believe that it is the current view
of most people competent to analyze the data,
that we lost something like 300,000 people
unnecessarily in the US because of vaccine hesitancy.
- But I think there's a way to communicate with humility
about the uncertainty of things
that would increase the vaccination rate.
- I do believe that it is rational and sometimes effective
to signal impatience with certain bad ideas, right?
And certain conspiracy theories
and certain forms of misinformation.
- I think so.
I just think it makes you look like a douchebag most times.
- Well, I mean, certain people are persuadable,
certain people are not persuadable,
but it's, no, 'cause there's not enough,
it's the opportunity cost.
Not everything can be given a patient hearing.
So you can't have a physics conference
and then let people in to just trumpet their pet theories
about the grand unified vision of physics
when they're obviously crazy
or they're obviously half crazy
or they're just not, you know,
the people, like, 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?
And the truth is, I think I'm one of those people
on the topic of COVID, right?
Like, it's never that I felt,
"Listen, I know exactly what's going on here.
"I know these mRNA vaccines are safe.
"I know exactly how to run a lockdown."
No, this is a situation where you want the actual pilots
to fly the plane, right?
We needed experts who we could trust.
And insofar as our experts got captured
by all manner of thing,
I mean, some of them got captured by Trump,
some of them were made to look ridiculous
just standing next to Trump
while he was bloviating about, you know, whatever,
that it's just gonna go away, there's just 15 people,
you know, there's 15 people in a cruise ship
and it's just gonna go away, there's gonna be no problem.
Or it's like when he said,
"Many of these doctors think I understand this
"better than them.
"They're just amazed at how I understand this."
And you've got doctors, real doctors,
the heads of the CDC and NIH standing around
just ashen faced while he's talking, you know.
All of this was deeply corrupting
of the public communication of science.
And then again, I've banged on
about the depredations of wokeness.
The woke thing was a disaster, right?
Still is a disaster.
But it doesn't mean that,
but the thing is there's a big difference
between me and Brett in this case.
I didn't do 100 podcasts on COVID.
I did like two podcasts on COVID.
The measure of my concern about COVID
can be measured in how many podcasts I did on it, right?
It's like once we had a sense of how to live with COVID,
I was just living with COVID, right?
Like, okay, get vaxxed or don't get vaxxed,
wear a mask or don't wear a mask,
travel or don't travel.
Like you've got a few things to decide,
but my kids were stuck at home on iPads for too long.
I didn't agree with that.
You know, it was obviously not functional.
Like I criticized that on the margins,
but there was not much to do about it.
But the thing I didn't do is make this my life
and just browbeat people with one message or another.
We need a public health regime
where we can trust what the competent people
are saying to us about, you know,
what medicines are safe to take.
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.
But in the absence of that,
it's gonna proliferate for understandable reasons.
And that's gonna,
it's not gonna be good next time
when something orders of magnitude more dangerous hits us.
And that's, I spent, you know,
insofar as I think about this issue,
I think much more about next time than this time.
- Before this COVID thing,
you and Brett had some good conversations.
I would say we're friends.
What's your, what do you admire most about Brett
outside of all the criticism we've had
about this COVID topic?
- Well, I think Brett is very smart
and he's a very ethical person
who wants good things for the world.
I mean, I have no reason to doubt that.
So the fact that we're on, you know,
we're crosswise on this issue is not,
does not mean that I think he's a bad person.
I mean, the thing that worried me about what he was doing,
and this was true of Joe and this was true of Elon,
this 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.
And I do, I did worry that,
yeah, people were making decisions
on the basis of the information
that was getting shared there.
And that's why I was, I think, fairly circumspect.
I just said, okay, give me the center
of the fairway expert opinion at this time point
and at this time point and at this time point,
and then I'm out, right?
I don't have any more to say about this.
I'm not an expert on COVID.
I'm not an expert on the safety of mRNA vaccines.
If something changes so as to become newsworthy,
then maybe I'll do a podcast.
So I just did a podcast on the lab leak, right?
I was never skeptical of the lab leak hypothesis.
Brett was very early on saying this is a lab leak, right,
at a point where my only position was,
who cares if it's a lab leak, right?
Like, the thing we have to get straight is,
what do we do given the nature of this pandemic?
- But also we should say that you've actually stated
that it is a possibility.
- Oh, yeah.
- Which doesn't quite matter.
- The time to figure that out, now, I've actually,
I have had my podcast guest on this topic
change my view of this because one of the guests,
Alina Chan, made the point that, no,
actually the best time to figure out the origin of this
is immediately, right?
Because you lose touch with the evidence.
I hadn't really been thinking about that.
Like, if you come back after a year,
§20Transcript · 3:00:35–3:09:59
there are certain facts you might not be able
to get in hand, but I've always felt that
it didn't matter for two reasons.
One is we had the genome of the virus
and we could design, we very quickly design,
immediately designing vaccines against that genome,
and that's what we had to do.
And then we had to figure out how to vaccinate
and to mitigate and to develop treatments and all that.
So the origin story didn't matter.
Generically speaking, either origin story
was politically inflammatory and made the Chinese look bad.
And the Chinese response to this looked bad,
whatever the origin story, right?
They're not cooperating.
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 I would argue that the wet market origin
is even more politically invidious
than the lab leak origin.
- Why do you think?
- Because for the lab leak, to my eye,
the lab leak could happen to anyone, right?
We're all running, all these advanced countries
are running these dangerous labs.
That's a practice that we should be worried about
in general.
We know lab leaks are a problem.
There've been multiple lab leaks of even worse things
that haven't gotten out of hand in this way,
but worse pathogens.
We're wise to be worried about this.
And on some level, it could happen to anyone, right?
The wet market makes them look like barbarians
living in another century.
Like you gotta clean up those wet markets.
Like what are you doing putting a bat on top of a pangolin,
on top of a duck?
It's like, get your shit together.
So if anything, the wet market makes them look worse,
in my view.
Now, I'm sure that what they actually did
to conceal a lab leak, if it was a lab leak,
all of that's gonna look odious.
- Do you think we'll ever get to the bottom of that?
I mean, one of the big negative,
I would say failures of Anthony Fauci and so on
is to be transparent and clear,
and just a good communicator
about gain-in-function research,
the dangers of that,
why it's a useful way of research,
but it's also dangerous.
Just being transparent about that,
as opposed to just coming off really shady.
Of course, the conspiracy theorists
and the politicians are not helping,
but this just created a giant mess.
- Yeah, no, I would agree.
So that exchange with Fauci and Rand Paul,
that went viral,
yeah, I would agree that Fauci looked like
he was taking refuge in a very lawyered language,
and not giving a straightforward account
of what we do and why we do it.
So yeah, I think it looked shady, it played shady,
and it probably was shady.
I mean, I don't know how personally entangled
he is with any of this,
but yeah, the gain-of-function research
is something that I think we're wise to be worried about.
And insofar as I judge myself adequate
to have an opinion on this,
I think it should be banned, right?
Like probably a podcast I'll do,
if you or somebody else doesn't do it in the meantime,
I would like a virologist to defend it
against a virologist who would criticize it.
Forget about just the gain-of-function research.
I don't even understand virus hunting at this point.
It's like, I don't know,
I don't even know why you need to go into a cave
to find this next virus that could be circulating
among bats that may jump zoonotically to us.
Why do that when we can sequence in a day
and make vaccines in a weekend?
I mean, like what kind of headstart
do you think you're getting?
- That's a surprising new thing,
how quickly you can develop a vaccine.
- Exactly.
- That's, yeah, that's really interesting.
But the shadiness around LabLeak.
- 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
to suggest that he was right about ivermectin
and about mRNA vaccines and all the rest.
Like, no, none of that connects.
And it was possible to be falsely confident.
Like, you shouldn't have been confident about LabLeak.
No one should have been confident about LabLeak early,
even if it turns out to be LabLeak, right?
It was always plausible.
It was never definite.
It still isn't definite.
Zoonotic is also quite plausible.
It certainly was super plausible then.
Both are politically uncomfortable.
Both at the time were inflammatory to be banging on about
when we were trying to secure some kind of cooperation
from the Chinese, right?
So there's a time for these things.
And it's possible to be right by accident, right?
The style of reasoning matters whether you're right or not.
You know, it's like, because your style of reasoning
is dictating what you're gonna do on the next topic.
- Sure, but this multivariate situation here,
it's really difficult to know what's right on COVID,
given all the uncertainty, all the chaos,
especially when you step outside
the pure biology, virology of it,
and you start to get into policy.
It's really-- - Yeah, it's just trade-offs.
- Like transmissibility of the virus.
Just knowing if 65% of the population gets vaccinated,
what effect would that have?
Just even knowing those things,
just modeling all those things.
Given all the other incentives, I mean, Pfizer,
I don't know what to think. - But you had the CEO
of Pfizer on your podcast.
Did you leave that conversation feeling like
this is a person who is consciously
reaping windfall profits on a dangerous vaccine?
Vaccine and putting everyone at intolerable risk?
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 or something?
- The thing I sensed, and I felt in part,
it was a failure on my part,
but I sensed that I was talking to a politician.
So it's not thinking of,
there was malevolence there or benevolence.
There was-- - He just had a job to do.
- He put on a suit and I was talking to a suit,
not a human being.
Now, he said that his son was a big fan of the podcast,
which is why he wanted to do it.
So I thought I would be talking to a human being.
And I asked challenging questions,
what I thought the internet thinks otherwise.
Every single question in that interview
was a challenging one,
but it wasn't grilling,
which is what people seem to want to do
with pharmaceutical companies.
There's a deep distrust of pharmaceutical companies.
- Well, what's the alternative?
I mean, I totally get that windfall profits
at a time of a public health emergency looks bad.
It is a bad look, right?
But how do we reward and return cash
and return capital to risk takers
who will spend a billion dollars
to design a new drug for a disease
that maybe only harms a single digit percentage
of the population?
It's like, well, what do we want to encourage?
And who do we want to get rich?
I mean, so like the person who cures cancer,
do we want that person to get rich or not?
We want the person who gave us the iPhone to get rich,
but we don't want the person who cures cancer to get rich?
I mean, what are we trying to do?
- I think it's a very gray area.
So what we want is the person who declares
that they have a cure for cancer
to have authenticity and transparency.
I think we're good now as a population smelling bullshit.
And there is something about the Pfizer CEO, for example,
just CEOs of pharmaceutical companies in general,
just because they're so lawyered up,
so much marketing and PR people,
that they are, you just smell bullshit.
You're not talking to a real human.
That it just feels like none of it is transparent
to us as a public.
So like this whole talking point
that Pfizer's only interested in helping people
just doesn't ring true,
even though it very well could be true.
It's the same thing with Bill Gates,
who seems to be at scale helping a huge amount
of people in the world.
And yet there's something about the way
§21Transcript · 3:10:01–3:19:03
he delivers that message,
where people are like, this seems suspicious.
What's happening underneath this?
There's certain kinds of communication styles
that seem to be more,
serve as better catalysts for conspiracy theories.
And I'm not sure what that is,
because I don't think there's an alternative
for capitalism in delivering drugs that help people.
But also at the same time,
there seems to need to be more transparency.
And plus, like regulation that actually makes sense
versus, it seems like pharmaceutical companies
are susceptible to corruption.
- Yeah, I worry about all that.
But I also do think that most of the people
going into those fields,
and most of the people going into government,
- They wanna do good. - Are doing it for good.
They're non-psychopaths trying to get good things done
and trying to solve hard problems.
And they're not trying to get rich.
I mean, many of the people are, it's like,
there,
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, right?
It's not that there are that many bad people.
And yes, it makes the truly bad people
that much more remarkable and worth paying attention to,
but the bad incentives and the power of bad ideas
do much more harm.
Because I mean, that's what gets good people
running in the wrong direction,
or doing things that are clearly creating
unnecessary suffering.
- You've had, and I hope still have,
a friendship with Elon Musk,
especially over the topic of AI.
You have a lot of interesting ideas that you both share,
concerns that you both share.
Well, let me first ask, what do you admire most about Elon?
- Well, I had a lot of fun with Elon.
I like Elon a lot.
I mean, Elon, I knew as a friend, I like a lot.
And it's not gonna surprise anyone.
I mean, he's done and he's continuing to do amazing things.
And I think he's,
I think many of his aspirations are realized,
the world will be a much better place.
I think it's just, it's amazing to see what he's built
and what he's attempted to build
and what he may yet build.
- So with Tesla, with SpaceX, with--
- Yeah, I'm a fan of almost all of that.
I mean, there are wrinkles to a lot of that,
or some of that.
- All humans are full of wrinkles.
- There's something very Trumpian about how he's acting
on Twitter, right?
I mean, Twitter, I think Twitter's,
he thinks Twitter's great.
He bought the place because he thinks it's so great.
I think Twitter's driving him crazy, right?
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.
I mean, so like he, the thing that I objected to
with him on Twitter is not that he bought it
and made changes to it.
I mean, that was not,
again, I remain agnostic as to whether or not
he can improve the platform.
It was how he was personally behaving on Twitter,
not just toward me, but toward the world.
I think when you 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, right?
That's not what it seems.
And you link to a website that previously claimed
that Hillary Clinton was dead
and that a body double was campaigning in her place.
That thing was exploding in Trumpistan
as a conspiracy theory, right?
And it was having its effect.
And it matters that he was signal boosting it
in front of 130 million people.
And so it is with saying that your former employee,
Yoel Roth is a pedophile, right?
I mean, that has real consequences.
It appeared to be complete bullshit.
And now this guy's getting inundated with death threats,
right, and Elon, all of that's totally predictable, right?
And so he's behaving quite recklessly.
And there's a long list of things like that
that he's done on Twitter.
It's not ethical, it's not good for him,
it's not good for the world, it's not serious.
It's a very adolescent relationship
to real problems in our society.
And so my problem with how he's behaved
is that he's purported to touch real issues by turns.
Like, okay, do I give the satellites to Ukraine or not?
Do I minimize their use of them or not?
Should I publicly worry about World War III or not, right?
He's doing this shit on Twitter, right?
And at the same moment, he's doing these other
very impulsive, ill-considered things,
and he's not showing any willingness
to really clean up the mess he makes.
He brings Kanye on, knowing he's an anti-Semite
who's got mental health problems,
and then kicks him off for a swastika,
which I probably wouldn't have kicked him off
for a swastika.
It's like, that's even, like,
can you really kick people off for swastikas?
Is that something that you get banned for?
I mean, are you a free speech absolutist
if you can't let a swastika show up?
I'm not even sure that's an enforceable terms of service.
Right, there are moments to use swastikas
that are not conveying hate and not raising
the risk of violence.
- Clip that.
- Yeah.
But so much of what he's doing, given that he's,
again, scale matters.
He's doing this in front of 130 million people.
That's very different than a million people,
and that's very different than 100,000 people.
And 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.
- Did you try to correct him,
sort of highlighting things he might be wrong on?
- Yeah.
- Or did you use the Lex Power love method?
I should write, like, a pamphlet for Sam Harris.
- Well, no, but it was totally coming from a place
of love because I was concerned about his reputation.
I was concerned about what he,
I mean, there was a twofold concern.
I could see what was happening with the tweet.
I mean, he'd had this original tweet that was,
I think it was, "Panic over COVID is dumb,"
or something like that, right?
This is way, this is in March.
This is early March, 2020.
- Oh, super early days.
- Super early.
So when nobody knew anything,
but we knew, we saw what was happening in Italy, right?
It was totally kicking off.
- God, that was a wild time.
That's when the toilet paper.
- It was wild, it was totally wild.
But that became the most influential tweet
on Twitter for that week.
I mean, it had more engagement than any other tweet,
more than any crazy thing Trump was tweeting.
I mean, it was, it went off, again,
it was just a nuclear bomb of information.
And I could see that people were responding to it like,
"Wait a minute, okay, here's this genius technologist
who must have inside information about everything, right?
Surely he knows something that is not on the surface
about this pandemic."
And they're reading, they were reading into it
a lot of information that I knew wasn't there, right?
And at the time, I didn't even,
I didn't think he had any reason to be suggesting that.
I think he was just firing off a tweet, right?
So I reached out to him in private,
and I mean, because it was a private text conversation,
I won't talk about the details,
but I'm just saying, that's a case,
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, I thought it was harmful
in every sense, because it was being misinterpreted.
And it was like, okay, you can say that panic
over anything is dumb, fine,
but this was not how this was landing.
This was like non-issue conspiracy,
there's gonna be no COVID in the US,
it's gonna peter out, it's just gonna become a cold.
I mean, that's how this was getting received.
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.
- I don't know if it was obvious,
but it was obvious there was a significant probability
that it could be a big deal.
§22Transcript · 3:19:04–3:28:43
- I remember in March, it wasn't unclear,
how big, 'cause there's still stories of it,
it's probably going to, the big concern,
the hospitals might overfill,
but it's gonna die out in two months or something.
- Yeah, we didn't know, but there was no way
we weren't going to have tens of thousands of deaths
at a minimum at that point.
And it was totally rational to be worried
about hundreds of thousands.
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 US.
And that didn't seem, it was, I think, appropriately hedged,
but 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 it'd be very surprising not to have
that order of magnitude and not something much, much less.
And so anyway, I mean, again, to close the story on Elon,
I could see how this was being received,
and I tried to get him to walk that back.
And then we had a fairly long and detailed exchange
on this issue, and that, so that intervention didn't work.
And it was not done, I was not an asshole.
I was not, I was just concerned for him, for the world,
and then there are other relationships where I didn't take,
but again, that's an example where taking the time
didn't work, right, privately.
There are other relationships where I thought,
okay, there's just gonna be more trouble than it's worth,
and I just ignored it, and there's a lot of that.
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.
Like, what good is it for me to talk about Elon or Brett
or any of these people in public?
- I think there's a lot of good,
because those friendships, listen, as a fan,
these are the conversations that I loved,
love as a fan, and it feels like COVID
has robbed the world of these conversations.
Because you are exchanging back and forth on Twitter,
but that's not what I mean by conversations,
like long-form discussions, like a debate about COVID,
like a normal debate.
- But there's no, there is no,
Elon and I shouldn't be debating COVID.
- You should be.
Here's the thing, with humility,
like basically saying, we don't really know,
like the Rogan method, we're just a bunch of idiots.
Like, one is an engineer, you're a neuroscientist.
It just kind of, okay, here's the evidence,
and be like normal people.
That's what everybody was doing.
The whole world was trying to figure out,
what the hell, what?
- Yeah, but the issue was that at that,
so at the moment I had this collision with Elon,
certain things were not debatable.
It was just, it was absolutely clear where this was going.
It wasn't clear how far it was gonna go,
or how quickly we would mitigate it,
but it was absolutely clear
that it was gonna be an issue, right?
The train had come off the tracks in Italy.
We knew we weren't gonna seal our borders.
There were already people, you know,
who, there are already cases known to many of us personally
in the US at that point.
And he was operating by a very different logic
that I couldn't engage with.
- Sure, but that logic represents a part of the population,
and there's a lot of interesting topics
that have a lot of uncertainty around them,
like the effectiveness of masks, 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.
It broke down very early at, this is, you know,
there's nothing to talk about here.
Like, it's like either there's a water bottle on the table
or there isn't, right?
- Technically, there's only 1/4 of a water bottle.
So what defines a water bottle?
Is it the water inside the water bottle,
or is it the water bottle?
What I'm giving you is an example of,
it's worth a conversation.
- This is difficult because this is,
we had an exchange in private, and I want to honor,
not exposing the details of it,
but, you know, the details convinced me
that there was not a follow-up conversation on that topic.
- On this topic.
That said, I hope, and I hope to be part
of helping that happen, that the friendship is rekindled
because one of the topics I care a lot about,
artificial intelligence, you've had great public
and private conversations about this topic.
And it seems like-- - Yeah, and Elon
was very formative in my taking that issue seriously.
I mean, he and I went to that initial conference
in Puerto Rico together, and it was only because
he was going and I found out about it through him,
and I just 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.
- It would be interesting to hear
how has your concern 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.
There's two questions.
One, how has your concern in terms of AGI
and superintelligence evolved,
and how impressed are you with Chad GPT
as a student of the human mind and mind in general?
- Well, my concern about AGI is unchanged.
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.
- Basically, that once superintelligence is achieved,
there's a takeoff, it becomes exponentially smarter,
and in a matter of time,
there's just, we're ants and they're gods.
- Well, yeah, unless we find some way
of permanently tethering a superintelligent,
superintelligent, self-improving AI to our value system.
And I don't believe anyone has figured out how to do that
or whether that's even possible in principle.
I mean, I know people like Stuart Russell
who I just had on my podcast are--
- Oh, really?
Have you released it yet?
- I haven't released it yet.
- Oh, great.
- He's been on previous podcasts,
but we just recorded this week.
- 'Cause you haven't done an AI podcast in a while,
so it's great.
- Yeah, yeah.
- He's a good person to talk about alignment with.
- Yeah, so Stuart, I mean, Stuart has been probably
more than anyone my guru on this topic.
I mean, like, just reading his book and doing,
I think I've done two podcasts with him at this point.
- I think it's called "The Control Problem"
or something like that.
- His book is human compatible.
- Human compatible.
- He talks about the control problem.
And yeah, so I just think the idea
that we can define a value function in advance
that permanently tethers a self-improving
super intelligent AI to our values
as we continue to discover them, refine them,
extrapolate them in an open-ended way.
I think that's a tall order.
And I think there are many more ways,
there must be many more ways of designing super intelligence
that is not aligned in that way
and is not ever approximating our values in that way.
So I mean, Stuart's idea to put it in a very simple way
is that he thinks you don't want to specify
the value function up front.
You don't want to imagine you could ever write the code
in such a way as to admit of no loophole.
You want to make the AI uncertain
as to what human values are and perpetually uncertain
and always trying to ameliorate that uncertainty
by hewing more and more closely
to what our professed values are.
So like it's always interested in us saying,
oh no, no, that's not what we want,
that's not what we intend, stop doing that.
Or like, no matter how smart it gets,
all it wants to do
is more perfectly approximate human values.
I think there are a lot of problems with that
at a high level, I'm not a computer scientist,
so I'm sure there are many problems at a low level
that I don't understand or can't understand.
- Like how to force a human into the loop always,
no matter what.
- There's that and like what humans get a vote
and just what do humans value
and what is the difference between what we say we value
and our revealed preferences, which,
if you were a super intelligent AI
that could look at humanity now,
I think you could be forgiven for concluding
that what we value is driving ourselves crazy with Twitter
and living perpetually on the brink of nuclear war
§23Transcript · 3:28:46–3:38:56
and just watching hot girls in yoga pants
on TikTok again and again and again.
It's like what-- - And you're saying
that is not?
- This is all revealed preference
and it's what is an AI to make of that,
and what should it optimize?
Like so, this is also Stuart's observation
that one of the insidious things
about like the YouTube algorithm
is it's not that it just caters to our preferences,
it actually begins to change us in ways
so as to make us more predictable.
It's like 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.
So the main concern is that most of the people in the field
seem not to be taking intelligence seriously.
Like as they design more and more intelligent machines
and as they profess to want to design true AGI,
they're not, again, they're not spending the time
that Stuart is spending trying to figure out
how to do this safely above all.
They're just assuming that these problems
are 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?
And that's not the concern.
The concern is that in the presence
of vast disparities in competence,
and certainly in a condition
where the machines are improving themselves,
they're improving their own code,
they could be developing goal,
instrumental goals that are antithetical to our wellbeing
without any intent to harm us, right?
It's analogous to what we do
to every other species on earth.
I mean, you and I don't consciously form the intention
to harm insects on a daily basis,
but there are many things we could intend to do
that would, in fact, harm insects
because, you know, you decide to repave your driveway
or whatever you're doing,
like you're just not taking the interest of insects
into account because they're so far beneath you
in terms of your cognitive horizons.
And so the real challenge here is that
if you believe that intelligence, you know,
scales up on a continuum toward heights
that we can only dimly imagine,
and I think there's every reason to believe that,
there's no reason to believe
that we're near the summit of intelligence.
And you can define, you know, define,
maybe there's some forms of intelligence
for which this is not true,
but for many relevant forms, you know,
like the top 100 things we care about cognitively,
I think there's every reason to believe
that many of those things, most of those things
are a lot like chess or Go,
where once the machines get better than we are,
they're 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 Stuart's lab.
- One. - Yeah, yeah.
- Yeah, one time a human beat a machine in Go.
- They found a hack for that.
But anyway, ultimately, there's gonna be no looking back,
and then the question is, what do we do in relationship
to these systems that are more competent
than we are in every relevant respect?
Because it will be a relationship.
It's not like, the people who think
we're just gonna figure this all out,
you know, without thinking about it in advance,
it's just gonna, the solutions
are just gonna find themselves,
seem not to be taking the prospect
of really creating autonomous superintelligence seriously.
Like, what does that mean?
It's every bit as independent and ungovernable, ultimately,
as us having created, I mean, just imagine
if we created a race of people
that were 10 times smarter than all of us.
Like, how would we live with those people?
They're 10 times smarter than us, right?
Like, they begin to talk about things we don't understand.
They begin to want things we don't understand.
They begin to view us as obstacles to them,
so they're solving those problems,
or gratifying those desires.
We become the chickens or the monkeys in their presence.
And I think that it's, but for some amazing solution
of the sort that Stuart is imagining,
that we could somehow anchor their reward function
permanently, no matter how intelligent scales,
I think it's really worth worrying about this.
I do buy the sci-fi notion that this is an existential risk
if we don't do it well.
- I worry that we don't notice it.
I'm deeply impressed with Chad GPT,
and I'm worried that it will become superintelligent,
these language models will become superintelligent
because they're basically trained
in the collective intelligence of the human species,
and then it'll start controlling our behavior
if they're integrated into our algorithms,
the recommender systems, and then we just won't notice
that there's a superintelligent system
that's controlling our behavior.
- Well, I think that's true even before,
far before superintelligence,
even before general intelligence.
I mean, I think just the narrow intelligence
of these algorithms and of what something like,
Chad GPT can do,
I mean, it's just far short of it developing its own goals
and that is, 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 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?
So like, when do you think the singularity's coming?
Or is it T, it doesn't matter, it's eventually?
- I have no intuitions on that front apart from the fact
that if we continue to make progress, it will come, right?
So it's just, you just have to assume
we continue to make progress.
There's only two assumptions.
You have to assume substrate independence.
So there's no reason why this can't be done in silico.
It's just, we can build arbitrarily intelligent machines.
There's nothing magical about having this done
in the wetware of our own brains.
I think that is true, and I think that's, you know,
scientifically parsimonious to think that that's true.
And then you just have to assume
we're going to keep making progress.
It doesn't have to be any special rate of progress.
It doesn't have to be Moore's law.
It can just be, we just keep going.
At a certain point, we're going to be in relationship
to minds, leaving consciousness aside.
I don't have any reason to believe
that they'll necessarily be conscious
by virtue of being super intelligent.
And that's its own interesting ethical question.
But leaving consciousness aside,
they're going to be more competent than we are.
And then that's like, you know, the aliens have landed.
You know, that's literally, that's an encounter with,
again, leaving aside the possibility
that something like Stewart's path
is actually available to us.
But it is hard to picture if what we mean by intelligence,
all things considered, and it's truly general,
if that scales and, you know,
begins to build upon itself,
how you maintain that perfect,
slavish devotion until the end of time in those systems.
- The tether to humans?
- Yeah.
- I think my gut says that that tether is not,
there's a lot of ways to do it.
So it's not this increasingly impossible problem.
- Right, so I have no, you know,
as you know, I'm not a computer scientist,
so I have no intuitions about, just algorithmically,
how you would approach that and what's possible.
- My main intuition is maybe deeply flawed,
but the main intuition is based on the fact
that most of the learning is currently happening
on human knowledge.
So even Chad Gipetty is just trained on human data.
- Right.
- I don't see where the takeoff happens
where you completely go above human wisdom.
The current impressive aspect of Chad Gipetty
is that's using collective intelligence of all of us.
- From what I glean, again,
from people who know much more about this than I do,
I think we have reason to be skeptical
that these techniques of deep learning
are actually going to be sufficient to push us into AGI.
Right, so it's just, they're not generalizing
in the way they need to.
§24Transcript · 3:38:57–3:48:32
They're certainly not learning like human children,
and so they're brittle in strange ways.
It's not to say that the human path is the only path,
you know, and maybe we might learn better lessons
by ignoring the way brains work,
but we know that they don't generalize
and use abstraction the way we do.
And so they have strange holes in their competence.
- But the size of the holes is shrinking every time.
And that's, so the intuition starts to slowly fall apart.
The intuition is like, surely it can't be this simple
to achieve super intelligence.
- Yeah, yeah.
- But it's becoming simpler and simpler.
So I don't know.
The progress is quite incredible.
I've been extremely impressed with Chad Giputi
and the new models, and there's a lot of financial incentive
to make progress in this regard.
So it's, we're going to be living
through some very interesting times.
In raising a question that I'm going to be talking to you,
a lot of people brought up this topic,
probably because Eric Weinstein talked to Joe Rogan recently
and said that he and you were contacted by folks
about UFOs.
Can you clarify the nature of this contact?
- Yeah, yeah.
- That you were contacted by?
- I've got very little to say on this.
I mean, he has much more to say.
I think he went down this rabbit hole further than I did,
which wouldn't surprise anyone.
He's got much more of a taste
for this sort of thing than I do.
But I think we were contacted by the same person.
It wasn't clear to me who this person was
or how this person got my cell phone number.
They didn't seem,
it didn't seem like we were getting punked.
I mean, the person seemed credible to me.
- And they were talking to you
about the release of different videos on UFOs.
- Yeah, and this is when there was a flurry
of activity around this.
So there was like, 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.
And so this person contacted both of us,
I think around the same time.
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.
And what happened is the person kept writing a check
that he didn't cash.
Like he kept saying, okay, next week,
I'm gonna, you know, 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.
And I said, great, just let me know,
send me the Zoom link, right?
And I went, that happened maybe three times.
There was just one phone conversation
and then it was just texts, you know,
there's just a bunch of texts.
And I think Eric spent more time with this person
and I haven't spoken to him about it.
I know he's spoke about it publicly, but.
So I, you know, it's not that my bullshit detector
ever really went off in a big way,
it's just the thing never happened.
And so I lost interest.
- So you made a comment, which is interesting,
that you ran the, which I really appreciate,
you ran a thought experiment of saying,
okay, maybe we do have alien spacecraft,
or just the thought experiment the aliens did visit.
- Yeah. - And then,
this is very kind of nihilistic, sad thought
that it wouldn't matter, it wouldn't affect your life.
Can you explain that?
- Well, no, I was, I think many people noticed this.
I mean, this was a sign of how crazy
the news cycle was at that point, right?
Like we had COVID and we had Trump
and I forget when the UFO thing was really kicking off,
but it just seemed like no one had the bandwidth
to even be interested in this.
It's like, I was amazed to notice in myself
that I wasn't more interested
in figuring out what was going on.
It's like, and I considered, okay, wait a minute.
This is, if this is true,
this is the biggest story in anyone's lifetime.
I mean, contact with alien intelligence is by definition
the biggest story in anyone's lifetime in human history.
Why isn't this just totally captivating?
And not only was it not totally captivating,
it was just barely rising to the level
of my being able to pay attention to it.
And I view that, 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.
The general sense is probably bullshit
or it probably has some explanation
that is purely terrestrial and not surprising.
And there is somebody who, what's his name?
Is it Mick West?
I forget, is it a YouTuber?
- Yeah, Mick West, yeah.
He debunks stuff.
I mean, I have since seen some of those videos.
I mean, now this is going back still at least a year,
but some of those videos seem like fairly credible
debunkings of some of the optical evidence.
And I'm surprised we haven't seen more of that.
Like there was a fairly credulous 60 minutes piece
that came out around that time,
looking at some of that video.
And it was the very video that he was debunking on YouTube.
And his video only had like 50,000 views on it or whatever.
But again, it seemed like a fairly credible debunking.
I haven't seen debunkings of his debunkings, but--
- I think there is, but he's basically saying
that there is possible explanations for it.
And usually in these kinds of contexts,
if there's a possible explanation,
even if it seems unlikely,
is going to be more likely
than an alien civilization visiting us.
- Yeah, so the extraordinary claims
require extraordinary evidence principle,
which I think is generally true.
- Well, with aliens, I think generally,
I think there should be some humility
about what they would look like when they show up.
But I tend to think they're already here.
- The amazing thing about this AI conversation though,
is that we're talking about a circumstance
where we would be designing the aliens.
And there's every reason to believe
that eventually this is gonna happen.
Like I said, I'm not at all skeptical
about the coming reality of the aliens,
that we're gonna build them.
- Now, here's the thing.
Does this apply to when super intelligence shows up?
Will this be trending on Twitter for a day?
And then we'll go on to complain
about something Sam Harris once again said
in his podcast the next day?
You tend to trend on Twitter,
even though you're not on Twitter, which is great.
- Yeah, I haven't noticed.
I mean, I did notice when I was on, but.
- You have this concern about AGI basically,
same kind of thing, that we would just look the other way.
Is there something about this time
where even like World War III,
which has been throwing around very casually,
concerningly so, even that, the news cycle wipes that away?
- Yeah, well, I think we have this general problem
that we can't make certain information,
even unequivocally certain information,
emotionally salient.
Like we respond quite readily to certain things.
I mean, as we talked about,
we respond to the little girl who fell down a well.
I mean, that just, that gets 100%
of our emotional resources.
But the abstract probability of nuclear war,
right, even a high probability,
even just, even an intolerable probability,
even if we put it at 30%, right?
You know, like, it's just like,
that's a Russian roulette with a gun with three chambers.
And, you know, 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.
And I mean, I think people who, this pre-Ukraine,
I think the people who have made it their business
to, you know, professionally to think about
the risk of nuclear war and to mitigate it,
you know, people like Graham Allison or William Perry,
I mean, I think they were putting like the ongoing risk,
I mean, just the risk that we're gonna have
a proper nuclear war at some point in the, you know,
the next generation, people were putting it at,
you know, something like 50%, right?
They were living with this sort of Damocles over our heads.
Now, you might wonder whether anyone
could have reliable intuitions about the probability
§25Transcript · 3:48:34–3:58:56
of that kind of thing, but the status quo is truly alarming.
I mean, we've got, you know, we've got ICBMs on,
I mean, leave aside smaller exchanges and, you know,
tactical nukes and how we could have a world war,
you know, based on, you know, incremental changes.
We've got the biggest bombs aimed at the biggest cities
in both directions and it's old technology, right?
And it's, you know, and it's vulnerable to some lunatic
deciding to launch or misreading, you know, bad data.
And we know we've been saved from nuclear war,
I think at least twice by, you know,
Soviet submarine commanders deciding,
I'm not gonna pass this up the chain of command, right?
It's like, this is almost certainly an error
and it turns out it was an error.
And it's like, and we need people to,
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.
And he reasoned if America was gonna engage
in a first strike, they'd launch more than five missiles,
right, so this has to be fictional.
And then he waited long enough to decide
that it was fictional, but the probability
of a nuclear war happening by mistake
or some other species of inadvertence, you know,
misunderstanding, technical malfunction,
that's intolerable.
Forget about the intentional use of it
by people who are, you know, driven crazy by some ideology.
- And more and more technologies are enabled
to kind of scale destruction.
- And misinformation plays into this picture
in a way that is especially scary.
I mean, once you can get a deep fake of, you know,
any current president of the United States
claiming to have launched a first strike, you know,
and just, you know, send that everywhere.
- But that could change the nature of truth
and then we, that might change the engine
we have for skepticism, sharpen it.
The more you have deep fakes.
- Yeah, and we might have AI and digital watermarks
that help us, maybe we'll not trust any information
that hasn't come through specific channels, right?
I mean, so in my world, it's like,
I no longer feel the need to respond to anything
other than what I put out in my channels of information.
It's like, there's so many people
who have clipped stuff of me that shows the opposite
of what I was actually saying in context.
I mean, the people have like re-edited my podcast audio
to make it seem like I said the opposite
of what I was saying.
It's like, unless I put it out, you know,
you can't be sure that I actually said it, you know?
I mean, it's just, but I don't know what it's like
to live like that for all forms of information.
And I mean, strangely, I think it may require
a greater siloing of information in the end.
You know, it's like, we're living through
this sort of Wild West period where everyone's got
a newsletter and everyone's got a blog
and everyone's got an opinion.
But once you can fake everything--
- There might be a greater value for expertise.
- Yeah. - For experts,
but a more rigorous system for identifying
who the experts are.
- Yeah, or just knowing that, you know,
it's gonna be an arms race to authenticate information.
So it's like, if you can never trust a photograph
unless it has been vetted by Getty Images,
because only Getty Images has the resources
to authenticate the provenance of that photograph
and a test that hasn't been meddled with by AI.
And again, I don't even know if that's technically possible.
And maybe whatever the tools available for this
will be commodified and the cost will be driven to zero
so quickly that everyone will be able to do it.
You know, it could be like encryption, but--
- And it would be proven and tested most effectively first,
of course, as always in porn.
- Yeah, right. - Which is where
most of human innovation technology happens first.
Well, I have to ask because Ron Howard,
the director, asked this on Twitter.
Since we're talking about the threat of nuclear war
and otherwise, he asked,
"I'd be interested in both your expectations
for human society if, when we move beyond Mars.
Will those societies be industrial-based?
How will it be governed?
How will criminal infractions be dealt with?
When you read or watch sci-fi,
what comes closest to sounding logical?"
Do you think about our society beyond Earth?
If we colonize Mars, if we colonize space?
- Yeah, well, I think I have a pretty--
- Uh-oh. - Humbling picture of that.
'Cause we're still gonna be the apes that we are.
So when you imagine colonizing Mars,
you have to imagine a first fist fight on Mars.
You have to imagine a first murder on Mars.
- Also infidelity. - Yeah.
- Somebody-- - Extramarital affairs on Mars.
Right, so it's gonna get really homely and boring
really fast, I think.
It's like only the spacesuits or the other exigencies
of just living in that atmosphere or lack thereof
will limit how badly we can behave on Mars.
- But do you think most of the interaction
will be still in meat space versus digital?
Do you think 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?
Like everything we've been complaining about Twitter,
is it possible that Twitter's just the early days
of a broken system that's actually giving birth
to a better working system that's ultimately digital?
- I think we're gonna experience a pendulum swing
back into the real world.
I mean, I think many of us are experiencing that now anyway.
I mean, just wanting to have face-to-face encounters
and spend less time on our phones
and less time online.
I mean, I think maybe everyone isn't going
in that direction, but I do notice it myself.
And I notice, I mean, once I got off Twitter,
then I noticed the people who were never on Twitter, right?
And the people who were never, basically, I mean, I know,
I have a lot of friends who were never on Twitter.
And they actually never understood
what I was doing on Twitter.
It's like, they just like, it wasn't that they were seeing it
and then reacting to it.
They just didn't know, it's like,
it's like being on, it's like I'm not on Reddit either,
but I don't spend any time thinking
about not being on Reddit, right?
It's like, I'm just not on Reddit.
- So you think the pursuit of human happiness
is better achieved, more effectively achieved
outside of Twitter world?
- Well, I think all we have is our attention in the end.
And we just have to notice what these various tools
are doing to it.
And it's just, it became very clear to me
that it was an unrewarding use of my attention.
Now, it's not to say there isn't some digital platform
that's conceivable that would be useful and rewarding,
but yeah, I mean, we just have,
you know, our life is doled out to us in moments.
And we have, and we're continually solving this riddle
of what is 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?
We're all, I mean, we have this tension
between being in the present and becoming in the future.
And, you know, it's a seeming paradox.
Again, it's not really a paradox, but it can seem like,
I do think the ground truth for personal wellbeing
is to find a mode of being where you can pay attention
to the present moment.
And this is, you know, meditation by another name.
You can pay attention to the present moment
with sufficient gravity that you recognize
that just consciousness itself in the present moment,
no matter what's happening,
is already a circumstance of freedom
and contentment and tranquility.
Like you can be happy now before anything happens,
before this next desire gets gratified,
before this next problem gets solved.
There's this kind of ground truth that you're free,
that consciousness is free and open and unencumbered
by really any problem until you get lost in thought
about all the problems that may yet be real for you.
So the ability to catch and observe consciousness,
that in itself is a source of happiness.
- Yeah, without being lost in thought.
And so this happens haphazardly for people
who don't meditate because they find something
in their life that's so captivating,
it's so pleasurable, it's so thrilling.
It can even be scary, but it can be,
even being scared is captivating.
Like it gets their attention, right, whatever it is.
If you like, Sebastian Junger wrote a great book
about people's experience in war here.
It's like strangely it can be the best experience
anyone's ever had because everything,
it's like only the moment matters, right?
Like the bullet is whizzing by your head.
You're not thinking about your 401k
or that thing that you didn't say last week
to the person you shouldn't have been talking about.
You're not thinking about Twitter.
It's like you're just fully immersed
§26Transcript · 3:58:59–4:08:23
in the present moment.
Meditation is the only way, I mean,
that word can mean many things to many people,
but what I mean by meditation is simply the discovery
that there is a way to engage the present moment directly
regardless of what's happening.
You don't need to be in a war.
You don't need to be having sex.
You don't need to be on drugs.
You don't need to be surfing.
Nothing, it doesn't have to be a peak experience.
It can be completely ordinary,
but you can recognize that in some basic sense,
there's only this and everything else
is something you're thinking.
You're thinking about the past.
You're thinking about the future
and thoughts themselves have no substance, right?
It's fundamentally mysterious that any thought
ever really commandeers your sense of who you are
and makes you anxious or afraid or angry or whatever it is.
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?
And you can literally just,
the anger that would have kept you angry for hours or days
lasts four seconds because you just,
the moment it arises, you recognize it
and you can get off that.
You can decide, at minimum, you can decide
whether it's useful to stay angry at that moment.
And obviously it usually isn't.
- And the illusion of free will is one of those thoughts.
- Yeah, it's all just happening, right?
Like even the mindful and meditative response to this
is just happening.
It's just like even the moments where you recognize
or not recognize is just happening.
It's not that,
this does open up a degree of freedom for a person,
but it's not a freedom that gives any motivation
to the notion of free will.
It's just a new way of being in the world.
- Is there a difference between intellectually knowing
free will is an illusion and really experiencing it?
What's the longest you've been able to experience
the escape, the illusion of free will?
- Well, it's always obvious to me when I pay attention.
Whenever I'm mindful, the term of jargon in the Buddhist
and increasingly outside the Buddhist context
is mindfulness, right?
But there are sort of different levels of mindfulness
and there's different degrees of insight into this.
But yes, what I'm calling evidence of lack of free will
and lack of the self, I got two sides of the same coin.
There's a sense of being a subject
in the middle of experience to whom all experience refers,
the sense of I, the sense of me.
And that's almost everybody's starting point
when they start to meditate.
And that's almost always the place people live
most of their lives from.
I do think that gets interrupted
in ways they get unrecognized.
I think people are constantly losing the sense of I,
they're losing the sense of subject, object, distance,
but they're not recognizing it.
And meditation is the mode in which you can recognize,
you can both consciously precipitate it,
you can look for the self and fail to find it
and then recognize its absence.
And that's just the flip side of the coin of free will.
I mean, the feeling of having free will
is what it feels like to feel like a self
who's thinking his thoughts and doing his actions
and intending his intentions.
And the man in the middle of the boat who's rowing,
that's the false starting point.
When you find that there's no one
in the middle of the boat, right?
Or in fact, there's no boat, there's just the river,
there's just the flow of experience
and there's no center to it.
And there's no place from which you would control it.
Again, even when you're doing things,
this does not negate the difference
between voluntary and involuntary behavior.
It's like, I can voluntarily reach for this,
but when I'm paying attention,
I'm aware that everything is just happening.
Like just the intention to move is just arising, right?
And I'm in no position to know why it didn't arise
a moment before or a moment later
or a moment or 50% stronger or weaker
or so as to be ineffective or to be doubly effective
where I lurched for it versus I move slow.
I mean, I can never run the counterfactuals.
I mean, 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
anything is ever possible.
Like what if, this is a question
I haven't thought a lot of about it,
but it's been a few years
I've been kicking this question around.
So I mean, what if only the actual is possible?
What if there was, what if,
so we live with this feeling of possibility.
We live with the sense that,
let me take, so I have two daughters.
I could have had a third child, right?
So what does it mean to say
that I could have had a third child?
Or is it, you don't have kids, I don't think?
So-- - Not that I know of.
- Yes, so-- - So the possibility
might be there. - Right.
So what do we mean when we say
you could have had a child
or you might have a child in the future?
What is the space in reality?
What's the relationship between possibility
and actuality and reality?
Is there a reality in which
non-actual things are nonetheless real?
And so we have other categories of non-concrete things.
We have things that don't have spatial temporal dimension,
but they're nonetheless, they nonetheless exist.
So like, you know, the integers, right?
So numbers.
There's a reality, there's an abstract reality to numbers.
And this is, it's philosophically interesting
to think about these things.
So they're not like, in some sense,
they're real and they're not merely invented by us.
They're discovered because they have structure
that we can't impose upon them, right?
It's not like, they're not fictional characters like,
you know, I mean, Hamlet and Superman
also exist in some sense,
but they exist at a level of our own fiction
and abstraction, but it's like,
there are true and false statements
you can make about Hamlet.
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.
But again, this is all abstract.
It's all abstractable from any of its concrete
instantiations, it's not just in the comic books
and just in the movies.
It's in our, you know, ongoing ideas about these characters.
But natural numbers or the integers
don't function quite that way.
I mean, they're similar, but they also have a structure
that's purely a matter of discovery.
It's not, you can't just make up whether numbers are prime.
You know, if you give me two integers, you know,
of a certain size, you mentioned two enormous integers.
If I were to say, okay, well, between those two integers,
they're exactly 11 prime numbers, right?
That's a very specific claim
about which I can be right or wrong,
and whether or not anyone knows I'm right or wrong.
It's like, that's just, there's a domain of facts there,
but these are abstract, it's an abstract reality
that relates in some way that's philosophically interesting,
you know, metaphysically interesting
to what we call real reality.
You know, the spatial temporal order, the physics of things.
But possibility, at least in my view,
occupies a different space.
And this is something, again,
my thoughts on this are pretty inchoate.
I think I need to talk to a philosopher of physics
and/or a physicist about how this may interact
with things like the many worlds interpretation
of quantum mechanics. - Yeah, that's an interesting,
right, exactly.
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.
- But even, that's just more actuality.
So if I took that seriously-- - Ah, sure.
- That's a case of, and 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?
So if you just head out in one direction,
eventually you're gonna meet two people just like us
having a conversation just like this,
and you're gonna meet them an infinite number of times
in every infinite variety of permutations
slightly different from this conversation, right?
§27Transcript · 4:08:25–4:17:46
So, I mean, infinity is just so big
that our intuitions of probability completely break down.
But what I'm suggesting is,
maybe probability isn't a thing, right?
Maybe there's only actuality.
If there's, maybe there's only what happens,
and at every point along the way,
our notion of what could have happened
or what might have happened is just that,
it's just a thought about what could have happened
or might have happened. - So there's no,
so it's a fundamentally different thing.
If you can imagine a thing that doesn't make it real.
So they, 'cause that's where that possibility exists,
is in your imagination, right?
- Yeah, and possibility itself is a kind of spooky idea
because it too has a sort of structure, right?
So like if I'm gonna say,
you know, you could have had a daughter, right, last year.
So we're saying that's possible, but not actual, right?
That is a claim, there are things that are true
and not true about that daughter, right?
Like it has a kind of structure, it's like.
- I feel like there's a lot of fog around that,
the possibility.
It feels like almost like a useful narrative.
- But what does it mean?
So like, what does it mean if we say, you know,
I just did that, but it's conceivable
that I wouldn't have done that, right?
Like it's possible that I just threw this cap,
but I might not have done that.
- So you're taking it very temporarily close
to the original, like what would appear as a decision.
- Whenever we're saying something's possible,
but not actual, right?
Like this thing just happened, but it's conceivable,
it's possible that it wouldn't have happened
or that it would have happened differently.
In what does that possibility consist?
Like where is that?
For that to be real, for the possibility to be real,
what claim are we making about the universe?
- Well, isn't that an extension of the idea
that free will is an illusion,
that all we have is actuality,
that the possibility is an illusion?
- Right, yeah, I'm just extending it beyond human action.
This goes to the physics of things, this is just everything.
Like we're always telling ourselves a story
that includes possibility.
- Possibility is really compelling for some reason.
- Well, yeah, because it's, I mean, so this, yeah,
I mean, this could sound just academic,
but every backward-looking regret or disappointment
and every forward-looking worry
is completely dependent on this notion of possibility.
Like every regret is based on the sense
that something else, I could have done something else,
something else could have happened.
Every disposition to worry about the future
is based on the feeling
that there's this range of possibilities.
It could go either way.
And, you know, I mean,
whether or not there's such a thing as possibility,
you know, I'm convinced that worry
is almost never psychologically appropriate
because the reality is that in any given moment,
either you can do something to solve the problem
you're worried about or not.
So if you can do something, just do it.
You know, and if you can't,
your worrying is just causing you to suffer twice over,
right, you're gonna, you know,
you're gonna get the medical procedure next week anyway.
How much time between now and next week
do you wanna spend worrying about it, right?
It's gonna, the worry doesn't accomplish anything.
- How much do physicists think about possibility?
- Well, they think about it in terms of probability
more often, but probability just describes,
and again, this is a place where I might be out of my depth
and need to talk to somebody to debunk this, but the-
- Do therapy with a physicist.
- Yeah, but probably it seems just describes
a pattern of actuality that we've observed, right?
I mean, we have, there are certain things we observe
and those are the actual things that have happened.
And we have this additional story about probability.
I mean, we have the frequency with which things happen,
have happened in the past.
You know, I can flip a fair coin and know,
I know in the abstract that I have a belief that
in the limit that those flips,
those tosses should converge on 50% heads and 50% tails.
I know I have a story as to why
it's not gonna be exactly 50%
within any arbitrary timeframe.
But in reality, all we ever have are the observed tosses.
Right, and then we have an additional story that,
oh, it came up heads, but it could have come up tails.
Why do we think that, about that last toss?
And what are we claiming is true
about the physics of things
if we say it could have been otherwise?
- I think we're claiming that probability is true.
That it just, it allows us to have a nice model
about the world, gives us hope about the world.
- Yeah, it seems that possibility
has to be somewhere to be effective.
It's a little 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, we see their evidence.
But they're not reducible
to any specific set of instances, right?
So there's some structure there,
but the structure isn't just a matter of the actual things.
We have the actual billiard balls
that are banging into each other.
All of that actuality can be explained
by what actual things are actually doing.
But then we have this notion that in addition to that,
we have the laws of nature that are explaining this act,
but how are the laws of nature an additional thing
in addition to just the actual things
that are actually affect causally?
And if they are an additional thing,
how are they effective if they're not among
the actual things that are just actually banging around?
- Yeah.
- And so to some degree--
- For that, possibly has to be hiding somewhere
for the laws of nature to be--
- To be possible.
For anything to be possible, it has to be,
it has to have--
- It's a closet somewhere, I'm sure,
is where all the possibility goes.
- It has to be attached to something.
So--
- You don't think many worlds is that?
'Cause many worlds still exist.
- 'Cause we're in this strand of that multiverse.
- Yeah.
- Right, so it's still,
still you have just a local instance of what is actual.
And then if it proliferates elsewhere
where you can't be affected by it,
there's more actuality. - Many worlds,
you can't really connect with the other.
- Yeah. - Yeah.
- So many worlds are just a statement of
basically everything that can happen, happens somewhere.
- Yeah. - And that's,
I mean, maybe that's not an entirely
kosher formulation of it, but it seems pretty close.
But there's whatever happens, right?
In fact, there's, relativistically, there's a,
there's an, you know, Einstein's original notion
of a block universe seems to suggest this.
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.
I don't hear it discussed much,
but the idea of a block universe is that, you know,
space-time exists as a totality.
And our sense that we are traveling through space-time
where there's a real difference
between the past and the future,
that that's an illusion of just our, you know,
you know, the weird slice we're taking
of this larger object.
But on some level, it's like, you know,
you're reading a novel, the last page of the novel exists
just as much as the first page
when you're in the middle of it.
And they're just, you know, if that's,
if we're living in anything like that,
then there's no such thing as possibility.
It would seem there's just what is actual.
So as a matter of our experience, moment to moment,
I think it's totally compatible with that being true,
that there is only what is actual.
And that sounds to the naive ear,
that sounds like it would be depressing
and disempowering and confining, but as anything,
but it's actually, it's a circumstance of pure discovery.
Like you have no idea what's gonna happen next, right?
You don't know who you're gonna be tomorrow.
You're only by tendency seeming to resemble yourself
from yesterday.
There's way more freedom in all of that
than it seems true to many people.
And yet the basic insight is that you're not,
you're not in, the real freedom is the recognition
that you're not in control of anything.
Everything is just happening,
§28Transcript · 4:17:47–4:27:10
including your thoughts and intentions and moods.
- So life is a process of continuous discovery.
- You're part of the universe.
Yeah, you are just this, I mean,
it's the miracle that the universe is illuminated
to itself as itself where you sit.
And you're continually discovering what your life is.
And then you have this layer
at which you're telling yourself a story
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.
And yet there is this fundamental mystery to everything,
even the most familiar experience.
- We're all NPCs in a most marvelous video game.
- Maybe, although my game, my sense of gaming
does not run as deep as to know what I'm committing to.
There's a non-playing character.
- You're more, yeah, oh wow.
Yes, you're more of a Mario Kart guy.
- I went back, I was an original video gamer,
but it's been a long time since I,
I mean, I was there for Pong.
I remember when I saw the first Pong in a restaurant
in, I think it was like Benihana's or something,
they had a Pong table.
And that was just an amazing moment when you--
- You, Sam Harris, might live from Pong
to the invention and deployment
of a super intelligent system.
- Yeah, well, that happened fast
if it happens any time in my lifetime.
- From Pong to AGI.
What kind of things do you do purely for fun
that others might consider a waste of time?
- Purely for fun?
- 'Cause meditation doesn't count,
'cause most people would say that's not a waste of time.
Is there something like Pong
that's a deeply embarrassing thing you would never admit?
- I don't think, well, I mean, once or twice a year
I will play a round of golf,
which many people would find embarrassing.
They might even find my play embarrassing.
But it's fun.
- Do you find it embarrassing?
- No, I mean, I love, golf just takes way too much time,
so I can only squander a certain amount of time on it.
I do love it, it's a lot of fun.
- But you have no control over your actual performance.
You're ever discovering--
- I do have control over my mediocre performance,
but I don't have enough control as to make it really good.
But happily, I'm in the perfect spot
because I don't invest enough time in it
to care how I play, so I just have fun when I play.
- Well, I hope there'll be a day
where you play around golf
with the former president of Donald Trump,
and I would love to be--
- I would bet on him if we played golf.
I'm sure he's a better golfer.
- Amidst the chaos of human civilization in modern times,
as we've talked about,
what gives you hope about this world in the coming year,
in the coming decade, in the coming hundred years,
maybe a thousand years?
What's the source of hope for you?
- Well, it comes back to a few of the things
we've talked about.
I think I'm hopeful.
I know that most people are good
and are mostly converging on the same core values, right?
It's like we're not surrounded by psychopaths.
And the thing that finally convinced me
to get off Twitter was how different life was seeming
through the lens of Twitter.
It's like I just got the sense
that there are way more psychopaths,
or effective psychopaths, than I realized.
And then I thought, okay, this isn't real.
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.
So 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.
Like there's enough wealth to go around.
There's enough, you know, 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.
You know, on this, forget about going to Mars,
on this, the one rock, right?
It's like we could make this place incredibly beautiful
and stable if we just did enough work
to solve some, you know,
rather longstanding political problems.
- The problem of incentives.
So to you, the basic characteristics of human nature
are such that we'll be okay if the incentives are okay.
We'll do pretty good.
- I'm worried about the asymmetries
that it's easier to break things than to fix them.
It's easier to light a fire than to put it out.
And I do worry that, you know,
as technology gets more and more powerful,
it becomes easier for the minority
who wants to screw things up
to effectively screw things up for everybody, right?
So it's easier, it's like a thousand years ago,
it was simply impossible for one person
to range the lives of millions, much less billions.
Now that's getting to be possible.
So on the assumption that we're always gonna have
a sufficient number of crazy individuals
or malevolent individuals,
we have to figure out that asymmetry somehow.
And so there's some cautious exploration
of emergent technology that we need to get
our head screwed on straight about.
And so like, so gain-of-function research,
like just how much do we wanna democratize,
you know, all the relevant technologies there?
You know, do we want, really, you really wanna
give everyone the ability to order nucleotides in the mail
and give them the blueprints for viruses online
because of, you know, you're a free speech absolutist
and you think all PDFs need to be, you know,
exportable everywhere.
So I'm much more, so this is where, yeah,
so there are limits to,
many people are confused about my take on free speech
because I've come down on the unpopular side
of some of these questions, but it's been,
my overriding concern is that in many cases,
I'm worried about the free speech of the individual
businesses or individual platforms or individual,
you know, media people to decide that they don't wanna
be associated with certain things, right?
So like, if you own Twitter,
I think you should be able to kick off the Nazi
you don't wanna be associated with
because it's your platform, you own it, right?
That's your free speech, right?
That's the side of my free speech concern for Twitter,
right?
It's not that every Nazi has the right to be,
to algorithmic speech on Twitter.
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 wanna promote or not.
I view them as publishers more, you know,
more than as platforms in the end,
and that has other implications.
But I do worry about this problem of misinformation
and algorithmically and otherwise, you know,
supercharged misinformation.
And I think, I do think we have,
we're at a bottleneck now.
I mean, I guess it's,
could be the hubris of every present generation
to think that their moment is especially important,
but I do think with the emergence of these technologies,
we're at some kind of bottleneck
where we really have to figure out how to get this right.
And if we do get this right,
if we figure out how to not drive ourselves crazy
by giving people access to all possible information,
misinformation at all times,
I think, yeah, we could,
there's no limit to how happily we could collaborate
with billions of creative, fulfilled people.
You know, it's just--
- And trillions of robots, some of them sex robots,
but that's another topic.
- Robots that are running the right algorithm,
whatever that algorithm is.
- Whatever you need in your life to make you happy.
Sam, the first time we talked is one of the huge honors
of my life, I've been a fan of yours for a long time.
The few times you were respectful but critical to me
means the world, and thank you so much for helping me
and caring enough about the world
and for everything you do.
But I should say that the few of us
that try to put love in the world on Twitter
miss you on Twitter, but--
- Well, enjoy yourselves.
- Don't break anything, kids.
- Have a good party without me.
- Thanks so much.
§29Transcript · 4:27:11–4:27:39
- But very happy to do this, thanks for the invitation.
- Thank you. - Great to see you again.
- Thanks for listening to this conversation with Sam Harris.
To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors
in the description.
And now, let me leave you with some words
from Martin Luther King Jr.
"Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy
into a friend."
Thank you for listening, I hope to see you next time.
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