#365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs - Transcripts

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 stopped talking to each other as often with respect, humility, and love when the world needed those kinds of conversations the most. My hope is that they start talking again. They start being friends again. They start noticing the humanity that connects them that is much deeper than the disagreements that divide them. So let me take this moment to say with humility and honesty, why I look up to and am inspired by Joe, Elon, and Sam. I think Joe Rogan is important to the world as a voice of compassionate curiosity and open-mindedness to ideas, both radical and mainstream, sometimes with humor, sometimes with brutal honesty, always pushing for more kindness in the world. I think Elon Musk is important to the world as an engineer, leader, entrepreneur, and human being who takes on the hardest problems that face humanity and refuses to accept the constraints of conventional thinking that made the solutions to these problems seem 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.

which to me is at the core of the writing process

to support the learning. Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler, as Einstein said. And to have tools that give you ideas how to do that, not necessarily completely automate everything, but give you really powerful ideas on how to get 90% there. This is just brilliant. Also, if there's technical jargon, they can rewrite the text and explain it more simply. What else? They can obviously summarize the text. If you start writing, they can continue your writing. If you're having trouble starting to write and there's a blank page glaring back at you, they can generate based on a topic, a bunch of text to get you going. I mean, there's so many just amazing features. I love it when great, powerful language models or any idea in AI is then injected into a tool that's actually usable and useful and powerful across a number of use cases to a huge number of people. I mean, this is really, really, really exciting.

on the world, empathy or reason? It depends on what you mean by empathy. There are at least two kinds of empathy. There's the cognitive form, which is, I would argue, even a species of reason. It's just understanding another person's point of view. You understand why they're suffering, or why they're happy, or you have a theory of mind about another human being that is accurate, and so you can navigate in relationship to them more effectively. And then there's another layer entirely, not incompatible with that, but just distinct, which is what people often mean by empathy, which is more a kind of emotional contagion, right? Like you feel depressed, and I begin to feel depressed along with you, because it's contagious, right? We're so close, and I'm so concerned about you, and your problems become my problems, and it bleeds through, right? Now, I think both of those capacities are very important, but the emotional contagion piece, and this is not really my thesis, this is something I have more or less learned from Paul Bloom, the psychologist who wrote a book on this topic titled Against Empathy. The emotional social contagion piece is a bad guide, rather often for ethical behavior and ethical intuitions. Oh boy.

with any part of empathy either, either. Well, there's a lot of changes to go on there, but briefly to mention, you've recently talked about effective altruism on your podcast. I think you mentioned some interesting statement. I'm going to horribly misquote you, but that you'd rather live in a world, like it doesn't really make sense, but you'd rather live in a world where you care about maybe your daughter and son more than 100 people that live across the world, something like this. Where the calculus is not always perfect, but somehow it makes sense to live in a world where it's irrational in this way,

and yet empathetic in the way you've been discussing. 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. So 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, right? So you spend all this time trying to figure out how to keep your kids healthy and happy, and you'll attend to their minutest concerns, and however superficial, and again, there's a genocide raging in Sudan, or wherever, and it takes up less than 1% of your bandwidth. I'm not sure it would be a better world if everyone was running the Dalai Lama program there. I think some prioritization of one's nearest and dearest ethically might be optimal, because we'll all be doing that, and we'll all be doing that in a circumstance where we have certain norms and laws and other structures that force us to be dispassionate where that matters, right? So like when I go to, when my daughter gets sick, I have to take her to a hospital. You know, I really want her to get attention, right? And I'm worried about her more than I'm worried about everyone else in the lobby, but the truth is I actually don't want a totally corrupt hospital. I don't want a hospital that treats my daughter better than anyone else in the lobby because she's my daughter, and I've bribed the guy at the door, or whatever, or the guy's a fan of my podcast, or whatever the thing is.

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 ideas comes, 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,

of other versus raw mathematical reason. I think it's important, but I just, 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 I mean, one that comes to mind is I've been super critical of Trump, obviously, and I've been super critical of certain people for endorsing him or not criticizing him when he really made it patently obvious who he was. If there had been any doubt initially, there was no doubt when we have a sitting president who's not agreeing to a peaceful transfer of power, 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 his heart is in the right place. He's really a man of the people, even though he's gold-plated everything in his life. They bought the myth somehow of 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.

however much you can guard your good luck.

But what about having empathy for certain principles that people believe? For example, the pushback, the other perspective on this, because you said bought the myth of Trump as a great businessman. There could be a lot of people that are supporters of Trump who could say that Sam Harris bought the myth that we have this government of the people by the people that actually represents the people as opposed to a bunch of elites who are running a giant bureaucracy that is corrupt, that is feeding themselves, and they're actually not representing the people. And then here's this chaos agent Trump who speaks off the top of his head. Yeah, he's flawed in all this number of ways. He's a more comedian than he is a presidential type of figure. And he's actually creating the kind of chaos that's going to shake up this bureaucracy, shake up the elites that are so uncomfortable because they don't want the world to know about the game they got running and everybody else. So that's the kind of perspective that they would take and say, yeah, yeah, there's these flaws that Trump has,

but this is necessary.

Yeah, yeah, 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? Like, I'm not sure we want, in the end, everyone's opinion given equal weight about, you know, 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 was grossly incompetent and worse than incompetent, genuinely malevolent in his selfishness, right?

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 derangement syndrome,

medical, medical, medical, 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 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, oh boy, that was dangerous. I probably shouldn't wander in the middle of the street with my eyes closed, you weren't wrong to feel that you really had a problem, right?

and conspiracy thinking and just bullshit and bullshit. What kind of amateur speculation we're doing

on this very podcast? I'm usually alert to the moments where I'm just guessing or where I actually feel like I'm talking from within my wheelhouse. And I try to telegraph that a fair amount with people. So yeah, I mean, but it's not, it's different. Like, I mean, you can invite someone onto your podcast who's an expert about something that you're not an expert about. And then you, in the process of getting more informed yourself, your audience is getting more informed. So you're asking smart questions and you might be pushing back at the margins, but you know that when push comes to shove on that topic, you really don't have a basis to have a strong opinion. And if you were 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 for granted there's a 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.

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 then Trump is not a malevolent and ultra competent malevolent figure, but is simply a jokester. And he just by creating the chaos revealed that it's all pretty fragile because you're a student 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, you know, 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, you know, totalitarian, right? I mean, and he's- He's more brave in your world than 1984. This is what, you know, Eric Weinstein never stops badgering me about, but, you know, he's still wrong. Eric, you know, I can, you know, my analogy for Trump was that he's an evil chauncey gardener. I don't know if you remember the book or the film being there with Peter Sellers. But, you know, Peter Sellers is this gardener who really doesn't know anything, but he gets recognized as this wise man and he 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 it would seem to be aphorisms. He's just talking, all he cares about is gardening.

But aren't those humorous perturbations to our system of civility such that we know what the limits are, and now we start to think that

and have these kinds of discussions? That wasn't a humorous perturbation because he did everything he could, granted he wasn't very competent, but he did everything he could to try to steal the election. I mean, the irony is he claimed to have an election stolen from him, all the while doing everything he could to steal it, declaring it fraudulent in advance, trying to get the votes to not be counted as the evening wore on, knowing that they were 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 dye, and you got Sidney Powell and all these grossly incompetent people lying as freely as they could breathe about election fraud, right? And all of these things are getting thrown out by largely Republican election officials and Republican judges. It wasn't for want of trying that he didn't maintain his power in this country. He really tried to steal the presidency. He just was not competent, and the people around him weren't competent. So that's a good thing, and it's worth

not letting that happen again. But, he wasn't competent,

so he didn't do everything he could. Well, no, he did everything he could. He didn't do everything that could have been done

by someone more competent. Right, but the tools you have as a president, You can do a lot of things. You can declare emergencies, especially dang COVID. You could postpone the election. You can create military conflict, any kind of reason to postpone the election. There's a lot-

Well, he tried to do things and he would have to have done those things through other people and they're people who refuse to do those things. They're people who said they would quit. There would quit publicly, right? I mean, again there are multiple books written about the last hours of this presidency, and the details are shocking in what he tried to do and tried to get others to do, and it's awful, right? I mean, it's just awful that we were that close to something, to a true unraveling of our political process. I mean, it's the only time in our lifetime that anything like this has happened, and it's deeply embarrassing, right, on the world stage. It's just like we looked like a banana republic there for a while, and we're the lone superpower. It's not good, 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 capital 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, and who know that they can get on their Gulf Stream and fly to their compound in New Zealand if everything goes to shit, right? So there's a cynicism to all of that

that I think we should be deeply critical of. What I'm trying to understand is not, and analyze, is not the behavior of this particular human being, but the effect it had, in part, on the division between people. To me, the degree, the meme, of Sam Harris's brain being broken by Trump represents, you're like the person I would look to,

to bridge the division. Well, I don't think there is something profitably to be said to someone who's truly captivated by the personality cult of Trumpism, right? 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, is when you operate in the space of reason, yes, but I think there's a lot of power in you showing, in you, Sam Harris, showing that you're willing to see the good qualities of Trump publicly showing that. I think that's the way to win over the Candace Owens.

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. Does others look at just policies and actual impacts?

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, again, that you have to, there's a lot of fine print to a lot of this because the way he talks about these things and many of his motives that are obvious are things that I don't support, but I'm gonna take immigration. I think it's obvious that we should have control of our borders, right? Like I don't see the argument for not having control of our borders. We should let in who we 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, you know, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people are coming across that border and we are not in a position to know who's coming, that seems untenable to me. So, and I can recognize that many people in our society are on balance the victims of immigration because, 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 have, we should let in refugees, right?

And that might involve sort of, so the actual quote is Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in the basement. There's a dark humor to it, right? Which is, I think you speak to, I would not have cared. There's nothing, it's Hunter Biden, it's not Joe Biden. Whatever the scope of Joe Biden's corruption is, it is infinitesimally compared to the corruption we know Trump was involved in. It's like a firefly to the sun is what you're speaking to. But let me make the case that you're really focused on the surface stuff, that it's possible to have corruption that masquerades in the thing we mentioned, which is civility. You can spend hundreds of billions of dollars or trillions towards the war in the Middle East, for example, something that you've changed your mind on in terms of the negative impact it has on the world. And that, the military industrial complex, everybody's very nice, everybody's very civil, that's 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 it's, everyone is very polite.

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. I mean, in Trump, you had a president who was repeatedly asking his generals, why couldn't we use our nuclear weapons? Why can't we have more of them? Why do I have fewer nuclear weapons than JFK, right? As though that were a sign of anything other than progress, right? And this is the guy who's got the button, right?

But apart from Diet Coke, but- There's nothing wrong, just for the record,

when you push back on that, there's nothing wrong with Diet Coke. Nothing wrong with Diet Coke, yeah. I mean, it's 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 of that is,

no, I don't know. I hope you're right. Yeah, I mean, everything you said about the military industrial complex is true, right? And it's been, we've been worrying about that on both sides of the aisle for a very long time. I mean, that's just, you know, 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 to, 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, so it's almost the inversion of our current situation. So yes, and you say I changed my mind about the war.

to apparently to realize that. That's one of the things you realize with the war is there's not going to be a strong signal that things are not working. If you just keep pouring money into the thing,

a military effort thing. Well, also there are signs of it working too, you have all the stories of girls now going to school, right, you know, the girls are getting battery acid thrown in their faces by religious maniacs. And then we come in there and we stop that. And now girls are getting educated and there's, I mean, 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 Yosafzai should have the Nobel Prize and she shouldn't have been shot in the face by the Taliban, right? We know what the right answers are there. The question is, what do you do when there are enough, in this particular case, religious maniacs, who are willing to die and let their children die in defense of crazy ideas and moral norms that belong in the seventh century? And it's a problem we couldn't solve, and we couldn't solve it even though we spent

trillions of dollars to solve it. This reminded me of the thing that you and Jack Dorsey jokingly had for a while, the discussion about banning Donald Trump from Twitter. But does any of it bother you now that Twitter files came out that, 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 then that could be susceptible to bias

and to ideological influence. Well, I think it always will be, or in the absence of perfect AI, it always will be.

And this becomes relevant with AI as well. Yeah. Because you have some censorship on AI happening. Yeah.

And it's an interesting question there as well. I don't think Twitter is what 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 diverted. And I was not a crazy Twitter addict. I mean, I was probably a pretty normal user. I mean, I was not someone who was tweeting multiple times a day or even every day, right?

I probably, I think I probably averaged, right?

And I had 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 news feed. I was just following 200 very smart people, and I would 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, then I would thought I should signal boost, I would tweet. And so all of that seemed good. And 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. And 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.

No, I just let go of it.

Like chocolate ice cream is the most delicious thing ever. It's usually not that sort of thing, but it's just, but then you look at the kinds of problems people create for themselves. You look at the life deranging and reputation destroying things that people do. And I look at the things that have, the analogous things that have happened to me. I mean, the things that have really bent my life around professionally over the past decade. So much of it is Twitter. I mean, honestly, in my case, almost 100% of it was Twitter. The controversies I would get into, the things I would think I would have to respond to and, like I would release a podcast on a certain topic, I would see some blow back on Twitter. It would give me the sense that there was some signal that I really had to respond to. Now that I'm off Twitter, I recognize that most of that was just, it was totally species. 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.

Do you think it's possible to avoid the drug of that? So now that you've achieved the Zen state, is it possible for somebody like you to use it in a way that doesn't pull you into the world pool? And so anytime there's attacks, you just,

I mean, that's how I've tried to use it. I try to use it. Yeah, but it's not the way I wanted to use it. It's not the way it promises itself as- You wanted to have debate towards em. I wanted to actually communicate with people. I wanted to hear from the person because again, it's like being in Afghanistan, right? 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, and now I'm actually in dialogue with them.

I never even see what's on there down there. So you don't think it's possible to see something

and not let it affect your mind? No, that's definitely possible. But the question is, and I did that for vast stretches of time, right? But then the promise of the platform is dialogue and feedback, right? So 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 fun house mirror of acrimony and dishonesty that is going to, I mean, the reason why I got off is not because I couldn't recalibrate and find equanimity again with all the nastiness that was coming back at me and not that I couldn't ignore it for vast stretches of time. But I could see that I kept coming back to it hoping that it would be something that I could use, a real tool for communication. And I was noticing that it was insidiously changing the way I felt about people, both people I know and people I don't know, right? Like people, mutual friends of ours who are behaving in certain ways on Twitter, which just 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 realized this is the last person you want to fight with. That's one of the heartbreaking things is to see, see people who I know, who I admire, who I know are friends, be everything from snarky to downright, on a mean derisive towards each other. It doesn't make any sense. Like this is the only place where I've seen people I really admire who have had a calm head about most things, like really be shitty to other people. It's probably the only place I've seen that. And I don't, I don't, I choose to maybe believe that that's not really them, there's something about the system, like if you go paintballing, if you were Jordan Peterson and!!! Yeah, 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.

It's probably Peterson and quote, go paintball. You're gonna shoot your friends, yeah. And I, 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 snide-ness 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 he'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. And 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 surprising there's a lot of good, I mean, they're like, even if they're critical,

they're like being thoughtful, which is nice.

I used it that way too, and that was what kept me hooked. But then there's also touchballs69 wrote a question.

Ask what, ask what? I can't imagine, this is part of it, but one way to solve this is,

we've got to 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 touchball69, touchball69 should be happy that I suck a little bit less now that I'm off Twitter. I mean, I don't have to hear from touchballs69 on the regular.

Touchball69, I don't. The fact that you have to see that it probably can have a negative effect, just even a moderation, just to see that there is, like for me, the negative effect is slightly losing faith in the underlying kindness of humanity. Yeah, that was for me, yeah. You can also just reason your way out of it, saying that this is anonymity and this is kind of fun and it's kind of just the shit show of Twitter, it's okay,

but it does mentally affect you a little bit. Yeah, that was for me, yeah. 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, 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-account for Elon, I don't know.

Well, yeah, that's right, yeah, yeah.

No, I'm pretty sure Elon would, yeah, that's right, yeah. No, I'm pretty sure Elon would just tweet that

under his own name at this point, under his own. 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? Do you love each other? 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. In the next five years. I don't know, I think. So you were just observing yourself week by week, seeing the effect that's on your mind and on how much you're actually learning

and growing as a person, and it was negative. Yeah, and I'd also seen the negativity in other people's lives. I mean, it's obviously, I mean, he's not gonna admit it, but I think it's obviously negative for Elon, right? I mean, it's just not, that was one of the things that when I was looking into the fun house mirror, I was also seeing the fun house 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. That was based, I mean, it was on, I was on somebody's podcast, but that was based on a clip taken from that podcast, which was highly misleading as to the general shape of my remarks on that podcast. Even, 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 was, 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.

and it's dysfunctional. See, I think it's possible to create a platform. I think we will keep living on clips, but, you know, when I saw that clip of you talking about children and so on, just knowing that you have a sense of humor, you just went to a dark place in terms of humor. So like, I didn't even bother, and then I knew that the way clips work is that people will use it for virality's sake, but the giving 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 only your past.

The truth is you even need, like I even give Trump the benefit of the doubt when I see a clip of Trump. Because there are famous clips of Trump that are very misleading as to what he was saying in context, and I've been honest about that. Like the whole, you know, there were good people on both sides scanned all around his remarks after Charlottesville. Like the clip that got exported and got promoted by everyone, you know, left of center from Biden on down, you know, the New York Times, CNN, there's nobody that I'm aware of who has honestly, you know, apologized for what they did with that clip. That clip, he did not say what he seemed to be saying in that clip about the Nazis at Charlottesville, right? And I have always been very clear about that. So it's just, you know, even people who I think should be marginalized, and people who should be defenestrated because they really are terrible people who are doing dangerous things, and for bad reasons, I think we should be honest about what they actually meant in context, right? And this goes to anyone else we might talk about, you know, who's more, where the case is much more confusing. But yeah, so everyone's, it's just so, and then I'm sure we're going to get to AI, but, you know, the prospect of being able to manufacture clips with AI and deep fakes, and that where it's going to be hard for most people most of the time to even figure out whether they're in the presence of something real, you know, forget about being divorced from context. There was no context. I mean, that is, that's a misinformation apocalypse that is, we're right on the cusp of,

and, you know, it's terrifying. Well, 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, you know. People have functioned. Well, 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 waiting 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, you know, 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.

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 at 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's just, 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 to a thought, 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, 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 my God, I think that happens less and less now, but some version of that keeps happening and it may always keep happening in every area of expertise, right? 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? And expertise really is a thing, right?

But there's just a few things to say. So one, you mentioned this example with cancer and doing your own research. There's several things that are different about our particular time in history. One, doing your own research has become more and more effective because 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 and the different papers that make up the meta-analysis. And you can read a lot of those blog posts that are conflicting with each other and you can take that information in in a short amount of time, you can start to make good faith interpretations. For example, I don't know, I don't want to overstate things but if you suffer from depression, for example, then you could go to an expert, a doctor that prescribes you some medication, but you could also challenge some of those ideas in seeing what are the different medications, what are the different side effects, what are the different solutions to depression, all that kind of stuff. And I think depression is just a really difficult problem. That's very, I don't want to again state incorrect things, but I think 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.

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 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.

But, yeah, 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 and how dangerous I perceive COVID to be as a illness. It has been for the longest time, even more a concern about our ability to respond to a truly scary pathogen next time. Like for, you know, outside those initial months, give me the first six months to be quite worried about COVID and the unraveling of society. But- And a supply of toilet paper. You want to secure a steady supply of toilet paper. But beyond that initial period, when we had a sense of what we were dealing with and we had every hope that the vaccines are actually going to work and we 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 proved to ourselves at this moment in history is that we have built informational tools that we do not know how to use and we have made ourselves, we've basically enrolled all of human society into a psychological experiment that is deranging us and making it virtually impossible to solve coordination problems that we absolutely have to solve next time

when things are worse. Do you understand who's at fault for the way this unraveled? The way we didn't seem to have the distrust in institutions and the institution of science that grew like seemingly exponentially or got revealed through this process,

who's at fault here and what's to fix? So much blame to go around, but so much of it is not a matter of bad people conspiring to do bad things. It's a matter of incompetence and misaligned incentives and just ordinary, just plain vanilla dysfunction.

But my problem was that people like you, people like Brett Weinstein, people like that I look to for reasonable, difficult conversations on difficult topics have a little bit lost their mind, became emotional and dogmatic in style of conversation, perhaps not in the depth of actual ideas, but there, I tweet something of that nature and not about you, but just, it feels like the pandemic made people really more emotional than before. And then Kimball Musk responded, I think something I think you probably would agree with, maybe not. I think it was the combo of Trump and the pandemic. Trump triggered the far left to be way more active than they could have been without him. And then the pandemic handed big government, nanny state lefties, a huge platform on a silver platter,

a one-two punch and here we are. I would agree with some of that. I'm not sure how much to read into the nanny state concept,

but yet like basically got people on the far left really activated. And then gave control to, I don't know if you say nanny state, but just control to government that when executed poorly

has created a complete distrust in government.

Yeah, my fear is that there was gonna be that complete distrust anyway, given the nature of the information space, given the level of conspiracy thinking, given the gaming of these tools by an anti-vax cult. I mean, there really is an anti-vax cult that just ramped up its energy during this moment. But it's a small one. It's not to say that every concern about vaccines is a species of, it was born of misinformation or born of this cult,

but there is a cult that is just, you know.

But it's a small one. And the core of Trumpism is a cult. I mean, QAnon is a cult. And so there's a lot of line and there's a lot of confusion. You know, there are, it's almost so 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, like they're adjacent to the pure crazy. There's the semi crazy. And adjacent to the semi crazy, there's the grifting opportunist asshole. And the layers of bad faith are hard to fully diagnose, but the problem is all of this is getting signal boosted by an outrage machine that is preferentially spreading misinformation. It has a business model that is guaranteeing, that is preferentially sharing misinformation.

And actually just in 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 the reason. I think you have to use empathy.

You have to make it. But part of it, I mean, I find it very difficult to believe that anyone believes these things. I mean, I think that there's, 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? None of this is what it seems. They're not signaling an alliance with white supremacy or neo-naziism, but they're not doing it. They just don't fucking care. It's just cynicism overflowing its banks. It's just fun to wind up the normies. 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. 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 want to vandalize our new sphere.

But unnecessary. I think the criticism that people would say about your talking about COVID, maybe you can correct me, but you were skeptic or you were against skepticism of the safety and efficacy of the vaccine. So people who get nervous about the vaccine but don't fall into the usual anti-vax camp, which I think there was a significant enough number. They're asking, they're getting nervous. I mean, especially after the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, I too was nervous about anything where a lot of money could be made. And you just see how the people who are greedy, they come to the surface all of a sudden. And a lot of them that run institutions actually really good human beings. I know a lot of them, but it's hard to know how those two combined together when there's hundreds of billions, trillions of dollars to be made. And so that skepticism, I guess the sense was

that you weren't open enough to the skepticism. I understand that people have that sense. I'll tell you how I thought about it and think about it. One, again, it was a moving target. So there was a point in the timeline where it was totally rational to expect that the vaccines were both working, both they were reasonably safe and that COVID was reasonably dangerous and that the trade-off for basically everyone was it was rational to get vaccinated. Given the level of testing and how many people had been vaccinated before you, given what we were seeing with COVID, that that was a forced choice. You're eventually 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.

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, 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, but I'm certainly less worried about getting COVID. I've had it once, I've been vaccinated. I've like, it's like, so you ask me now, how do I feel about getting the next booster? I don't know that I'm going to get the next booster, right? So I was somebody who was waiting in line at four in the morning, hoping to get some overflow vaccine when it was first available.

I just disagree with that, I think, yes, in theory, I agree 100%, but I feel like experts failed at communicating, not at doing- They did. And I just feel like you and Brett Weinstein actually have the tools with the internet, given the engine you have in your brain of thinking for months at a time deeply about the problems that face our world, that you actually have the tools to do pretty good thinking here.

The problem I have with experts- But there would be deference to experts

and pseudo experts behind all of that. Well, the papers, you would stand on the shoulders of giants, but you can surf those shoulders better than the giants themselves.

Yeah, but I knew we were gonna disagree about that. Like 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. I mean, one larger problem, and this goes back to the problem of how we rely on authority in science, is that you can always find a PhD or an MD to champion any crackpot idea, right? I mean, it is amazing, but you could find PhDs and MDs who would sit up there in front of Congress and say that they thought smoking was not addictive, or that it was not harmful to, there was no direct link between smoking and lung cancer. You can always find those people, and you can end, but some of the people Brett found were people who had obvious tells, to my point of view, to my eye, and I saw them on, some of the same people were on Rogan's podcast, right? And it's hard, because if a person does have the right credentials, and they're not saying something floridly mistaken, and we're talking about something where it's their genuine unknowns, right? Like, how much do we know about the safety of these vaccines, right? 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 that's, 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 that would be getting into the weeds on this.

on those most, on those edgiest points that seem most. And your experts seem like, what is the term,

mass hysteria, I forgot the term. Well, no, but it's like, it's like with climate science. I mean, this old, it's received as a canard for in half our society now, but the claim that 97% of climate scientists agree that human caused climate change is a thing, right? So do you go with the 97% most of the time, or do you go with the 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, everyone's a journalist, right? Everyone's a scientist, everyone's an expert, everyone's got direct contact with the facts

or some, 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 would listen to you as the aggregator, as the communicator of expertise. Because the virologists haven't been able to be good communicators. I still to this day don't really know what 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 aggregating 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.

even still today. Well, the jury is still out on some of it. And again, it's a moving target. And some of it, I mean, it's complicated. Some of it's a self-fulfilling dynamic where like, so like lockdowns, in theory lockdowns, a lockdown would work if we could only do it, but we can't really do it. And there's a lot of people who won't do it because they're convinced that it's, this is the totalitarian boot, finally on the neck of the good people who are always having their interests introduced 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? Because there are absolutely certain pathogens that we should lock down for next time, right? And it was completely rational in the beginning of this thing to lockdown given, to attempt to lockdown, 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?

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, you know, was maliciously clipped out from some other podcast where someone's trying to make it look like I wanna see children die. Look, there's a pity more children didn't die from COVID, right? This is actually the same person who, and that's the other thing that got so poisoned here. It's like that person, this psychopath or effective psychopath who's creating these clips of me on podcasts, the second clip of me seeming to say that I wish more children died during COVID, but it was so clear in context what I was saying that even the clip betrayed the context, so it didn't actually work. This psycho, and again, I don't know whether he actually is a psychopath, but he's behaving like one because of the incentives of Twitter. This is somebody who Brett Signal Boosted as a very reliable source of information, right? He kept retweeting this guy at me, against me, right? And this guy, at one glance, I knew how unreliable this guy was, right? But I think I, I'm not at all set. One thing I think I did wrong, one thing that I do regret, one thing I have not sorted out for myself is how to navigate the 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.

which is not what I would say about Elon, but. I don't think, I disagree with you because good vibes in the moment, there's a deep core of good vibes that persist through time between you and Elon. And I would argue probably between

some of the other folks you mentioned. I think with Brett, I failed to reach out in private to the degree that I should have. And we never really had, we had tried to set up a conversation in private that never happened, but there was some communication, but it would have been much better for me to have made more of an effort in private than I did before it spilled out into public.

And I would say that's true with other people as well. What kind of interaction in private do you think you should have with Brett? Because my case would be beforehand and now still. The case I would like in this part of the criticism you sent my way, maybe it's useful to go to that direction. Actually, let's go to that direction because I think I disagree with your criticism as you stated publicly, but this is- You're talking about Your beauty with Kanye. The thing you criticized me for is actually the right thing to do with Brett. Okay, you said Lex could have spoken with Kanye in such a way as they have produced a useful document. He didn't do that because he has a fairly naive philosophy

about the power of love. You're talking about your beauty with Kanye. Let's see, if you can maintain that philosophy in the presence of his 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, right? 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 to 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's power to that. Maybe that is naive, but I believe in the power 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, and it has to do with Kanye. I mean, so Kanye, I don't know, I've never met Kanye, so obviously I don't know him, but I think he's either obviously in the midst of a mental health crisis, or he's a colossal asshole, or both. I mean, actually those aren't mutually exclusive, so one of three possibilities. He's either mentally ill, he's an 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, no, I would argue none of those are likely for either of us, but not to say we don't have our moments, but either. So the reason not to talk to Kanye, 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? If he's in the middle of a manic episode or I'm not a clinician, but I've heard it said of him that he is bipolar, you're not doing him a favor sticking a mic in front of him and letting him go off on the Jews or anything else, right? We know what he thought about the Jews. We know that there's not much illumination that's gonna come from him on that topic. And if it is a symptom of his mental illness that he thinks these things, well then, you're not doing him a favor making that even more public. If he's just an asshole and he's just an anti-Semite, an ordinary garden variety anti-Semite, well then there's also not much to say unless you're really gonna dig in and kick the shit out of him in public. And I'm saying you can do that with love. I mean, that's the other thing here is that I don't agree that compassion and love always have this patient embracing acquiescent face, right?

to put out into the world of work. You don't think it opens up the mind and heart

of people that listen to that, just seeing a person? If 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 people see it.

Yeah, but I had to, sorry, in 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.

Okay, but when he shows up in a gimp hood on Alex Jones' podcast, I mean, either that's more genius performance in his world,

or he's unraveling further. I wouldn't put that under mental illness. We have to, 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, on politics, on 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 the spot.

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, because I think there are problems just letting him spread those memes as well. But the most offensive thing is just how delusionally egocentric he is, or was coming off in that interview and in others. Like he has an estimation of himself as this omnibus genius, not only to rival Shakespeare, to exceed Shakespeare, right? 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, right? So it's complete delusion of a very Trumpian sort. It's like when Trump says he's a genius who understands everything, but nobody takes him seriously, and one wonders whether Trump takes himself seriously, Kanye seems to believe his own press. He actually thinks he's just a colossus, and he may be a great musician. It's certainly not my wheelhouse to compare him to any other musicians, but one thing that's patently obvious from your conversation is he's not who he thinks he is intellectually or ethically or in any other relevant way. And so when you couple that to the antisemitism he was spreading, which was genuinely noxious and ill-considered and has potential knock-on effects in the black community.

rather than to me.

There's an antisemitism. 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 that people talk about it. But I should also say that you're one of the only people that wrote to me privately criticizing me. And like out of the people I really respect and admire, and that was really valuable that I had to, painful, because I had to think through it for a while. I'm still, it still haunts me because the other kind of criticism I got a lot of people basically said things towards me based on who I am that they hate me. You mean antisemitic things or? 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, right? It's unique in that it seems, it's knit together with, it's not just ordinary racism, it's knit together with lots of conspiracy theories that never seem to die out. It can by turns equally animate the left and the right politically.

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 it's just this whole period is a very difficult conversation. But I believe in the power, especially given who I am of not always,

but sometimes often turning the other cheek. Oh yeah, and again, things change when they're for public consumption. It's like, I mean, the cut for me that has just the use case I keep stumbling upon is the kinds of things that I will say on a podcast like this or if I'm giving a public lecture versus the kinds of things I will say at dinner with strangers or with friends. Like if you're 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 and say, listen, that thing you just said about X, Y, or Z is completely false and here's Y, 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, they're definitely moments to privilege civility or just to pick your battles. I mean, sometimes it's just not worth it

to get into it with somebody out in real life. I just believe in the power of empathy both in the elevator and when a bunch of people are listening that when they see you willing to consider another human being's perspective,

it just gives more power to your words after. Well, yeah, but until it doesn't, because you can extend charity too far, 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. So it's, and again, the mental illness component here makes it very difficult to think about

what you should or shouldn't have said to Kanye.

You can extend. So I think the topic of platforming is pretty interesting. Like what's your view on platforming controversial people? Let's start with the old, would you interview Hitler on your podcast and how would you talk to him? Oh, and follow up question. Would you interview him in 1935, 41, and then like 45?

Well, I think we have an uncanny valley problem with respect to this issue of whether or not to speak to bad people, right? So if a person is sufficiently bad, right? If they're all the way out of the valley, then you can talk to them and it's just totally unproblematic to talk to them because you don't have to spend any time signaling to your audience that you don't agree with them. If you're interviewing Hitler, you don't have to say, listen, I just got to say before we start, I don't agree with the whole genocide thing. And I just think you're killing mental patients and vans and all that. That was all bad. It was a bad look. Adolf, 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?

Once he's legitimately- But when do you know it? Is genocide really happening? It's like 42, 43?

No, no, no, no, no. It's like 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 want to help facilitate that, then there's a question of whether you can undermine him while pushing back against him in that interview, right? So there are people I wouldn't talk to just because I don't want to give them oxygen and I don't think that in the context of my interviewing them, I'm gonna be able to take the wind out of their sails at all, right? So it's like for whatever, either because it's an asymmetric advantage because I just know that they can do something within the span of an hour that I can't correct for. It's like they can light many small fires

and it just takes too much time to put them out. That's more like on the topic of vaccines, for example,

having a debate on the efficacy of vaccines. Having a debate on the efficacy. It's not that I don't think sunlight is usually the best disinfectant, I think it is. You know, even these asymmetries aside, I mean, there are, it is true that a person can always make a mess faster than you can clean it up, but still there are debates worth having even given that limitation and they're the right people to have those specific debates and there's certain topics where I'll debate someone just because I'm the right person for the job and it doesn't matter how messy they're 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 has to be, each of which contains more lives than the last and there's not time enough in the world to run down and it's 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.

Confabulation, confabulation. That if somebody says something a little micro-untruth

it really stops your brain. Here I'm not talking about micro-untruths, I'm just talking about making up things out of whole cloth. So it's like, if someone says something, well, what about, and then the thing they put at the end of that sentence, it's just a set of pseudo facts that you can't possibly authenticate or not in the span of that conversation. Whether it's about UFOs or anything else, they will seem to make you look like an ignoramus when in fact, everything they're saying is specious, whether they know it or not. I mean, there's some people who are just crazy, there's some people who are just bullshitting and they're not even tracking whether it's true, it just feels good,

and then some people are 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 and then. But the thing is, the place I'm familiar with doing this and not doing this is on specific conspiracies like 9-11-truth. So because of what 9-11 did to my intellectual life, I mean, it's really just, 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 because I spent so much time studying religion on my own and I was also very interested in the underlying spiritual concerns of every religion. And so I was, I devoted more than a full decade of my life to just, what is real here? What is possible? What is the nature of subjective reality and how does it relate to reality at large? And is there anything to just, who was someone like Jesus or Buddha? And are these people frauds? Are these just myths?

through the full decade of my 20s. And that was launched in part by 9-11-truth or?

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? 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 that. Allegedly. The core doctrines of Islam, exactly. So I went down, so that became my wheelhouse for a time, terrorism and jihadism and related topics. And so the 9-11-truth conspiracy thing kept getting aimed at me and the question was, well, do I want to debate these people, right? Like? 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.

Allegedly.

Yeah, like Alex Jones, perhaps.

Yeah, and privately I had some very long debates with people who, one person in my family went way down that rabbit hole. And I just, every six months or so, I'd literally write the two hour email that would try to deprogram him, 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, things are never what they seem. There's always malicious conspirators doing things perfectly. We see evidence of human incompetence everywhere else.

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 the people, the people who are worried

about Ukrainian Nazis, some of the same people, they're the same people who are worried about

the people. Intentionally. The Ivermectin got suppressed. Like Ivermectin is really a panacea, but it got suppressed for because no one could make billions on it. In many cases the same people and the same efforts to unearth those.

You're saying it's very difficult to have conversations with those kinds of people. What

about a conversation with Trump himself? Would you do a podcast with those kinds of people? No. I don't think so. I don't think I'd be learning anything about him. It's like with Hitler, and I'm not comparing Trump to Hitler, but- Clips guy, that's your chance. You got this one. With certain world historical figures, and I would just feel like, okay, this is an opportunity to learn something that I'm not going to learn. I think Trump is among the most superficial people we have ever laid eyes on. He is in public view, and I'm sure there's some distance between who he is in private and who he is in public, but it's not going to be the kind of distance that's going to blow my mind. I think the liability of that, for instance, I think Joe Rogan was very wise not to have Trump on his podcast. I think all he would have been doing is he would have put himself in a situation where he couldn't adequately contain the damage Trump was doing, and he was just going to make Trump seem cool to a whole potentially new cohort of his massive audience.

anything else. We're monkeys, and we like to laugh. Because he brought up Joe. He's somebody like you I look up to. I've learned a lot from him because I think who he is privately as a human being. Also, he's kind of the voice of curiosity to me. He inspired me that unending open-minded curiosity, much like you are the voice of reason. Joe had recently a podcast with Jordan Peterson, and he brought you up saying they still have a hope for you. Any chance that you talk to Joe again

and reinvigorate your friendship? 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, so there's no issue there. He also knows I'll be happy to do his podcast when we get that together. I've got no policy of not talking to Joe or not doing his podcast. I think we got a little sideways along these same lines where we've talked about Brett and Elon and other people. It was never to that degree with Joe because Joe's in a very different lane, and consciously so. Joe is a stand-up comic who interviews, who just is interested in everything, interviews the widest conceivable variety of people, and just lets his interests collide with their expertise or lack of expertise. 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.

extraordinarily ethical, good person. Also doesn't use Twitter. He doesn't really use Twitter.

The crucial difference, though, is that because he is an entertainer first, I'm not saying he's not smart and doesn't understand things. What's potentially confusing is he's very smart, and he's full-time job. When he's not doing stand-up or doing color commentary for the UFC, his full-time job is talking to lots of very smart people at great length. He's created the Joe Rogan University for himself, and he's gotten a lot of information crammed into his head. It's not that he's uninformed, but when he feels that he's uninformed or when it turns out he was wrong about something, he can always pull the rip cord and say, I'm just a comic. We were stoned. It was fun. Don't take medical advice from me. I don't play a doctor on the internet. I can't quite do that. You can't quite do that. We're in different lanes.

do 100 podcasts in a row on COVID. It makes no sense. You think in part audience capture can explain that?

I absolutely think it can. I absolutely think it can.

For example, do you feel pressure to not admit that you made a mistake on COVID or made a mistake on Trump? I'm not saying you feel that way, but do you feel this pressure? So you've attacked audience capture within the way you do stuff, so you don't feel as much pressure from the audience, but within your own ego.

I mean, again, the people who think I'm wrong about any of these topics are going to think, okay, you're just not admitting that you're wrong, but now we're having a dispute about specific facts. There are things that I believed about COVID or worried might be true about COVID two years ago that I no longer believe or I'm not so worried about now and vice versa. I mean, things have flipped, certain things have flipped upside down. The question is, was I wrong? So here's the cartoon version of it, but this is something I said probably 18 months ago and it's still true. When I saw what Brett was doing on COVID, let's call it two years ago, I said, even if he's right, even if it turns out that ivermectin is a panacea and the mRNA vaccines kill millions of people, he's still wrong right now. His reasoning is still flawed right now. His facts still 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'd be vaccinated with the mRNA vaccine, I would be powerfully annoyed. I wouldn't know what I was going to do and I would be doing more research about myocarditis and I'd be badgering our doctors and I would be worried that we have a medical system and a pharmaceutical system and a healthcare system and a public health system that's not incentivized to look at any of this in a fine-grained way and they just want one blanket admonition to the entire population. Just take the shot, you idiots.

My problem, I really enjoyed your conversation with Eric Topol, but also didn't. He's one of the great communicators in many ways on Twitter, distillation of the current data. 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 to get attacked so much by the left, they become almost irrational and arrogant in their beliefs. 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. Many of the decisions you made, many of the things you were talking about were saying, there's a lot of uncertainty,

but this is the best thing we could do now. Well, it was a forced choice. You're going to get COVID. Do you want to be vaccinated when you get it? That was always, in my view, an easy choice. And it's up until you start breaking apart the cohorts and you start saying, okay, wait a minute, there is this myocarditis issue in young men. Let's talk about that. Before that story emerged, it was just clear that if it's not knocking down transmission as much as we had hoped, it is still mitigating severe illness and death. And I still believe that it is the current view of most people competent to analyze the data, that we lost something like 300,000 people

unnecessarily in the US because of vaccine hesitancy. But I think there's a way to communicate with humility about the uncertainty of things that would increase the vaccination rate.

I do believe that it is rational and sometimes effective to signal impatience with certain bad ideas and certain conspiracy theories and certain forms of misinformation.

I think so. I just think it makes you look like a douchebag most times.

Well, certain people are persuadable, certain people are not persuadable, but it's not enough. It's the opportunity cost. Not everything can be given a patient hearing. 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 when they're obviously half crazy. You begin to get a sense for this when it is your wheelhouse, but there are people who declare their irrelevance to the conversation fairly quickly without knowing that they have done it. And the truth is, I think I'm one of those people on the topic of COVID. It's never that I felt, listen, I know exactly what's going on here. I know these mRNA vaccines are safe. I know exactly how to run a lockdown. No, this is a situation where you want the actual pilots to fly the plane. We needed experts who we could trust. And insofar as our experts got captured by all manner of things, I mean, some of them got captured by Trump.

I think much more about next time than this time.

Before this COVID thing, you and Brad had some good conversations. I would say we're friends. What's your, what do you admire most about Brad outside of all the criticism we've had

about this COVID topic? Well, I think Brett is very smart and he's a very ethical person who wants good things for the world. I mean, I have no reason to doubt that. So the fact that we're on, you know, we're crosswise on this issue is not, does not mean that I think he's a bad person. I mean, the thing that worried me about what he was doing, and this was true of Joe and this was true of Elon, this is true of many other people, is that once you're messaging at scale to a vast audience, you incur a certain kind of responsibility not to get people killed. And I do, I did worry that yeah, people were, people were making decisions on the basis of the information that was getting shared there. And that, that's why I was, and that 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, if something changes, so as to become newsworthy, then maybe I'll do a podcast.

what do we do given the nature of this pandemic, the lab leak, right? But also we should say that you've actually stated that it is a possibility. Oh, yeah. You just said it doesn't quite matter.

It did. Oh, yeah. You just said it doesn't quite matter. The time to figure that out. Now, I've actually, I have had my podcast guest on this topic changed 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 in the event you lose touch with the evidence and I hadn't really been thinking about that. If you come back after a year, 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're very quickly designed immediately designing vaccines against that genome. And that's what we had to do. And then we had to figure out how to vaccinate and to mitigate and to develop treatments and all of that. So the origin story didn't matter. Generically speaking, either origin story was politically inflammatory and made the Chinese look bad, right?

if it was a lab leak, all of that's going to look odious. Do you think we'll ever get to the bottom of that? I mean, one of the big negative, I would say failures of Anthony Fauci and so on is to be transparent and clear and just a good communicator about gain and functional 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, they went viral. Yeah, I would agree that Fauci looked like he was taking refuge in 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 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. 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 the gain of function research. I don't even understand virus hunting at this point. It's like, 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.

What kind of head start do you think you're getting? That's a surprising new thing, how quickly you can develop a vaccine. Yeah, that's really interesting, but the shadiness around lab leak.

Exactly. I think the point I didn't make about Brett's style of engaging this issue is people are using the fact that he was early on lab leak to suggest that he was right about ivermectin and about mRNA vaccines and all the rest. No, none of that connects. And it was possible to be falsely confident. You shouldn't have been confident about lab. No one should have been confident about lab leak early, even if it turns out to be lab leak. 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.

reasoning is dictating what you're going to do on the next topic. Sure. But this multi-variant situation here, it's really difficult to know what's right on COVID given all the uncertainty and all the chaos, especially when you step outside the pure biology of it and you start getting to policy. 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, Pfizer, I don't know what to

think. But you had the CEO of Pfizer on your podcast. Did you leave that conversation feeling like this is a person who is consciously reaping windfall profits on a dangerous vaccine and putting everyone at intolerable risk? Or did you think this person was making a good faith attempt to save lives and had no taint of bad incentives or something?

The thing I sensed and I felt in part, it was a failure on my part, but I sensed that I was talking to a politician. It's not thinking of there was malevolence there or benevolence. He just had a job. He put on a suit and I was talking to a suit, not a human being. Now, he said that his son was a big fan of the podcast, which is why he wanted to do it. I thought I would be talking to a human being. I asked challenging questions what I thought the internet thinks otherwise. Every single

question in that interview was a challenging one, but it wasn't grilling, which is what people seem

to want to do with pharmaceutical companies. There's a deep distrust of pharmaceutical companies.

What was the alternative? I mean, I totally get that windfall profits at a time of public health emergency looks bad. It is a bad look, right? But how do we reward and return 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 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. What are we trying to do? That windfall product. 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 a real human. It just feels like none of it is transparent to us as a public. So this whole talking point that Pfizer is only interested in helping people just doesn't ring true. Even though it's very well could be true. It's the same thing with Bill Gates, who seems to be at scale helping a huge amount of people in the world. And yet there's something about the way he delivers that message where people like, this seems suspicious. What's happening underneath this?

Yeah, I worry about all that. But I also do think that more people, I also do think that most of the people going into those fields and most of the people going into government are doing it for good. And they're non-psycho paths, 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- Yeah, they want to do good.

Bad incentives or something, again, I've uttered that phrase 30 times on this podcast, but it's just almost everywhere it explains normal people creating terrible harm. It's not that there are that many bad people. And yes, it makes the truly bad people that much more remarkable and worth paying attention to, but the bad incentives and the power of bad ideas do much more harm. Because that's what gets good people running in the wrong direction or

doing things that are clearly creating unnecessary suffering. You've had, and I hope still have a friendship with Elon Musk, especially over the topic of AI. You have a lot of interesting ideas that you both share, concerns you both share. Well, let me first ask, what do you admire most about Elon?

Well, I had a lot of fun with Elon. I like Elon a lot. I mean, Elon, I knew as a friend, I like a lot. And it's not going to surprise anyone. He's done and he's continuing to do amazing things. And I think many of his aspirations are realized the world would be a much better place. I think it's just, it's amazing to see what he's built and what he's attempted to build and what he

may yet build. So Tesla or SpaceX?

Yeah. I'm a fan of almost all of that. I mean, there are wrinkles to a lot of that,

or some of that. All humans are full of wrinkles.

There's something very trumping about how he's acting on Twitter. I mean, Twitter, I think Twitter, he thinks Twitter is great. He bought the place because he thinks it's so great. I think Twitter is driving him crazy. 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. 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, gay, tryst gone awry, 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, and it was having its effect. It matters that he was signal boosting it in front of 130 million people. So it is with saying that your former employee, Yoel Roth, is a pedophile. That has real consequences.

mitigate a friend's behavior, and it didn't work out very well. Did you try to correct him 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 two-fold 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. This is in March, it's early March, 2020. Oh, super early days of COVID. Super early. When nobody knew anything,

but we knew we saw what was happening in Italy. It was totally kicking off. God, that was a wild

time. That's when the toilet paper, that's when the toilet paper. 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 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. Surely he knows something that is not on the surface about this pandemic. They were reading into it a lot of information that I knew wasn't there. And at the time, 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.

I don't know if it was obvious, but it was obvious there was a significant probability that it could be a big deal. I remember it wasn't clear. There's still stories of it, the big concern, the hospital's might have been filled, but it's gonna calculating in two months

or something. Yeah. No, 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 kinda riding this exponential, and we're, and it's gonna be, you know, it'd be very surprising not to have that order of magnitude, and not something much, much less. 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 so that intervention didn't work, and it was not done, you know, I was not an asshole, I was not, I was just concerned, for him, for the world, and then there are other relationships where I didn't take the, again, that's an example where taking the time didn't work, right, privately. There are other relationships where I thought, okay, this is just gonna be more trouble than it's worth, and I said, I just ignored it, you know? And there's a lot of that and I, Frank, again, I'm not comfortable with how this is all netted out because I don't know if, you know, 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 anything? I think there's a lot of good because those friendships, listen, as a fan, these are the conversations that I loved, love as a fan and it feels like COVID has robbed the world of these conversations because you were exchanging back and forth on Twitter, but that's not what I mean by conversations, like long-form discussions, like a debate about COVID,

like a normal debate and debate. But there's 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 like trying to figure out

what the hell, what? Yeah, but the issue was that at that, so at the moment I had this collision with Elon, certain things were not debatable, right? It was just, it was absolutely clear where this was going. It wasn't clear how far it was 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, there are already cases known to many of us personally in the US at that point. And he was operating by a very different logic

that I couldn't engage with. Sure, but that logic represents a part of the population and there's a lot of interesting topics that have a lot of uncertainty around them, like the effectiveness of masks.

Yeah, but no, but where things broke down was not at the point of, oh, there's a lot to talk about, a lot to debate, this is all very interesting, and who knows what's what. It broke down very early at, this is, there's nothing to talk about here, like either there's a water bottle on the table or there isn't, right?

Technically, there's only one fourth of a water bottle. So what defines a water bottle? Is it the water inside the water bottle or is it the water bottle? What I'm giving you is an example

of it's worth the conversation. This is difficult because we had an exchange in private and I wanna honor not exposing the details of it, but the details convinced me that there was not a followup conversation on that topic.

On this topic. On this topic. That said, I hope, and I hope to be part of helping that happen, that the friendship was rekindled because one of the topics I care a lot about artificial intelligence, you've had great public and private conversations about this topic. And it seems like-

Yes, 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 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's 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's your concern in terms of AGI and super intelligence 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. And so 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 super intelligence 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 super intelligent self-improving AI to our value system. And I don't believe anyone has figured out how to do that or whether that's even possible in principle. I know people like Stuart Russell who I just had on my podcast are- Oh, really? Have you released it yet? I haven't released it yet. Oh, great, that's great. Yeah, we've been due to previous podcasts but we just recorded it this week.

Because you haven't tried, have you released it yet? I haven't released it, yeah, yeah. Oh, great, that's great. But he's been on- Because you haven't done an AI podcast in a while, so it's great. He's a good person to talk

about alignment with, so that's great. Yeah, so I just said- 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 you're just reading his book and doing, I think I've done two podcasts with him at this point. No, 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 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.

I worry that we don't notice it. I'm deeply impressed with Chad GPT and I'm worried that it will become super intelligent. These language models will become super intelligent because they're basically trained in the collective intelligence of the human species and then it will start controlling our behavior if they're integrated into our algorithms, the recommender systems. And then we just won't notice that there is a super intelligent system

that's controlling our behavior. Well, I think that's true even before, far before super intelligence or even before general intelligence. I think just the narrow intelligence of these algorithms and of what something like Chad GPT can do. I mean, it's just far short of it developing its own goals that are 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 the ground truth on any facts. Yeah, it's super scary.

Do you think it's a giant leap in terms of the development towards AGI, Chad GPT, or is it just an impressive little toolbox? When do you think the singularity is coming? Or is it T? It doesn't

matter. I have no intuitions on that front, apart from the fact that if we continue to make progress, it will come. You just have to assume we continue to make progress. There's only two assumptions. You have to assume substrate independence. 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. I think that's scientifically parsimonious, I think that that's true. Then you just have to assume we're going to keep making progress. It doesn't have to be any special rate of progress, it doesn't have to be Moore's Law.

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. 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 GPT is just trained on human data. I don't see where the takeoff happens where you completely go above human wisdom. The current impressive aspect of Chad GPT

is that's using collective intelligence of all of us. From what I gleaned from, again, from people who know much more about this than I do, I think we have reason to be skeptical that these techniques of deep learning are actually going to be sufficient to push us into AGI. Right, so it's just, they're not generalizing in the way they need to. They're certainly not learning like human children. And so they're brittle in strange ways. They're, it's not to say that the human path is the only path, and maybe we might learn better lessons by ignoring the way brains work, 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 some intelligence. Yeah, but it's becoming simpler and simpler. So I don't know, I don't, the progress is quite incredible. I've been extremely impressed with Chad GPT 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.

Yeah, yeah. 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?

Can you, that you were contacted by,

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, 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, come in 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, 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, just send me the Zoom link, right? And I went, that happened maybe three times, you know, 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'm not, I haven't spoken to him about it, I know he's spoken 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, that you ran a thought experiment of saying, okay, maybe we do have alien spacecraft or just the thought experiment the aliens did visit and then the aliens did visit. 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 would just barely rise into 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. You know, the general sense is probably bullshit or it probably has some explanation that is purely terrestrial and not surprising.

but is it a YouTuber? Mick West, yeah, he debunked stuff. 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, it's going to be more likely

than an alien civilization visiting us, civilization visiting us. Yeah, it's the extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence principle,

which I think is generally true. Well, with aliens, I think generally, I think there should be some humility about what they would look like when they show up.

I tend to think they're already here. The amazing thing about this AI conversation though, is that we're talking about a circumstance where we would be designing the aliens and there's every reason to believe that eventually this is going to happen. Like I said, I'm not at all skeptical about the coming reality of the aliens and we're going to build them.

Now, here's the thing. Does this apply to when super intelligence shows up? Will this be trending on Twitter for a day? And then we'll go on to complain about something Sam Harris once again said on his podcast next day. You tend to trend on Twitter, even though you're not on Twitter, which is great.

Yeah, I haven't noticed. I 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 new cycle wipes that away. Yeah, well, I think we have this general problem that we can't make certain information, even unequivocally certain information emotionally salient. Like we respond quite readily to certain things. I mean, as we talked about, we respond to the little girl who fell down a well. I mean, that just gets 100% of our emotional resources, but the abstract probability of nuclear war, even a high probability, even just even an intolerable probability, even if we put it at 30%, like it's just like that's Russian roulette with a gun with three chambers. And it's aimed at the heads, not only your head, but your kid's head and everyone's kid's head. And it's just 24 hours a day. And I mean, I think people who, this pre Ukraine, I think the people who have made it their business to professionally to think about the risk of nuclear war and to mitigate it, 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 next generation, people were putting it at something like 50%, that we're living with this sort of Damocles over our heads. Now, you might wonder whether anyone could have reliable intuitions about the probability of that kind of thing. But the status quo is truly alarming. I mean, we've got ICBMs on, leave aside smaller exchanges and tactical nukes and how we could have a world war based on incremental changes. We've got the biggest bombs aimed at the biggest cities in both directions and it's old technology, right?

by people who are driven crazy by some ideology. And more and more technologies

enable a kind of scale of destruction. And misinformation plays into this picture in a way that is especially scary. I mean, once you can get a deep fake of, any current president of the United States claiming to have launched a first strike, and just 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 can't be sure that I actually said it. 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. We're living through this sort of Wild West period where everyone's got a newsletter and everyone's got a blog and everyone's got an opinion.

But once you can fake everything. There might be a greater value for expertise for experts, but a more rigorous system

for identifying who the experts are for experts. Yeah, or just knowing that 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 it hasn't been meddled with by AI. And again, I don't even know if that's technically possible. I mean, 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.

It could be like encryption, but.

Yeah, and it would be proven and tested most effectively first, of course, as always in porn. Yeah, which is where most of human innovation technology happens first. Well, I have to ask because Ron Howard, the director asked us on Twitter, since we're talking about the threat of nuclear war and otherwise, he asked, I'd be interested in both your expectations for human society if, when we move beyond Mars. Will those societies be industrial based? How will it be governed? How will criminal infractions be dealt with? When you read or watch sci-fi, what comes closest to sounding logical? Do you think about our society beyond Earth?

If we colonize Mars, if we colonize space? Yeah, well, I think I have a pretty humbling picture of that. Because we're still gonna be the apes that we are. So when you imagine colonizing Mars, you have to imagine a first fistfight on Mars. You have to imagine a first murder on Mars. Also infidelity. Extramarital affairs on Mars. So it's gonna get really homely and boring really fast, I think. It's like only the spacesuits, or the other exingencies of just living in that atmosphere or lack thereof,

will limit how badly we can behave on Mars. Yeah, somebody else. 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 living through a transformation of a kind where we're going to be doing more and more interaction than digital space? Like everything we've been complaining about Twitter, is it possible that Twitter's just the early days of a broken system that's actually giving birth

to a better working system that's ultimately digital? I think we're 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 the real world.

Have face-to-face encounters and spend less time on our phones and less time online. 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 are never on Twitter, right? And the people who are never, basically, I mean, I know, I have a lot of friends who are never on Twitter. And they actually never understood what I was doing on Twitter. It was like it wasn't that they were seeing it seeing it and then reacting to it,

they just didn't know, it's like, right?

And 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.

Do you think the pursuit of human happiness is better achieved and 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 in the end, 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 has 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 have this tension between being in the present and becoming in the future. And, you know, it's a seeming paradox. Again, it's not really a paradox, but it can seem like, I do think the ground truth for personal wellbeing is to find a mode of being where you can pay attention to the present moment, and this is, you know, meditation by another name, you can pay attention to the present moment with sufficient, you know, gravity, that you recognize that just consciousness itself in the present moment, no matter what's happening, is already a circumstance of freedom and contentment and tranquility. Like, you can be happy now before anything happens, before this next desire gets gratified, before this next problem gets solved. There's this kind of ground truth that you're free, that consciousness is free and open and unencumbered by really any problem until you get lost in thought

about all the problems that may yet be real for you. So the ability to catch and observe consciousness,

that in itself is a source of happiness. 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 captivated. Like, it gets their attention, right? Whatever it is. You know, Sebastian Younger wrote a great book about people's experience in war here. You know, strangely it can be the best experience anyone's ever had because everything, it's like only the moment matters, right? Like the bullet is whizzing by your head. You're not thinking about your 401k or that thing that you didn't say last week to the person you shouldn't have been talking about. You're not thinking about Twitter. It's like, you're just fully immersed in the present moment.

it's just a new way of being in the world. Is there a difference between intellectually knowing free will as an illusion and really experiencing it? What's the longest you've been able to experience,

the escape the illusion of free will? Well, it's always obvious to me when I pay attention. When I, whenever I'm mindful of the term of jargon in the Buddhist and increasingly outside the Buddhist context is mindfulness, right? But they're sort of different levels of mindfulness and there's different degrees of insight into this. But yeah, so what I'm calling evidence of lack of free will and lack of the self. I've got two sides of the same coin. There's a sense of being a subject in the middle of experience to whom all experience refers. The sense of I, the sense of me. And that's almost everybody's starting point when they start to meditate. That's almost always the place people live most of their lives from. I do think that gets interrupted in ways that get unrecognized. I think people are constantly losing the sense of eye.

So- Not that I know of. Yes.

The possibility might be there. So what do we mean when we say, you could have had a child, or you might have a child in the future? Like what is the space in reality, what's the relationship between possibility and actuality and reality? Is there a reality in which non-actual things are nonetheless real? And so we have other categories of like non-concrete things. We have things that don't have spatial temporal dimension, but they 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, Hamlet and Superman also exist in some sense, but they exist at a level of our own fiction and abstraction. But it's like, they're true and false statements you can make about Hamlet.

Yeah, like 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, sure, that's a case of, and truth is that happens even, even if the many worlds interpretation isn't true, but we just imagine we have a physically infinite universe, the implication of infinity is such that things will begin to repeat themselves, you know, the farther you go in space, right? So, you know, if you just head out in one direction, eventually you're 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, you know, infinite variety of permutations, slightly different from this conversation, right? So I mean, infinity is just so big that our intuitions of probability completely break down. But what I'm suggesting is maybe probability isn't a thing, right, maybe there's only actuality. 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. It might've happened. about the different thing. If you can imagine a thing that doesn't make it real, because 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 if I'm going to say, you could have had a daughter 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? It has a kind of structure. It's like-

I feel like there's a lot of fog around the possibility. It feels almost like a useful

narrative. What does it mean? If we say, I just did that, but it's conceivable that I wouldn't have done that, right? 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. What would appear as a decision?

Whenever we're saying something's possible, but not actual, right? This thing just happened, but it's possible that it wouldn't have happened or that it would have happened differently. In 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 sexuality,

that the possibility is an illusion? Right, yeah, I'm just extending it beyond human action. Like this goes to the physics of things, this is just everything. Like we're always telling ourselves a story

that includes possibility.

Possibility is really compelling for some reason. Well, yeah, well, because it's, I mean, so this, yeah, I mean, this could sound just academic, but every backward looking regret or disappointment and every forward looking worry is completely dependent on this notion of possibility. Like every regret is based on the sense that something else, I could have done something else, something else could have happened. Every disposition to worry about the future is based on the feeling that there's this range of possibilities, it could go either way. And whether or not there's such a thing as possibility, I'm convinced that worry is almost never psychologically appropriate, because the reality is 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. And if you can't, your worrying is just causing you to suffer twice over, right? 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- You can do therapy with a physicist. Yeah, but probability, it seems, just describes a pattern of actuality that we've observed, right? I mean, there's 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. I can flip a fair coin and know, I know in the abstract that I have a belief that in the limit, those flips, those tosses should converge on 50% heads and 50% tails. I know I have a story as to why it's not 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 about that last toss? And what are we claiming is true about the physics of things

if we say it could have been otherwise? I think we're claiming that probability is true, that it just allows us to have a nice model about the world.

It gives us hope about the world, about the world. It seems that possibility has to be somewhere to be effective. It's a little bit like what's happening with the laws. There's something metaphysically interesting about the laws of nature, too, because 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 making, they're explaining this, but how are the laws of nature an additional thing? In addition to just the actual things that are actually effect-causingy, and if they are an additional thing, how are they effectives if they're not among

the actual things that are just actually banging around?

Yeah.

To some degree. For that possibility has to be hiding somewhere for the laws on 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,

where all the possibility goes.

It has to be attached to something, so. You don't think many worlds is that? Yeah, or-

Because many worlds still exists. Yeah, or- Because many worlds still exists. Well, because we're in this strand of that multiverse. Yeah. Right, so it's still, you have just a local instance of what is actual. Yeah. And then if it proliferates elsewhere where you can't be affected by it, many worlds has-

Or as well. Yeah, yeah. Many worlds has- Or as well. You can't really connect with the other.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so many worlds are just a statement of basically everything that can happen,

happens somewhere, right?

Yeah. Yeah. And that's, I mean, maybe that's not an entirely kosher formulation of it, but it seems pretty close. So, but there's whatever happens, right? In fact, there's, you know, relativistically, there's a, you know, the 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, 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. We, when you're in the middle of it, and they're just, you know, if that's, if we're living in anything like that, then there's no such thing as possibility. I would, it would seem 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 it's anything but.

including your thoughts and intentions and moves.

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, a non-playing... Yeah, non-playing, oh, wow.

Yes, you're more of a Mario Kart guy, I tell. Yes, you're a guy, I tell. 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.

I think it was, like, Benny Hans or something, that had a Pong table. And that was... Isn't this amazing?

It was an amazing moment... Isn't it amazing that you Sam Harris might live from Pong

to the invention and deployment of a super intelligent system?

Oh, that'll happen fast, if it happens anytime in my lifetime. to AGI, what kind of things do you do purely for fun that others might consider a waste

of time? I...

Purely for fun. Because meditation doesn't count because most people 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 fine. Do you find it embarrassing? No. 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 it's fun. Do you find it embarrassing? Well, you have no control over your actual performance.

You're ever-discovering, 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 a round of golf with the former president

Donald Trump, and I would love to be. I would bet on him if we played golf.

I'm sure he's in better golf. 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 know that most people are good and are mostly converging on the same core values. 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. I just got the sense that there's 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. There's enough wealth to go around, there's no effective limit, I mean, again, within the limits of what's physically possible, but we're nowhere near the limit on abundance. I forget about going to Mars, on this, the one rock. We could make this place incredibly beautiful and stable if we just did enough work to solve

some rather long-standing political problems. The problem of incentives, so to you, the basic characteristics of human nature such

that we'll be okay if the incentives are okay, we'll do 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. I do worry that 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. It's easier, a thousand years ago, it was simply impossible for one person to derange the lives of millions, much less billions, millions, now that's getting to be possible. On the assumption that we're always going to 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 gain a function of research. Just how much do we want to democratize all the relevant technologies there? You really want to give everyone the ability to order nucleotides in the mail and give them the blueprints for viruses online because you're a free speech absolutist and you think all PDFs need to be exportable everywhere. This is where 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 my overriding concern is that in many cases, I'm worried about the free speech of individual businesses or individual platforms or individual media people to decide that they don't want to be associated with certain things. If you own Twitter, I think you should be able to kick off the Nazi you don't want to be associated with because it's your platform, you own it. That's your free speech. That's the side of my free speech concern for Twitter. It's not that every Nazi has the right to algorithmic speech on Twitter.

there's no limit to how happily we could collaborate with billions of creative fulfilled people. It's just-

And trillions of robots, some of them sex robots, but that's another topic. 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. 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 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. Enjoy yourselves. Don't break anything, kids. Have a good party without me. Thanks for watching. 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 and hope to see you next time.