Sam Harris on Donald Trump

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 if the election was fairly executed having an empathy for their world view 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 thumbs that kind of empathy while you're discussing ideas what is in your Pursuit Of Truth having empathy for the perspective of a large number of other people versus Raw mathematical reason I think it's important but I just it only takes you so far right it doesn't it doesn't get you to truth right it's not the truth is not a is not decided by you know Democratic principles and um 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 or respect you know epistemologically and yet their 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 one that comes to mind is I've been super critical of trump obviously and um I've been super critical of certain people for endorsing him or not criticizing him when he really made it you know patently obvious who he was you know if there had been any doubt initially there was no doubt when we have a sitting president who's not not um agreeing to a peaceful transfer of power right so um I'm 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 um didn't see through his con right I mean they bought into the idea that he was a brilliant businessman who who might just be able to change things because he's so unconventional and so you know his heart is in the right place you know he's really a man of the people even though he's a you know gold-plated everything in his life um they bought the myth somehow uh of you know the largely because they had seen him on television for almost a decade and a half uh pretending to be this genius businessman who could get things done um it's understandable to me that many very frustrated people who have not had their hopes and dreams actualized uh who have been the victims of globalism and and many other you know current trends uh it's understandable that they would be confused and and and not see the liability of electing a grossly incompetent morbidly narcissistic person into the into the the presidency um so I don't so which is to say that I don't blame there are many many millions of people who I don't necessarily blame for the Trump phenomenon but I can nonetheless bemoan the phenomenon as as indicative of you know very bad uh State of Affairs in our society right so it's it's there's two levels to it I mean one is I think you have to call a spade a spade when you're talking about how things actually work and what things are are likely to happen or not but then you can recognize it people are have very different life experiences and and yeah I mean I think empathy and you know probably the better word for what I would hope to embody there is compassion right like really you know you who to really wish people well you know and really wish you know strangers well effortlessly wish them well I mean to realize that you there is no opposition between in the at bottom there's no real opposition between selfishness and selflessness because wise selfishness really takes into account other people's happiness I mean you what you know which do you want to live in a society where you have everything but most other people have nothing uh or do you want to live in a society where you're surrounded by happy creative self-actualized people who are having their hopes and dreams realized I think it's obvious that the second Society is much better however much you can guard your good luck but what about having empathy for certain principles that people believe for example the 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 uh 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 on everybody else so that's yeah that's the kind of perspective that they would take and say yeah there's these flaws that Trump has but this is necessary I agree with the first part of this so I haven't bought the myth that it's uh you know a truly representative democracy in in the way that we would you might idealize um and you know on some level means this is a different conversation but some of them I'm not even sure how much I think it should be right like I'm not sure um we want in the end everyone's opinion give an 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 um 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 because and and it's um and I think it's important to see those bright lines in in one's life and in in the moment politically and ethically so yeah I think um so leave aside the the viability of democracy uh but I I'm I'm under no illusions that all of our institutions are you know worth preserving precisely as they have been up into the moment this great orange wrecking ball came swinging through our lives but I just It Was a Very Bad Bet to elect someone who is grossly incompetent and um or worse than incompetent um genuinely malevolent in his selfishness right I think and this is something we know based on literally Decades of him being in the public eye right he's not as he's not a public servant in any normal sense of that term and he couldn't possibly give an honest or sane answer to the question the question you asked me about empathy and reason and and like how should we you know what should guide us um I I genuinely think he is missing some necessary moral and and psychological tools right and this this is I can feel compassion for him as a human being because I think having those things is incredibly important and genuinely loving other people is incredibly important and and knowing what all that's about is is that's really the good stuff in life and I I um I think he's missing a lot of that but I think we we don't want to promote people to to the highest positions of power in our society who are far outliers in in pathological terms right we want them to be far outliers in in if in the best case in wisdom and compassion and some of the things you've some of the topics you brought up I mean we want someone to be deeply informed we want someone to be um uh unusually curious unusually alert to how they may be wrong or getting things wrong consequentially he's none of those things and if in so far as we're going to get normal mediocrities in that role which I think you know is often the best we could expect let's get normal mediocrities in that role not uh you know once in a generation narcissists and um uh frauds I mean it's like the let me just take honesty as a single variable right I think you want yeah yes it's possible that most politicians lie at least some of the time I don't think that's a good thing I think people should be gen you know generally honest um even to a fault um yes there are certain circumstances where lion I think is necessary it's kind of on a Continuum of self-defense and violence so it's like if you're gonna you know if the Nazis come to your door and ask you if you've got Anne Frank in the attic I think it's okay to lie to them um but uh you know Trump there's I arguably there's never been a person in that anyone could name in in human history who's lied with with that kind of velocity um I mean it's just it was it was a just a blizzard of Lies Great and Small you know to to pointless and and to and effective but is just it it says something uh fairly alarming about our society that a person of that character got promoted and so uh yes I have compassion and concern for for half of the society who didn't see it that way and that's going to sound elitist and and uh and smug or something for anyone who's who's on that side listening to me but um it's genuine I mean I understand that like like I barely have the I'm like one of the luckiest people in the world and I barely have the bandwidth to pay attention to half the things I should pay attention to in order to have an opinion about half the things we're going to talk about right so how much less bandwidth to somebody who's working two jobs or you know a single mom who's who's you know raising you know multiple kids you know even a single kid it's just it's unimaginable to me that people have the bandwidth to to Really track this stuff and so then they jump on social media and they they see they get inundated by misinformation and they see what their favorite influencer just said um and now they're worried about vaccines and they're it's just it's we're living in an environment where our in the information space has become so corrupted and we've built machines to to further corrupt it you know I mean we've built a business model for the internet that it further corrupts it uh so it's it is just um it's chaos in informational terms and I don't fault people for being confused and impatient and uh at the at their wit's end and um yes Trump was a an enormous [ __ ] you to The Establishment and and that's that was understandable for many reasons to me Sam Harris the great Sam Harris is somebody I've looked up to for a long time as a beacon of voice of reason and there's this meme on the internet and I would love you to steal 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 div on the ability of balanced calm rational Minds to see the world clearly to think clearly you being one of the beacons of that is there is there a degree to which he broke your brain uh well Otherwise Known As Trump derangements medical competition yeah I mean I think Trump derangement syndrome is a very clever meme because it it just uh throws the you know the problem back on the person who's criticizing Trump but in truth the true Trump derangement syndrome was not to have seen how dangerous and divisive it would be to promote someone like Trump to that position of power and to not and in the in the final moment not to see how uh untenable it was to still support someone who you know a sitting president who was not committing to a peaceful transfer of power I mean that was if if that wasn't a bright line for you you have been deranged by something uh because that was you know the that was one minute to midnight for our democracy as far as I'm concerned and I think it really was but for the the Integrity of a few people that we didn't suffer some real constitutional crisis and and real emergency you know after January 6. I mean if Mike Pence had caved in and decided to not certify the election right uh if it literally you can count on two hands the number of people who held things together at that moment and so it was so it wasn't for want of trying on Trump's part that we we um didn't succumb to some you know real truly Uncharted uh uh catastrophe with our democracy so the fact that that didn't happen is not a sign that those of us who were worried that it was so close to happening were exaggerating the problem I mean it's like you know you almost got run over by a car but you didn't and so you know you're the fact that you're adrenalized and you're thinking you know but boy that was dangerous I probably shouldn't you know you know wander in the middle of the street uh with my eyes closed um you weren't wrong to feel that you really had a problem right um and came very close to something truly uh terrible so I think that's where we were and I think we shouldn't do that again right so the fact that he's he's still he's coming back around as potentially a viable candidate you know I'm not spending much time thinking about it frankly because it's you know I'm I'm waiting for the moment where it requires some thought um I mean it did it took up uh I don't know how many podcasts I devoted to the topic it wasn't that I mean it wasn't that many in the end you know against the the number of podcasts I I devoted to other topics but there are people who look at Trump and just find him funny entertaining not especially threatening is like not a you know just it's just good fun to see somebody who's like who's just not taking anything seriously and it's just just putting a you know a stick in the wheel of of business as usual again and again and again and again um and they don't really see anything much at stake right it doesn't really doesn't really matter if we don't support NATO it doesn't really matter if he says he trusts Putin more than our intelligence Services uh I mean none of this is it doesn't matter if he's on the one hand saying that he loves uh the leader of North Korea and on the other threatening is threatens to to you know bomb them back to the Stone Age right on Twitter it's all it all can be taken in the spirit of kind of reality television it's like this is just this is the part of the movie that's just fun to watch right and I understand that I can even inhabit that space for a few minutes at a time but there's a deeper concern that we're in the process of entertaining ourselves to death right that we're just not taking things seriously and this is it's a problem I've had with several other people we might name who just who just appear to me to be goofing around at scale and they lack a kind of moral seriousness I mean they're touching big problems where lives hang in the balance but they're just [ __ ] around and I think they're really important problems that we have to get our head straight around and we need you know it's not to say that that institutions don't become corrupt I think they do and I think and I'm quite worried that you know both about the the loss of trust in our institutions and the the fact that trust has eroded for good reason right that they have become less trustworthy I I think you know they've become infected by you know political ideologies that are not truth tracking I mean I I worry about all of that um but I just think the we need institutions we need to rebuild them we need we need experts who are real experts we need to Value expertise over you know amateurish speculation and conspiracy thinking and just you know and [ __ ] the kind of amateur speculation we're doing on this very podcast I'm usually alert to the moments where I'm just guessing or where I actually feel like I'm talking from within my wheelhouse and I try to Telegraph that a fair amount with people um so yeah I mean it 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 you you're not an expert about and then you you in the process of getting more informed yourself your 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 a strong opinion and if you were going to form a a a a strong opinion that was this counter to the expert you have in front of you it's going to be by deference to some other expert who you've brought in or who you've heard about or whose work you've read or whatever but there's a paradox to how we value Authority in science that most people don't understand and I think we should at some point unravel that because it's the basis for a lot of public confusion and frankly it's the basis for a lot of you know criticism I've received on these topics whereas you know people think that I'm a you know I I'm against Free Speech or I'm an establishment shill or it's it's like I just think I'm a credit credentialist I just think people with phds from ivy league universities should you know run everything it's not true but there's a ton of confu there's a lot to cut through to get to Daylight there because people are um very confused about how we value Authority in the service of rationality generally you've talked about it but it's just interesting the intensity of feeling you have you've you've had this famous phrase about Hunter Biden and children in the basement can you just revisit this case so let me let me give another perspective on the situation of January 6th and Trump in general it's possible that January 6th and things of that nature revealed to our democracy is actually pretty fragile and then Trump is not a malevolent an ultra competent malevolent figure but it's simply a jokester and he just by creating the chaos revealed that it's all pretty fragile because you're a student in history and there's a lot of people like Vladimir Lenin Hitler who are exceptionally competent at controlling power at being Executives and taking that power controlling the generals controlling all the figures involved and certainly not tweeting but working in the shadows behind the scenes to gain power and they did so extremely confidently and that is how they were able to gain power the the pushback with Trump is doing none of that he was creating which he's very good at creating drama sometimes for humor's sake sometimes for drama's sake and simply revealed that our democracy is fragile and so he's not this uh once in a generation horrible figure once in a generation narcissist no I I don't think he's he's a a truly scary Sinister you know putin-like or you know 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 um no no he's much less scary than any really scary you know totalitarian right I mean and he's he's more Brave New World than 1984. this is what you know Eric Weinstein never stops um badgering me about but you know he's still wrong Eric um you know I I can you know my analogy for Trump was that he's an evil Chauncey Gardner I don't know if you remember the the um the the book or the film being there uh with it with Peter Sellers um but you know Peter Sellers is this Gardener who really doesn't know anything um 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 he's just talking about his garden all the time but you know he'll say something but yeah you know in the spring you know the new shoots will will Bloom and people read into that some kind of Genius you know Insight politically and so he gets promoted and so that's that's the joke of the film for me Trump has always been someone like an evil Chauncey Gardner he's he's not to say he's totally yes he has a certain kind of Genius he's got a genius for creating a spectacle around himself right he's got a genius for getting the the eye of the media always coming back to him um but it it's only it's a kind of it's a kind of you know self-promotion that only works if you actually are truly Shameless and don't care about having a reputation for anything that that I or you would want to have a reputation for right it's like it's pure the pure pornography of attention right and he just wants more of it um I think the truly depressing and genuinely scary thing was that we have a country that at least half of the country given how uh broken our society is in many ways we have a country that didn't see anything wrong with that bringing someone who's uh who obviously doesn't know what he should know to be president and who's obviously not a good person right obviously doesn't care about people can't even pretend to care about people really right in a credible way um and so I mean this if there's a silver line into this it it's it's along the lines you just sketched it shows us how vulnerable our system is to a truly brilliant and Sinister figure right I mean like a I I think we are um we really dodged a bullet yeah someone far more competent and conniving and ideological could have exploited our system in a way that Trump didn't and I and that's um yeah so if if we plug those holes eventually um that would be a good thing and he would have done a good thing for our society right I mean one of the things we realized and I think nobody knew I mean I certainly didn't know it and I didn't hear anyone talk about it is how much our system relies on Norms rather than laws yeah civility yeah it's just like it's it's quite possible that he never did anything illegal you know truly a truly illegal I maybe I think he probably did a few illegal things but like illegal such that he really should be thrown in jail for it you know um at least that remains to be seen so all of the chaos all of the you know all of the diminishment of our stature in the world all of the Just the the opportunity costs of spending years focused on nonsense um all that was just Norm violations all that was just that was just all a matter of not saying the thing you should say but that doesn't mean they're insignificant right it's not that it's like it's not illegal for a sitting president to say no I'm not going to commit to a peaceful transfer of power right we'll wait and see whether I win if I win it was the election was was was valid if I lose it was fraudulent right but aren't those humorous perturbations to our system of Civility such that we know what the limits are and now we start to think that and have these kinds of discussions but that wasn't a humorous perturbation because he did everything he could granted he wasn't very competent but he did everything he could to try to steal the election I mean the irony is he claimed to have an election stolen from him all the while doing everything he could to steal it declaring it fraudulent in advance trying to get the votes to to not be counted as the evening wore on knowing that they were going to be disproportionately Democrat Democrat votes um because of the the you know because of the position he took on mail-in ballots I mean all of it was fairly calculated the whole circus of of of you know the clown car that crashed into you know Four Seasons Landscaping right and and he got Rudy Giuliani with his hair dying you got Sydney Powell and all these gross incompetent people lying as freely as they could breathe about election fraud right and all these things are getting thrown out by you know Republican largely Republican election officials and Republican judges um it wasn't 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 he did everything he could he didn't do everything that could have been done by someone more competent right but the the tools you have as a president you could do a lot of things you can declare emergencies especially doing covid you could postpone the election you can create military conflict that you know any kind of reason to postpone the election there's there's a lot of what 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 the people who said they would quit they would they would quit publicly right I mean this is you start again there are multiple books written about uh all in the last hours of 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 it's just awful that we were that close to something um to a true unraveling of our political process and it's the only time in our lifetime that anything like this has happened and um is deeply embarrassing right for uh you know on the world stage it's just like we looked like a Banana Republic there for a while and where the lone superpower it's a bit it's it's not good right and so we shouldn't like there's no there's no the I the people who thought well we just need to shake things up and this is a great great way to shake things up and having people you know storm our capital and smear [ __ ] on the walls that's just more shaking things up right it's all just for the lulls um there's a nihilism and cynicism to all of that which again in certain people it's understandable you know frankly it's not understandable if you've got a billion dollars and you're you you know have a compound in Menlo Park or wherever it's like they're 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 [ __ ] right so there's a cynicism to all of that that I think we should be deeply critical of but what I'm trying to understand is not and analyze is not the behavior of this particular human being but the effect it had in part on the division between people as to me the degree the meme of Sam Harris's brain being broken by Trump represents you're like the person I would look to to bridge the division well I don't think there is something profitably to be said to someone who's truly captivated by the the the personality Cult of trumpism right like there's nothing that I'm going to say to there's no conversation I'm going to have with Candace Owens say about Trump that's going to converge on something reasonable right you don't think so no I mean I've tried I haven't tried with Candace I've tried with you know many people who are in that particular orbit I mean I've I've had conversations with people who won't admit that there's anything wrong with Trump anything so I'd like to push for the empathy versus reason because when you operate in the space of Reason yes but I think there's a lot of power in you showing in you Sam Harris showing that you're willing to see the good qualities of trump publicly showing that I think that's the way to win over okay but he has so few of them he has fewer good qualities than any virtually anyone I can name right but so he he's funny he I'll grant you that he's funny he's he's a good Entertainer there's others look at just policies and actual impacts yeah I've admitted that no no so like so I've admitted that many of his policies I agree with many many of us probably so uh probably more often than not at least on balance I agree so I I agreed with his policy that you know we should take China seriously as an adversary right and um I think I mean 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 and many of his motives that are obvious or things that I um don't support but I'm gonna take immigration I think there's it's obvious that we should have control of our borders right like I don't see the argument for not having control of our borders we should let in who we want to let in and we should keep out who we want to keep out and we should have the same immigration policy so um I don't I didn't necessarily think it was a priority to build the wall but I didn't I never criticized the impulse to build the wall because if you know tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of people are coming across that border and we are not in a position to know who's coming that seems untenable to me so um and I can recognize that many people in our society are on balance the victims of immigration because and there is a in in many cases a zero-sum contest between the interests of actual citizens and the interests of immigrants right so I think we should have a we should have control of our borders we should have a sane and compassionate immigration policy we should have we should let in refugees right so I you know Trump on refugees was terrible um but no like I would say 80 of the policy concerns people uh celebrated in him are concerns that I either share entirely or certainly sympathize with right so like that's not that's not the issue the issue is a threat to democracy and something well the issue is largely what you said it was it's not so much the person it's the effect on everything he touches right he just he has this this superpower of deranging and destabilizing uh almost everything he touches and Sully in the and compromising the Integrity of almost anyone who comes into his orbit I mean so he looked at these people who served you know as Chief of Staff or you know in various cabinet positions people had real reputations you know for for probity and and level-headedness uh you know whether you share their politics or not I mean these were real people these were not you know some of them were goofballs but um uh you know many people who who just got totally trashed by proximity to him and then Trashed by him when they finally parted company with him um yeah I mean there's just people bent over backwards to accommodate his Norm violations and it it was it was bad for them it was bad for our our system and but then but none of that discounts the fact that we have um A system that really needs a proper house cleaning yes there are bad incentives and um entrenched interests and yeah I'm not a fan of the concept of of the Deep State uh but because it you know has been so propagandized but yes there's there's something like that you know that is uh not um flexible enough to respond intelligently to the needs of the moment right so there's a lot of rethinking of government and of institutions in general that I think we should do but we need smart well-informed well-intentioned people to do that job and the well-intentioned part is is hugely important right it's Gentlemen Just give me someone who is not the most selfish person anyone has ever heard about in their lifetime right and what we got with Trump was the like the literally the one most selfish person I think anyone could name I mean and you and again you there's so much known about this man that's the thing it's like it predates his presidency we knew this guy 30 years ago yeah and and this and this is what to come back to the those inflammatory comments about Hunter Biden's laptop the reason why I can say with confidence that I don't care what was on his his laptop is that there is and and that includes any evidence of corruption on the on the part of his father right now there's been precious little of that that's actually emerged so it's like there is no as far as I can tell there's not a big story associated with that laptop as much as people bang on about a few emails but even if there were just obvious corruption right like Joe Biden was at this meeting and he took you know this amount of money from this Shady guy uh for bad reasons right given how visible the lives of these two men have been right given how much we know about Joe Biden and how much we know about Donald Trump and how they have lived in public for almost as long as I've been alive both of them the the the the scale of corruption can't possibly balance out between the two of them right we I if if you show me that Joe Biden has this secret life or he's driving a Bugatti and he's living like Andrew Tate right and he's do he's doing all these things I didn't know about okay then I'm gonna start getting a sense that all right maybe this guy is way more corrupt than I realize maybe there is some deal in Ukraine or with China that is just like this guy is not who he seems he's not the public servant he's been pretending to be he's been on the take for decades and decades and he's just he's as dirty as can be he's all mobbed up and it's a nightmare um and he can't be trusted right that's possible if you show me that his life is not at all what it seems but on the assumption that I having looked at this guy for literally decades right and and knowing that every journalist has looked at him for decades just how many Affairs does he have and just how much you know uh how many drugs is he doing how many houses does he have where you know what what what is what are the obvious conflicts of interest you know you hold that against what we know about Trump right and I mean the Litany of indiscretions you can put on Trump's side that that testify to his personal corruption to testify the fact that he has no ethical compass there's simply no comparison right so that's why I don't care about what's on the laptop when now if you tell me Trump is no longer running for president in 2024 and we can put trumpism behind us and now you're saying listen there's a lot of stuff on that laptop that makes Joe Biden look like a total [ __ ] okay I'm all ears right I mean it was a force in 2020 it was a force choice between a sitting president who wouldn't commit to a peaceful transfer of power and a guy who's obviously too old to be president who has a crack addicted son who who you know who lost his laptop and I just knew that I was going to take Biden in spite of whatever Litany of Horrors was going to come tumbling out of that laptop and that might involve sort of so the actual quote is Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in the basement there's a dark humor to it right which is I think you speak to I would not have cared there's nothing it's Hunter Biden it's not Joe Biden whatever the scopo 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 commend you can spend hundreds of billions of dollars or trillions towards the War uh in the Middle East for example something that you've changed your mind on in terms of the negative impact it has on the world and that you know the military industrial complex it's everybody's very nice everybody's very civil it's very upfront here's how we're spending the money yeah sometimes somehow disappears in different places but that's the way you know war is complicated and it's everyone is very polite there's no uh Coke and strippers or whatever is on the laptop um it's very nice and polite in the meanwhile hundreds of thousands of civilians die uh hate and just an incredible amount of hate is created because people lose their family members all that kind of stuff but there's no strippers in Coke on a laptop so yeah but but it's not just superficial it is when you when someone only wants wealth and power and fame and so this is that is their their objective function right they're like a 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 I mean environmental risk pandemic risk nuclear proliferation risk none of it right they just they're just tracking Fame and money and and whatever can can personally uh re down 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 of of anything other than progress right um and this is the guy who's got the the the button right I mean he's got somebody's following him around with a bag waiting to take his order to to launch right um that is a it's just it's a it's a risk we should never run one thing Trump has going for him I think is that he's he doesn't drink or do drugs right although there's you know people allege that he does speed but um you know let's take him in his word he's he's uh not deranging himself with with Pharmaceuticals at least but um apart from diet coke uh but there's nothing wrong just for the record let me push back on that there's nothing wrong with that girl yeah that'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 that this um no I don't know if I I hope I hope you're right um 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 that phrase came from from Eisenhower um it's uh 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 Us 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 and and we will really succeed when we have a system of incentives where the 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 you know so so it's it's almost the inversion of our current situation so yes and you say I changed my mind about the War uh I not quite I mean I I was never a supporter of the war in Iraq I was always worried that it was a distraction from the war in Afghanistan I was a supporter of the war in Afghanistan and I will admit in hindsight that looks like uh you know at best a highly ambiguous and painful exercise you know more likely a Fool's errand right I was like that would you know it did not turn out well it's it's it wasn't for want of trying I I don't you know I have not done a deep dive on on all of the failures there and maybe all of these failures or failures in principle I mean maybe it's just maybe that's not the kind of thing that can be done well by anybody whatever our intentions um but yeah the move to Iraq always seemed questionable to me and um when we knew the problem the immediate problem at that moment you know Al Qaeda uh was in Afghanistan and you know and then bounced into Pakistan um anyway all you know so yes but my my sense of the possibility of nation building my sense of of um you know and so insofar as the the the neocon um a spirit of of you know responsibility and idealism that you know America was the kind of nation that should be functioning in this way as as the world's cop and we've got we have to get in there and and untangle some of these knots by force um uh rather often because you know if we don't do it over there we're gonna have to do it over here kind of thing um yeah some of that has definitely changed for me in my thinking I mean they're obviously cultural reasons why it failed in Afghanistan and if you can't change the culture um it's uh you're not going to force a change at gunpoint in the culture or it certainly seems that that's not going to happen and it took us you know over 20 years to apparently to realize that that's one of the things you realize with the war is there's not going to be a strong signal that things are not working you can just keep pouring money into a thing a military effort well also there are signs of it working too you have all the stories of girls now going to school right you know the girls are getting battery acid thrown in their faces by religious maniacs and then we come in there and we stop that and now girls are getting educated and there's a and that's all good and our intentions are good there and we're on the right side of history there good girls should be going to school you know Malala yosef's I should have the Nobel Prize and she shouldn't have been shot in the face by by the Taliban right um 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 7th century um and it's a problem we couldn't solve and we couldn't solve it even though we spent you know trillions of dollars to solve it

Channel: Lex Clips

Views: 458,547

Keywords: ai, ai clips, ai podcast, ai podcast clips, artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence podcast, computer science, consciousness, deep learning, einstein, elon musk, engineering, friedman, joe rogan, lex ai, lex clips, lex fridman, lex fridman podcast, lex friedman, lex mit, lex podcast, machine learning, math, math podcast, mathematics, mit ai, philosophy, physics, physics podcast, sam harris, science, tech, tech podcast, technology, turing

Id: t0PEjMY3j_I

Length: 47min 51sec (2871 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 19 2023