Understanding Power, Corruption, Politics, AI, Religion, Tribalism & Free Speech | Sam Harris

culture is software we know it's continually failing us we should not have a significant number of Americans alleging the election was stolen there was a pretty gnarly one-two punch between covet and Trump that I really think caused a sense-making apparatus to fall apart in some way yeah my question is can we stop the rise of evil or is that already a fallacy and if we can then how well I mean I think your first point is that we didn't have a anything like a consensus around what was going on I mean people were siled into various Echo Chambers and just not converging on an assessment of just what the facts are about anything I don't consider myself the best judge of how this happened because there you know there were people who were sufficiently far from me on the in the information landscape so that I just I just cease to understand how they could be thinking and doing what they they were thinking and doing I mean I just I you know I'm not seeing their social media feed I'm seeing some fragments of what they're they're finding persuasive but it's just amazing to me that there are I don't know what it is 30 40 of American society still thinks that Trump was not only fine there's no just better than fine they're just impeccable on some level ethically and that January 6 was a non-event and that there was really nothing at stake there it's all just been it's you know you know insanely it was it was a combination of nothing happened but everything that did happen was you know antifa or you know Trump trumped up by the CIA or something it was just it was not violent but the violence was was uh you know from some other source I mean this is not a coherent view but you literally have something like 100 million people who think that it was just no factor I mean there was there's nothing the only thing bad that happened is that the election got stolen from the the rightful president which was Trump I don't know how you are paying attention to anything like a valid source of information and and still believe and you still believe that right and they're and they're people who believe that or pretend to believe it enough that they're and I do think they're people who are just being fundamentally dishonest with their audiences so you have and I think it's amazing how it comes it can come down to a couple of dozen personalities that that really are close to the the the lever that moves public opinion here so you have someone like Tucker Carlson who we know on the basis of the Dominion lawsuit behind closed doors was talking about Trump as a demonic Force he couldn't wait for him to to disappear from the public conversation uh he hated him with passion and those are basically verbatim quotes uh of his text messages within you know behind the scenes at Fox that got you know entered into evidence in the Dominion case and yet his public facing message is all you know Trump supporting conspiracy theorizing all the time for years he was the most watched person on Fox and and you know pretty soon he'll be the most watched person you know whatever he he finally hangs his hat but you know his Twitter videos get apparently tens of millions of views and so he's got this enormous audience that seemingly doesn't care about his hypocrisy right which is amazing to me I don't know how you maintain an audience with this kind of loss of face the the mainstream media was not shy in advertising his the discrepancy between what he was saying behind closed doors and what he was saying on his show right so either either you have 100 million people who just simply never watch any mainstream media product or read it you know and that's quite possible but the basic problem before anything you know before we think about antithetical ethical commitments or political commitments or you know people who disagree about evil really at bottom we just can't even Converge on on a discussion of facts I mean people just can't agree about what is happening or much less why or what should happen the thing that we have to start with one to set the table is is that what people are doing that they really do all have their own good intentions they all think that they have spotted the evil but they're just spotting it from different sides if that's true then people's behavior at least makes sense I understand how it's self-motivated now it's never going to be that pure I'm sure there are also some people that are just grabbing for power but if if the the public response is okay I see from where I'm sitting from my side that the other side is evil and and I need to really react accordingly then then it starts to make sense now if that's what's going on then it becomes okay well now we need the sense making apparatus by which we figure out what is evil what is the right response and the first step in that is going to be I think to identify what's true that we need some anchor in the storm that we're going to say okay this is the foundation and we're going to build up from here there has to be a mechanism by which we start to figure all this out and so I'll lay out my rough thesis as a way just to sort of guide the conversation so I think that there's something about the modern world largely as it's married to technology that creates this inability to get people to share a narrative which allows us then to approach any issue from the same perspective of what we're trying to achieve so you've got velocity of information so information is just coming out of so fast and furious I've heard you talk about Alex Jones in that context yeah of like hey this guy just talks as fast as he can throwing out so many points at you each one just makes you look uneducated if you're like I didn't know what that was and you're like you find out it doesn't even exist and so that is social media just the rate at which information can come at you is so fast the business model of social media is that whatever grabs attention is going to be monetized so then people very quickly realize the more salacious the more sort of grand and aggressive the more likely it is to get attention so now it's coming at you hyper negative and Hyper fast when you combine that with this sense of everything has to roll up into a headline so all of these ideas are incredibly nuanced the problem is to get them to propagate on social media they have to be a headline it has to be something that's memorable it has to be something that's easily digestible and it has to be something that's repeatable and when you repeat it that the other person's like oh that's sick you got it just right and now they want to go tell somebody else and So for anybody that's being bombarded with all this information as a way to wrap their heads around it they just pick a team and then the team just tells them yeah these are all your positions so now all you have to memorize are the headlines for for your group and I actually am deeply empathetic to that because holding on to the Nuance of a complicated situation is already very difficult when you are able to roll that up into a headline it becomes something that you can hold on to far more easily but then the truth of the on the ground interaction points all get lost and so I as I was watching all of this unfold then it became the those 12 people that you're talking about and certainly I will put you as one of them it began to be unclear like okay wait what what what is the foundation that you're building on that you level up from this and so what I want to get through in the beginning here is what is that foundation so in a world where the sense making apparatus is dealing with velocity of information misinformation power grabs corruption but you can actually hide a lot of that through velocity of headline um rolling up a complex topic into an over simplification where do we get the Bedrock now I'm I am aware of the not debate maybe it was a debate that you and Jordan did about what is truth and and I know that you can devolve into madness but like if you were to give a simple explanation of how you ground yourself when you think through these things what does that look like first of all not being tribal right so not being not caring really about I mean I care about Source I care about sources of information as a proxy for just not having to figure out everything from from you know the Bedrock every time right so yeah being an expert yeah so I think I think it you can default to expertise most of the time all the while knowing that expertise can fail it's just a sanity sparing and certainly time sparing practice to say okay most of what is printed in the New York Times has to be to a first approximation mostly true otherwise the New York Times is no longer the New York Times now I think there there have been moments where and certainly on specific topics where it's been valid to worry that the New York Times is no longer the New York Times right there I think it's sort of systematically getting certain topics wrong or shading the truth for you know as an expression of obvious political bias so there's there there are moments where all of our institutions have if not you know frankly failed us showed a capacity to fail us you know at times and um and what that did to much of the country is just torpedo any trust in institutions right so the the the trust in the the mainstream media is at its all-time low I would imagine um certainly the last time I looked at a poll on that topic that seemed to be the case but so it is with government messaging on virtually any Topic in particular Public Health our scientific institutions our universities uh and all of this is understandable in that in the last you know six years post Trump and post covid we had this almost perfect storm politically where there really did seem to be a capture of the mainstream institutions by a very intolerant and really at bottom ill liberal political ideology I mean it's supposedly liberal it's far left but it's you know in in terms of its style of thought it was um you know we were edging toward you know Chinese show trials I mean it was really it was just you know the kinds of and the truth is you didn't need that many specific cases to feel like okay you've seen enough the you there's no reason to listen to these people ever again right I mean if you're if you're somebody who's just poised to throw the baby out with a bath water it's just you just need to hear you know one case of someone being you know defenestrated at the New York Times for um is not surviving one specific blasphemy test and that's you know then then there's just no then the New York Times is no better than the epoch times or Breitbart or anything else that is in in the business of of you know putting things in font and and shipping them and um it's all journalism right you know uh so so for me it was it was you had to recognize that though our institutions are challenged there is still such a thing as expertise there is still such a thing as institutional knowledge there's a need for institutions that we can trust certainly when you're in the middle of a pandemic we need a a CDC and an FDA that we can actually trust right so the fact that we felt that we couldn't quite trust them is an enormous problem and it's it's the the thing we need to shore up is the trustworthiness of indispensable institutions it's not that we need to tear everything down to the studs such that there are no institutions no one thinks in terms of Institutions it's all just podcasts and sub-stack newsletters as far as the eye can see and we're just going to all do our own research right um and I think do it it's not to say that doing your own research is never valid and it's never even important I mean there's certainly cases where one person can pull at a thread long enough that something really important unravels and we're all you know wiser for it um or that you know one individual given a specific problem in their lives you know let's say a medical problem they do their own research and they discover the remedy for the thing that was ailing their family member or whatever and you know the doctors didn't do it and the CDC didn't do it and the FDA was wrong and they found the thing that helped okay great generally speaking doing it when times are good doing your own research is just frankly a waste of time and when things really matter is very likely a dangerous waste of time right it's like you don't you don't get on an airplane and decide you know well I'm you know I'm not so sure I trust the pilot or the guy you know the guys who repair the engines I'm going to do some of my own research here you know like you know let me in the cockpit I want to you know I want to interrogate some of those dials and switches it's like that's that's not a situation where anyone would tolerate this sort of contrarian anti-establishment I'm going to innovate you know just break stuff and and see what happens um and that the problem is in many respects we are at 30 000 feet together all of us all the time and we're having to we're having to figure out what is real and what to do and we do need experts that actually warrant our trust because they are in fact experts right so when you know they're just specific cases like what's really happening in Ukraine and why and what should we do about it right what should we should we be sending them arms is Putin line about you know the last thing he said was true on the ground um when our state department has a press conference and tells us what's going on we need a state department that we trust to inform us right we and and when the New York Times has some point of view on what's happening there we need a New York Times that is sourcing information in a way that is that is valid we just we can't have everyone trying to get to ground truth based on their own private efforts to come up with what we should all think about Ukraine or what we should all think about mRNA vaccines or whatever it is but people do feel that and I certainly felt that at the beginning of this so as I hear you say so remember my my initial question is what's your foundation and the foundation felt like you wanted to be experts but you understand how much they've eroded their credibility so my question because I don't disagree with you if I was at 30 000 feet I don't want people going in and trying to mess with the pilot but I think that the analogy might not quite be right for what we went through we what it felt like and I'll just speak for myself but I think I represent a lot of people what it felt like was oh I'm realizing that the pilot is lying to me now I'm willing to be generous and say the pilot is lying to me because they're trying to Stamp Out evil and they really believe that that to trick the American public into taking a vaccine whatever is the right answer and that they are doing it with a big heart and that they really just want to help people get where they're going but like when they said you know masks don't work it was just like come on like that doesn't make any sense and then they flip and they're like no of course actually Mass do work and we're just lying to you because we needed to get them into the medical professionals hands so it's like just slowly slowly they start eroding and you suddenly realize everybody has an agenda now that I get it but where it starts to be a problem for me is when if if we understand that experts have an agenda and and I'll even um I had Peter attia on my show who's a medical expert amazing and if if he tells me to do something I basically just do it like he's unbelievable and he in his new book he talks about how you actually can be fat and healthy and when he said that my first impulse was Peter you can't tell people that because even if it's true it's in such a like Edge case narrow percentage and the vast majority of the bell curve are all people who are fat and unhealthy and if you give them that out they're going to take it they're never going to make any changes and they're going to die and they're going to raise their kids worse and their kids are going to have shorter life expectancy and I really had an emotional response of like you can't tell people that even if it's true but in that moment I realized oh this is the very thing crazy yeah so I'm like you you can't so I was like well if it's true it's true and the consequences are going to be what the consequences are going to be so then I start going okay then if I can't just more myself around um experts are going to know and they're going to be able to say because I don't think three years ago Peter would have written this book I don't think he had the insights into it so even somebody's brightest him over time is changing so experts don't really know what's right and what's wrong especially not in a hot and heavy situation like that on top of that there are inevitably going to be things that I think should be said somebody else thinks shouldn't be said or vice versa and so now you get to okay well if we can all agree we're only going to say what's true like even that I think is a task but let's say that we all agree that we're only going to say what's true now this gets really complicated and I will put forth that what I think is quote unquote true is based on perspective interpretation and reinforcement so there's physics which we don't even understand fully and then there's everything else and because a a gigantic part of everyday truth and I don't know if that will help us get to a sort of in the weeds working definition but everyday truth seems to be predicated on that you have to take into the into account the person's perspective so how do they see the world blue red right uh you have to take into account their interpretation so looking at data some people are going to say no it doesn't show that it shows this and you can get people that look at the data and just violently disagree on what it shows uh and then you've got the reinforcement so if they put out a tweet saying their version of the truth and they get a wall of reinforcement um then they're just one that feels good they're going to see it more and more and more and more and more and so just the sheer repetition of it all yeah um any of those pieces feel wrong well I think the thing you pointed to there in your conversation with Peter is important to focus on because people have a very hard time just keeping track of everything that's said right and and keeping things in proportion right and so I think your intuition that is dangerous to be precisely true on that point because most people most of the time will draw the wrong message that is the style of thinking as You observe that our Public Health officials were too encumbered by right like they were they were aware that they were messaging into a very dirty information landscape right it's just polluted with conspiracy thinking and Frank lies and we had a president who was you know by turns minimizing everything and lying about it I mean just telling pointless lies like you know there's we have 15 cases and it's going to go away you know immediately right and so the end there was just this basic fact it was quite inconvenient in the case of a pandemic that it's just moving Target where we're we're finding that we don't actually don't understand what we thought we understood yesterday right so the message is changing it's not it's not that we have a completely clear message that is still difficult to parse and we have to be careful we have to talk to people like children or at least in a kind of paternalistic way and say okay listen most fat people are not healthy it's generally not healthy to be fat virtually every fat person would be healthier if they were less fat but it's still possible to be healthy if you're fat and there are people who are skinny who are not healthy and it gets confusing so but you can't really go wrong with this basic message that you want to be thin and fit and you want to do the things you want to be on your way to being thin and fit at minimum you want to be active you want to be eating well Etc I am a freak for efficiency so let me tell you I am always on the hunt for clothes that can work in any setting the bad news is most traditional pants do not have that kind of Versatility but bird dogs were designed to meet that exact need they were created to be your go-to pants for any and every activity bird dogs are made with a cloud net fabric that looks just like khaki but stretches with your every move and their built-in liners use anti-stink sweat wicking fabric that I know a lot of you boys are going to need to keep cool and dry all day long with bird dogs you can go out work out meet with clients kung fu fight go to an event whatever they've got you covered and you can do it all without having to stop and change go to birddogs.com impact or just enter promo code impact for a free Yeti style tumbler with your order you won't want to take your bird dogs off we promise you that in the case of covid the truth was getting overturned by further Revelations I mean the truth with respect to the disease the epidemiology of it uh how contagious it was how dangerous it was we were getting new variants or literally the disease itself was changing um what we understood about vaccines was changing uh you know initially in the beginning there was every reason to believe at least it was every reason to hope that the vaccines would block transmission and therefore not getting vaccinated was a decision not just with respect to your own health but the health of the people around you later on that began to unravel and it was clear okay that doesn't really block transmission all that much maybe a little bit but not really so therefore it's a personal decision and it's not you know a decision that you're making for others you're not a bad citizen there therefore if you don't get vaccinated um we were messaging into an environment where there's so much misinformation around specifically things like vaccines right there's literally like an anti-vaccine cult that was had been what has been working in the background of our culture for decades and this was their moment to really kind of seize the reins of of you know social the social media conversation at least um so it was understandable that our Public Health officials and you know doctors generally felt like okay we got to keep this really simple this has got to be idiot proof get faxed covet is dangerous wear a mask you know don't wear a mask when you're stealing the masks from people who don't get who are you know our first line responders who need the PPE but once we had enough wear a mask um and the problem was when that began to unravel there was so there were there were there were so many clear moments of dishonesty that where anyone who was going to have their trust broken with with mainstream institutions just they broke up right there and they and they they seemingly broke up permanently right it was just okay you're gonna tell me that that uh I have to get vaccinated because it stops transmission and now you're now I'm hearing that it no longer stops transmission okay I'm done right and and then they had the the other problem is that now we have an an information landscape where basically everything survives there is not the the normal darwinian contest between sources of information where if if something gets sufficiently discredited you know you never hear from it again you can the internet is big enough and friction free enough such that you can be a complete lunatic who everyone knows is a complete lunatic and yet you create an ecosystem that enough people love and you can you can figure out how to monetize it you can have an audience of a million people forever it seems right and you're literally literally you could be saying that that you know the the I mean you know the craziest case of something like Q Anon where it's like the actual claim that people are bonding over is that the world is being run by child raping cannibals and among those cannibals are people like Michelle Obama and Tom Hanks and I mean it's just I always know yeah you know I mean so it's like okay we're really saying that these people are cannibals and and pedophiles um and we're gonna spend a lot of time having this conversation amongst ourselves we don't care if the rest of the world thinks we're crazy because in this space this is just our playground this is our information playground there's nothing we we're not bumping into any hard objects here because we have as much real as we have as much information real estate as we can as we want to carve out for ourselves I mean that didn't used to be it used to be that if you wanted to publish books or publish print newspapers or magazines you needed enough contact with the normal kind of reinforcement of of you know just mainstream consensus that that you would survive you know financially it's like there's something about the internet that has just made the cost of spreading information go to zero and um when you're I mean when you're dealing in bits and and no longer dealing in atoms it's um everything survives and persists in some basic sense so yeah I think it's important to really understand what that mechanism is so it's what I'll call velocity of information if you have a better name for it I'm all for it but there's something about uh packaging an idea up in an environment where there's so much information all you can digest is the headline when something is hyper transmittable that it just has you know whether it's clever it Rhymes it whatever that has just that little bit of extra juice on it it's something that's funny um memified that it's it's really going to burn through culture yeah now for me where this all begins to become deeply problematic is that it it isn't so much that just the internet is forever it's that Socrates hated democracy because he didn't think people were smart enough to parse through the information and he thought Matt you shouldn't be able to vote in this thing if you're not educated on this thing and the reality is most people aren't going to be educated and therefore democracy is is really not going to survive so I take a totally different approach to this which is I think that that if you create an environment where everybody gets to vote in a world that has the velocity of information that we have information is free to send um it's easy to package it up roll up into headlines there's no doubt that a lot of misinformation is going to get out there and people just don't even know where to check where to turn to know like who's who what's what that will have very negative consequences but the only flip side of that that I see is top-down authoritarian control where it's like I decide whoever I is the government Twitter Youtube whoever they decide what's real information and what's not because what people are trying to get back to is what you were talking about before where information velocity was slow that you had to go to a print piece of newspaper they even put extra checks where it was like it had to be vetted by three sources or whatever and I'm not saying yellow journalism didn't exist of course it did but there were self-imposed constraints there was a business model that let even though self-imposed constraints really be financially viable it was just harder to do harder to get out there and so by reducing it there were only so many narratives that you were going to be able to get out so even if New York you know back in the 20s or whatever had 50 newspapers just in New York City that's still only New York City you're not dealing with a global readership right so you have just this natural constraint now once nature isn't giving you the constraint anymore the second you want that constraint from the top down you now step into what I call the trifecta of evil and the trifecta of evil is is three books that I read they technically have nothing to do with each other but just completely explain how all of this goes awry and has made me absolutely terrified of top-down authoritarian control far more than I am afraid of the absolute chaos of a thousand Alex Jones so uh the three books are the gulag archipelago by Alexander soljenitson uh Mao the unknown story and then the rise and fall of the Third Reich and those three books tell you just how wrong things go when people are told shut up your opinion doesn't matter and this person knows better and you're just gonna get in line and the great thing about the mail book is that I I hadn't realized how evil Mao was I mean like I I thought he was like a junior level of evil compared to Stalin and Hitler it's just like but you read book and it's just I'm in the details are just so sadistic and successful yeah unbelievable I literally had no idea when I started reading that book the fourth if I were going to do an honorable mention uh to give Stalin some more love would be red famine yeah that book is is shocking shocking uh have you read it no but I've uh I've read a lot about Stalin yeah I don't know if I can recommend it there's this one part where a woman telling a tale a woman comes up and looks through another woman's this is in the Ukraine starving 1921 or whatever and uh she looks through the window and catches her neighbor eating her seven-year-old daughter right you're just like yeah I just I can't imagine so that that scares me a lot more than um we're all having a hard time figuring out what is true now I have a pitch for how I think we figure out what is true that is certainly going to be flawed but the the first thing I want to to either agree debate whatever is do you agree that this is sort of the sequencing of events that we have this wall of information that's coming in too fast it's all rolled up into headlines there's no Nuance most people probably aren't smart enough to deal with the Nuance anyway and now Temptation one is to just go oh dear Elites pre-masticate all of this for us and tell us what to do we tried that they have agendas even if they're really being sincere and trying to be good they have agendas and that just feels absolutely shitty feels like you're being manipulated it breaks all your trust can't do that the other one is you know just absolute top down do what the [ __ ] you're told shut up and and this is it both of those strike me as horrendous and that leaves the third option which is Free Speech which has become contentious somehow so as a child of the 80s to me that's like the greatest thing ever I'm all for free speech I love what Elon is doing on Twitter I think it's amazing um but at the same time I know that's not widely shared I'm not even sure where you fall down yeah no I can push back on some of that well so a couple of distinctions one is that it's not just that everything gets boiled down to headlines right I mean that is a problem sometimes the headline doesn't even Faithfully represent what's actually in the article um and so many people only read the headlines they never even read the article right so it's there's that problem that problem's been with us for a while there's the algorithmic boosting of outrage and misinformation preferentially which is which is the the problem and also on social media and the distinction so so I would make one distinction which is and this is you know many people have made this like freedom of speech and freedom of reach are different things right so you you should be free to post whatever you want to post but it is a it is a choice on the side of the the social media company to preferentially boost or dampen whatever they want to boost or dampen right so it's to change the character of the conversation and they have to make just decisions there whether to make no decision is itself a decision right so you if you're going to make a completely flat people will have one experience if you're going to if you're going to tweak it algorithmically people have a different experience and that is a business choice that they are incentivized to make um largely because they have a terrible business model I mean it's the gaming of attention is is a is a bad business model I would argue so the fact that it's an ad based attention economy has a lot to do with what we with the kind of the original sin of of social media I think is the business model um and if these were all subscription businesses I think we could have a different you know we could have a different landscape there with respect to social media but still there would be a moderation burden and it's a very it's something that it seems like they're never going to get right even I mean except for the the in the presence of something like omniscient AI that we could trust I don't see how you your your effort to moderate what hundreds of millions of people say to one another or even some cases billions of people um that's always going to produce casualties it's always going to produce somebody who was just a completely valid academic who just took a a an edge case position and got flagged as a you know a Nazi or whatever and you know that they there has to be some process of appeal Etc the other distinction I would make is that there's a big difference between governments silencing speech and and actually punishing people for you know errant speech and companies private companies or even publicly held companies deciding that they want to be associated with or not associated with certain kinds of speech right so because and so when I look at this from through a free speech lens from a you know a U.S Centric you know first amendment um lens and we should acknowledge that most of the world doesn't have the protection of the First Amendment and they're worse off for it and so if you're living in the UK and you're perceiving this debate you're looking at it as someone who feel stifled by the reality that you don't have a first first amendment to default back to and that's you know I I I've been slow to appreciate just how different that is politically and ethically for people um so speaking from the the U.S context I think we have it right that the government should not make any kind of speech illegal with you know a few exceptions like inciting violence um so I think you should be free to be a Nazi and say you're Nazi things and you should be free to reap the reputational costs of that right people now know you're a Nazi they don't want to do business with you they vilify you and uh on their forums um but the question is should a platform like Twitter or any other platform be legally required to associate with Nazis right can they have in their terms of service a no-nazis policy and I think they should they I think my free speech concern now is aimed at the owners and employees of those platforms right so I'm thinking about the person who starts a social media company the truth is what we're going to do this we're going to you know this is an experiment because my you know as you might imagine my faith that you can actually produce a social media platform that works is is pretty low but for waking up my meditation app we are we're going to launch a a basically a forum of some kind and that will you know very quickly have tens of thousands and even some hundreds of thousands of people in it uh presumably should I be able to have a no Nazis policy right now I'm not expecting any Nazis I mean first of all this is a subscription business so there's already a gatekeeping function that is that is helpful there I think um ensuring a kind of good faith and and quality um but they're you know anyone who needs free access to waking up also gets it so there's a lot of free users of it so it's not not a perfect uh uh paywall um I think when I start a a platform like first of all I should be able to just do zero it out overnight like if it's not working if I don't like the way this is working I should be able to just send everyone emails saying sorry you know you guys broke this place I don't like the conversation this is over right um that's actually something I told Jack Dorsey when he was still running Twitter that he should just delete it and he'd win the Nobel Peace Prize and he would deserve it um so I think you should be able to you should be free to delete your your social media account if you you in fact own it um and you should be free to decide okay these are the standards of Conduct in this space uh like it's you know this is true if you open a restaurant or if you open a movie theater if you open any public space it doesn't change if it's merely digital you should be able to set the terms of service and if it's a no Nazi space well then Nazis are not welcome here right so you if you demonstrate that you're a Nazi we kick you out of our platform um now I so I'll grant you that any company should be able to do what they want to do if Hooters wants to hire only attractive women by all means let them hire only attractive women if someone wants to do a female only company I I don't have a beef with it I don't even have a beef if Harvard only wants to uh you know if Harvard wants to make it near impossible for an Asian student to get in as long as they are clear and transparent and don't take government money I'm all for it right I don't care but the transparency matters to me but my real question is like as we think about actually solving the problem and so I'm asking this largely in the connotation of 2024 is coming we're going to be running into this again I really think the right way to set the table is you've got people on the left and people on the right who both think that the other side is evil they both think that they have recognized uh the the problem reincarnate and uh if we don't establish a new sense making mechanism for a world in which the velocity of information is this fast AI is coming so deep fakes are going to be a real thing like we we need a method that we can all rely upon in order to think through these problems well and so like where I come down on Free Speech isn't whether a private company should be able to limit the reach of somebody that's a Nazi or say I don't want Nazis on my platform that's fine there is a real consequence to that though which is then it just bifurcates and you get the right and the left because that's really what's being argued about as far as I can tell there's I have not seen any of what I would call real nazi-like stuff it's normally just Behavior people don't like it it's coming from the opposite side of the aisle so when I say okay what is the right way to deal with this my answer is I think everybody needs to distrust themselves a little so they should not assume that they are right everybody should be willing to put their ideas forward on how they think through the problem so rather than only listening to experts it's like hey I'm an expert or I'm not but this is how I think about the problem this is how I've ended up with this conclusion I've looked at this or I've studied that whatever but this is how I come to this conclusion and then to want the Collision of ideas and the second people are more worried about bad ideas being out there they're either saying I completely give up to this velocity of information problem so we have to just choke it and we have to make sure that there's there's only the authorized information or you accept the the consequences of letting the ideas battle it out in the public Consciousness and as far as I can tell the second you say the people aren't smart enough to battle these ideas out the system of information distribution is so broken that it's it's unsafe maybe isn't the perfect word but you'll never get a good outcome by doing that you can't have democracy like it it is literally only in the face of the ability for people to say what they believe is true and to battle out those ideas that we have any hope of people really understanding as close to these sort of unsculptured um way of presenting an idea that we're going to get and look there are going to be people that won't be able to navigate that mess and so I'm certainly not saying that this is perfect but when I step back and look at the reality of the landscape that we're in algorithmically controlled all of that everybody has a voice in Social et cetera et cetera I don't see a way around it well so we don't have a pure democracy right it's not like you just get online and vote and it's you know one person one vote and then we decide whether we go to war with Russia based on uh you know the tally we have we pick representatives and there I think it's important that we have Representatives who are not blown around like weather veins by just whatever's happening on Twitter that day right so yes they need to care about what their constituents want but it I think it's good that there's a looseness of fit between what you know 500 people in the government do and what and the cacophony on social media right that may may be to some degree informing their I their impression of what their constituents want right so we need serious people uh in serious roles of responsibility and insofar as we we're losing that and there's definitely signs that we are losing that I mean we've got you know at least one person in Congress who when our state is on fire she she speculates that maybe it's you know Jewish space lasers starting those fires right this is yeah yeah Marjorie Taylor green uh has heard that that there were some space lasers put up there by by Jews I think I think it was Rothschild funding um they could start fires and we might want to look into that right um so insofar as that is happening that we're getting people so anti-establishment that they are effectively lunatics uh in positions of real power I think that's that's a maybe that maybe that problem has always been with us to some degree but at least I am perceiving it um certainly post-trump as uh uniquely worth worrying about at this moment that like but populism is tending to promote candidates that um are almost by definition have fewer institutional commitments uh with all the good and all the bad that that entails right so but there's a lot that's good that if you care about you know the last hundred years of scientific knowledge right and your your statements about let's say something like climate change is is going to be constrained by a basic awareness of you know what most climate scientists most of the time think about climate change that's your one kind of Representative if you're somebody who's just gonna Free Will based on what they heard Alex Jones say or yeah I mean like literally Trump gave his first interview I think to Alex Jones right like there's there's a there's a difference of um the center of narrative gravity there in populism that I think we need to worry about but and there's obviously right wing and left wing variants of populism uh both are are problematic um but this is we we have to recognize that there are asymmetries like you say like so what you seem to be recommending is that we basically talk to everyone give everyone a fair hearing it's only when you just bring sunlight to everything that people are going to be able to make up their minds and they're not and they're gonna you know they're still the left and right are still going to demonize one another but we're going to approach something like maximum understanding if we just talk about everything so why not have RFK Jr on your podcast right now Rogan brings them on the podcast and just you know RFK tell me tell me give me the world as you see it you know tell me uh you know who killed your father who killed your uncle um what do you think about these vaccines do vaccines cause autism and just let him go for four hours um the downside with that is that even in the presence of somebody who is a subject matter expert who's there to provide some kind of guard rails to that conversation there is an asymmetry between the time and effort it takes to make a mess and the time and effort it takes to clean it up right and whether it's even possible to clean it up given the resources available right so if somebody is if someone's just going to make up lies in front of you even if you're an expert in the in that area you there's only so much you can do because like you're not you they're they're playing with a completely different you know kind of information physics right they're just going to make something up so if if you you might be a a climate change expert or a vaccine expert and if you have a somebody who's a pure conspiracy theorist on those topics you know in my experience you're you're sitting with someone who is is very often unscrupulous enough to just make stuff up right or to be so delusional in there in the way they have interacted with even valid information in the past that that the word salad they're going to produce is you know effectively just a tissue of lies and yet there may be no way to actually interact with it in an honest way in real time on Rogan's podcast or anywhere else such as so as to properly debunk it so you can't just take let's take RFK Jr as an example do we think that he is wrong and well-intentioned or do we think he is Sinister why well wrong and well-intentioned can cover for a lot of of a dangerous error right I mean you can you can really make a mess being wrong and well-intentioned I think with him he's so he's got so much sun cost he's taught me first of all there's so many people like there there is a just a a character illogical you know psychological you know phenotype that just is addicted to the the contrary intake on more or less everything right so it's just like and it's not an accident you see p you the the people who are all in on you know the JFK conspiracy right like you know no way it was a single shooter no way Oswald was a patsy whatever it is right those people by and large tend to just jump on all the other conspiracies whether it's you know the moon landing or 9 11 truth or it's like they and you have someone like RFK Jr where it's it seems I don't know the man but I've you know I've been paying attention of late it seems like there's there's almost no conspiracy that he doesn't have a an appetite for right so like when someone says well what about Bill Gates injecting you know transponders into us with the vaccine he's got time for that right he doesn't say oh no that's I mean you really you really think Bill Gates is doing that that's just isn't that obviously [ __ ] no no he's like well you know this is something we really have to look into it's like I you know I don't have Verbatim what he said on that but it was he is way too open-minded on on points like that right and so it is with everything and now it's it's deeply inconvenient for someone like me at A Moment Like This to have to recognize some of these conspiracies turn out to be true right and some always looked plausible from the very beginning so like the the the origins of kovid coming from the the Wuhan Institute of virology right like is it a lab leak or is it the wet Market well it always looked plausible that it could be a lab leak right that was always a a valid thesis worth worrying about and investigating and it was never racist to speculate that that might have been the case right so the fact that our medical establishment tried to Tamp that down in a completely bad faith way and maybe for reasons that are if you if you dig deeper into fauci and into you know the other players maybe they really are there's some deeply invidious things to discover about people's conflict of interest and you know and you know research we funded and now we don't want to admit we funded or whatever it was um I mean there was that moment in Congress where fauci and and Rand Paul were kind of debating the meaning of gain of function research and fauci looked like you know to to many people's perception and I actually shared it at the time he looked like he was just doing this sort of talmudic hair splitting on what game the phrase gain function meant whereas Rand Paul was saying can't just be honest with the American people like you know that if you're if you are changing the function of the Dynamics of a virus such that it spreads more among humans that scan a function you know by whatever By Any Other Name um so maybe there's something sinister beneath all of that right so here's one conspiracy among all these other conspiracies that P that people people were branded as conspiracy theorists for entertaining and yet it was always plausible to be worried about that but this by the way is exactly the thing that I'm worried about so uh it becomes very easy to shut people down to say oh that's just conspiracy um and to start having the apps get involved so YouTube marking it is like Oh you talked about Ivermectin this I'm shutting this episode down like just so many things coming at you at once trying to say this is outside the Overton window and so my my whole thesis is is very simple that the in a world where there's too much information coming in the answer cannot be to choke it off to try to limit the amount of information because you will get that wrong it is manipulative by its very nature the closest thing you're going to get is to let ideas battle out there are going to be consequences I want to be very clear there we probably when it comes to things like this you were better off when you had trusted but hyper limited media sources that could at least get everyone to walk towards the exits in a calm and orderly fashion so I I'm not denying that but but that world is over and so now you really only have two options that I can see you either top down clamp down or and I'll lead people back to my Trifecta of evil or you go there are going to be consequences to letting people battle the ideas out in public and they're going to be a lot of people that get confused by things that should never be taken seriously and they're going to be taken seriously and we're going to have lives lost because of that but it will balance out and we won't have lost all of our faith and you're not going to get the small guy trampled to death sent off to the gulag killed because he's an inconvenient voice whatever the case which also opens the door to the power grabs and now you get Will To Power which we saw a lot in kovid was like oh I can get a little bit of power and so it draws people into that so you get power grab power grab so when I think back and in fact maybe the right way to ask the question is and and I want to keep this tied to RFK I don't I don't want to depart from that yet so you've got RFK your view is that he's making things up that it's conspiracy maybe just personality wise he's drawn to it I don't hear you saying that you think he's Sinister just that's just how his mind works um other people though think that he's bang on that he's right you've already admitted that he'll probably end up being right about some of these things I know you well enough to know you're going to say well there's nuance and if you're right for the wrong reason you really do have to think that through it's not enough just to be right we'll set that aside for now so you've got this guy conspiracy minded not being Sinister probably will be right about some of these things but probably you still don't want him to be platformed and then it becomes well but but the crucial distinction again is between it being illegal to platform him or just the choice for any private class I only care about the choice I want to know why because you're you are such a potent sense maker there's so many of us that are like children of Sam Harris where you really helped us think about putting these ideas together and then there's something in this one-two punch of covid uh Trump where all of a sudden I felt like wait I've been using the tools you gave me and now the way that now I feel like you're using a different set of tools and so I'm trying to remap like because here's how I approach you right now obviously I've watched some portion of the internet go uh Sam's brain broke he used to be Sam Harris not Sam Harris you did your own podcast about it which is brilliant by the way were you like some portion of my audience thinks like what have you done I forget the exact phrase you used but like you're so aware of how people have responded but you've stayed really steady so I'm like okay then maybe there's something here I'm just not getting which is why I keep laying my thing out because you don't feel erratic to me but I want to understand you you're layering ideas that allow you to make sense of this in a way where your calm like I'll just if if people are going to freak out on Twitter I'm just going to step back I'm gonna keep doing my thing like being with you does not feel like I'm in the presence of someone who's on a manic episode or anything like you feel as ever sort of calm and centered and so because I am skeptical of my own approach I want to understand yours now I'm not going to pull back on the parts where I think that it doesn't make sense I'll say it doesn't make sense but I actually do want to understand so uh where I was going with that is I don't worry about illegal not illegal I just want to know why you think it makes sense to de-platform or to not platform maybe a more accurate way to say it to not platform someone like RFK Jr when the founding fathers said hey the one thing you don't want to [ __ ] with make sure people can say whatever the hell they want okay well it matters what the platform is so um you know with a podcast it's very simple you're only going to do I'm only going to do you know 40 50 podcasts this year I just have to make a choice it's an editorial Choice it's a publishing Choice what do I want to pay attention to whose book do I want to read who do I want to talk to you know most people you have said don't like there are certain people you don't think should be put on a platform Trump was one certain people I wouldn't talk to for certain for specific reasons you're not talking fair enough but are there people that you think should never be platformed well I think if you're going to platform it so what I said about RFK on my podcast is if you're going to platform him you have a journalistic responsibility to do your homework not only in anticipation of the things he's going to say on your podcast but you should need to catalog the things he's already said which are obviously [ __ ] that you should challenge them on right so you know there there is just a a widespread scientific consensus at this point that there is no link between childhood vaccines and autism right now autism is a problem autism rates have gone up we don't understand autism but people have gone deep studying the MMR vaccine but all just vaccines in general and autism and found no linkage right so and he is out there telling people anyone who will listen that that there's every reason to believe that vaccines cause autism or we should be worried about it or you know or you know I'm hearing from from mothers who who have seen the clear correlation uh they had a normal kid on Tuesday on Wednesday they got vaccinated and you know the autism started right so he is spreading that fear and as far as I can tell it's on the basis of no valid scientific information now now it's also this is now linked up with everyone else's concerns about covet vaccines and just you know the reliability of medicine in general and bad incentives and pharmaceutical companies and there's a there's a lot of there there in stuff uh but that it's worth worrying about I mean I think a a profit driven motive in medicine is something that we're we're always going to be in tension with because what we want is we we want the medical establishment to be recommending drugs because they're safe and truly safe and effective to people who truly need them right we don't want people in the privacy of their own minds or in the privacy of their board meetings celebrating how they're going to make billions of dollars at this new opportunity because they can they can you know Market this drug successfully to people who may not need it may not benefit from it maybe in fact be harmed by it right so is that a disalignment of incentives that is is specifically in the case of medicine that is um I think people are understandably uncomfortable with um but so in the in the narrow case when you're talking about having a podcast you you first of all you can just the burden is not is not on you to platform everybody you can just decide who you want to talk to if you're going to talk to someone like RFK Jr I think given his track record and given how much I think genuine misinformation he has spread and you know consequential misinformation I think you have a responsibility not to just put a mic in front of him and let him rip you you actually need to to debunk him and maybe bring on someone who can also debunk him now again as I said you have no problem with that so if it was done in a debate format with another exporter Superior expert then it's we're good yes except you the the asymmetry I pointed out before still applies if he's going to just make stuff up right so like you know he will I mean the example I mentioned on my podcast like he's been telling a story I I think in several venues that you know he he had collaborated with with the journalist Jake Tapper like 15 years ago on a documentary uh they just put in a ton of effort it was they did a really deep dive on the link between vaccines and autism and um at the last minute Jake Tapper called him and said listen we're we're going to pull this we just I've never in all my years as a journalist I've never had this experience but this just came down from corporate um they're just pulling the plug on this I'm so sorry and you know hit so the punch line for him and I I'm not sure if he said this on Rogue and he definitely said this on some podcasts I listened to um punchline for him is okay the pharmaceutical companies have such pull where I mean they they spend so much money with CNN and these other outlets that you know if they don't want something to air it's not going to air right that's how corrupt journalism is now now if I was on a podcast debating RFK Jr and he trotted out that story I would just have to eat it I would say all right well that's that's bad but I agree that looks bad right now Jake Tapper has published an article saying this is just a lie right this is just like this has like two percent two percent relationship to what actually happened there was nothing about it it's just it's all upside down and I keep debunking this and he keeps telling this story right um so unless you know that it doesn't matter that you're a vaccine expert or you could be an expert in in a dozen really you know relevant disciplines if someone's just going to make up a story that is perfectly shaped to tickle the contrarian you know they're they're all a bunch of [ __ ] Liars part of the brain he still lands that blow in real time on a podcast there's no way to debunk it in real time you literally need Jake Tapper to you need to pull him out of the woodwork for that particular Point um but isn't there many there are many things like that that's the thing I mean it's not like so someone who has this style of of reasoning again some of its conscious lines some of its misremembering some of it's that they're reading studies and they're not understanding them and they're just they're pulling you know half truths out of studies that you know that are can be made to seem real um and so they're making such a mess that it is genuinely hard to be an expert in in that you know riding shotgun and all of that and debunking in real time um but the only responsible way to do it would be to have an expert there to to try to do that I think it's worth stepping back and and asking the question well why is anyone listening to RFK Jr about vaccines at all right he's not an expert in the relevant domain right he's not I mean he's not an expert in epidemiology he's not an expert in Immunology is not a vaccine guy he's not he's like he's not he's a lawyer and an activist who got this particular B in his Bonnet 20 years ago and he's just made a lot of noise about this and and interestingly he's also a climate science activist right and there you can you see you you can see of a very bizarre mismatch between how he deals with mainstream con scientific consensus in climate and how he he disavows mainstream scientific consensus on the topic of vaccines and at me everything is flipped I mean he's just like he's got all the time this is the perfect example for me of the very thing that I'm worried about so here you have a guy he's either a Sinister and wants to help the climate in which case I think most people have cognitive dissonance or he's um Sinister and wants people to not take vaccines that are going to save their life or he's maybe right about something that other people disagree with or maybe he's wrong but well-intentioned so I think I think wrong but well-intentioned covers for a lot I mean just think about it the vaccine thing is is really a unique case because what you have is a an intervention on a healthy person very often a child that is nevertheless nevertheless risky to some degree um some number of people are going to have a bad reaction some number of people are going to die from from the they get like you I let you I mean this is just everyone's worst certainly every parent's worst nightmare you know let I let them stick a needle in my child and he was never the same or he died right like that's just so you you just have to hear one story like that right it doesn't have to happen to you it's just you it could be a friend of a friend of a friend you hear this story and you think man it's just it's not worth it like I just I I don't you know in in the case of of of childhood illness you know infectious disease you can as you know basically everyone who doesn't get their kids backs does you can just be a free rider on this larger system of herd immunity you can say listen I I most people are going to be vaccinated for measles I don't even have to get my kid vaccinated like I just don't I'm not going to run this risk I'm just going to opt out and so he's intersecting with totally understandable fears that get wherein specific anecdotes specific stories get Amplified to the to the I mean they're they're above data they're more important than data you can show me all the data in the world I know what happened to my kid right that's again scientifically every that's all upside down but it is so compelling uh that what should we do though with people that are in that situation because for me if a parent doesn't want to vaccinate their child I do not think you should be able to force them even at the height of kovid where I was like when I really believed everybody just needs to go get vaccinated and some people are like I don't want to do it I was like word then fine like I that just feels so it felt wrong to me and this is where it feels like everybody needs to have a moral compass part of where I think the breakdown is happening I've heard you refer to something as a great unraveling now I don't know what you mean by that but I started mapping out what I thought you meant by that and one of the things that certainly I would mean as a great unraveling is we don't have these shared morals anymore we don't have one religion to carry us through and you know because what I think ends up happening and the thing that you and I have been talking about without really talking about is that this is a battle for the truth if things were clear they'd be clear like if we really knew like vaccines don't cause uh autism like uh you you if if vaccines caused autism it'd be very clear you just see it boom done right so it's in some sort of weird like maybe it does like there's enough credibility there that people can still buy into it there isn't enough just like unequivocable evidence in the other direction people go I've looked at this because if it were true I could just show you this and I could show you this and then people would go down the line nobody's arguing about whether what you eat impacts what you [ __ ] right everybody just gets it not to tell anybody I don't have to go convince people it's just like your life is such proof that there is a one-to-one relationship between what you put in your mouth and what comes out the other end so there is some weird gray area so the the question because it's mostly gray area for most things right so now if we know we're living in this area where everything is great nobody knows who's going to be the expert you started the the conversation by saying okay we really do need experts but no joke like not fine words into your sense you were caveating experts have sort of thrown away their credibility and so it's like that is the world that we live in like this stuff is so complex so so the the thing that we have to take on in head-on collision is how do we discover what is true well if you do it the way RFK Jr is doing it for climate right like he you notice that you have any you can you can specif find any of the preponderance of exercise like it's not an accident that almost all climate scientists right I mean there's a general principle you have to understand here is that it's always possible to find a handful of phds or MDS who are crazy who are conflicted or just for whatever reason disposed to stake out a genuinely disreputable and and indefensible thesis you could also the cigarette companies could always find somebody with a seemingly relevant degree to say I don't think smoking causes cancer I don't think it's addictive but I like it you could you could find that guy and then that guy would sell his his wears to the chemical companies that are you know putting fire retardant in mattresses and he could say well I don't think this is this if it if it gets into the bloodstream it's not a problem right so it's you can always find those people so the the I'm not saying we we are always ruled by scientific consensus because there are there are genuine breakthroughs in science and that overturn you know even a 99.9 consensus right but scientific consensus is still Salient and still matters most of the time and it's it's not arrived at by accident and there's so much tension in science to disprove other scientists right they're so like that it is such a competitive atmosphere that you know again there are studies that don't get replicated there's there's there's you know false ideas that survive far longer than you think they would but generally speaking you are not going to go wrong most of the time by lining up with what 99 of you know specialist X thinks on this on this very specialized topic um so our RFK Jr plays that you know very you know Center the Fairway game on the topic of climate and he does something completely different when he's talking about medicine now I'm I don't know maybe he has a story that that reconciles that that difference but we need yes we need a a healthy institutional and scientific conversation such that good ideas generally generally survive and bad ideas are generally debunked and that we know that most of the time are our experts are real experts they got that they they they acquired their expertise by a process that was going to weed out the imbeciles and the and the you know the um the delusional and deliver somebody who really is is arriving at their opinions on the basis of a methodology that we we generally TR we generally can trust right they're not obviously conflicted by can we lay out that methodology well it's you know you're on guard for you know obvious cognitive bias and wishful thinking and you know bad certainly bad incentives right so it's understand it's like yes if R.J Reynolds is funding Research into the toxicology of of cigarettes right it's not to say that you know obviously conflicted money is always going to fund a study that that is false right I mean you could you could run it it's not it's not wouldn't be hard to run a totally valid study where the money came from you know a um what would be classically be considered the wrong Source but it's easy to see that there's a there's there's at least the Optics are bad enough that that's not how you want to fund that particular science right um and at minimum scientists have to declare any economic interest they had in any part of this you know part of this picture but we the the truth is I mean scientists science is deeply flawed and yet it's better than any other part of culture with respect to how we play this game of just letting ideas Collide against one another and and seeing what survives I that I agree with so the problem is I don't feel like that's what's happening or what's being championed so broadly and then we can get specific to you and I and exactly what we're saying but um though the way that I think about this is um you've got even even something like science uh if you talk to Eric Weinstein talks about the disc the I think it's the distributed information suppression complex so he talks about how there is for whatever reason just inherent into the world of science there's a certain bias there's certain ideas they don't want getting out because people have built their entire careers on something and if you're putting something for it the challenge is it not necessarily that they're being evil but it's the same kind of idea of the cigarette guy is going to see what he wants to see and the guy whose entire career lapses if your new idea is right well magically the peer review that you get is terrible and right he's got a laundry list of things like that and so I'll I'll back up so in a business context I created something um called the physics of progress and it was me trying to teach to my students exactly how you solve novel problems so I was like hey if you want to grow a business I I have no idea what the product is how the audience is going to respond what the market situation is going to be like so you really have to understand how to Think Through new business new product New Era new market dynamics whatever and the way that you do that is physics of progress and I lay this whole thing out and I'm super proud of it and I'm pitching it to my team and I'm like okay you're going to start with where where are you trying to get to what's your goal you're going to identify the obstacle between where you're at and uh your goal and like why won't I just automatically achieve my goal then you're going to come up with a experiment that you can run a thing that you can do to try to over come that obstacle you're going to do that thing you're going to look at the data figure out whether you made meaningful progress you're going to then reinform your hypothesis about how to overcome that obstacle and you're going to start over and one of the guys my team goes uh that's the scientific method and I was like is it I actually don't know the scientific method and he's like yeah that's the scientific method and I was like okay that makes sense to me that's it the reason that I called it the physics of progress and again just completely acknowledging it's the scientific method but the reason that it occurred to me as a physics of progress is because it is the only way to make progress that you're not going to know you're just taking your best guess you know you know where you're trying to get to you have a guess about what the thing is that's stopping you you're going to try something the problem is when I teach this the the big issue is when going back to what I was saying is truth truth is perception interpretation and reinforcement and at the moment you look at the data so I ran my test to see if I could overcome that obstacle I get a result when I look at that data I'm bringing my perception my interpretation and my reinforcement to that and it's not that I'm evil but I'm not necessarily going to see what's true and this is where science then begins to break down it is the right answer like it is what we need to do as far as I can tell it's the only way to make progress in anything but what we're living through right now is that moment of the interpretation the perception and the reinforcement causes you to see something that's not actually there you're you're looking at the world through a fun house mirror and so the one thing that I live in Perpetual fear of is that you have the guy the doctor you'll probably remember his name I I don't who was like you know what I think after you do an autopsy you need to wash your hands before you give birth to somebody yeah what Samuel why Samuel wise so summer wise goes and tells people this hey I think this is causing the death of mothers uh we we really have to start washing against people make fun of him lambast him drive him into an insane asylum where he dies before it's discovered oh yeah germ theory he was right and so that's how wrong this goes I don't think that humans have changed I think that we still have that reaction where it's like it it they're not necessarily even trying to be mean it just doesn't make sense and it to them and it would cause like all these changes and and we don't really know that this is a thing and so to me the people that want to make the decisions they lack the the humility to recognize the odds of me being wrong border on 100 not not on everything but when you take everything in totality you're going to be wrong and you just don't know about which things and so if I'm thinking okay you've put forth your idea we need these we need experts we need an Institutional response that we can trust my thing would be the closest thing I could imagine to that you have to Red Team blue team you've got to get somebody like RFK Jr who really believes this is a problem this is really causing autism and then you debate it with data that you predict ahead of time so it comes down to okay what was your prediction what did you think was going to happen then you run the experiment did it actually happen yes or no and then both sides because when you look at the data is the point at which you're most likely to make your errors bring your biases all that you look at the data and then you try to go with a consensus now I don't see any way in climate is a great one to talk about I don't see any way to stop all kinds of prolonged debate but then you hope that when there really is evidence that it starts to be just one by one all the detractors start falling away it just becomes too self-evident and then you really can get something approaching consensus in action yeah well so let me see if I can just isolate what we're disagreeing about here because you seem to be imagining that we can have an information landscape whether let's let's say it's on a platform like Twitter or YouTube where it's as flat as but like there's as much no one's doing anything deliberate to tune the signal to noise ratio right because to do that would be to be biasing it the best answer is I think people are hyper biased so that is factored into while I didn't talk about that that is factored into how I think you have to let the ideas battle so that the wiser more eloquent Fighters and I think this is probably a lot of some people's pushback on you stepping back somewhat exiting Twitter because they were like you were the guy I counted on to be able to throw and Dodge punches and bring humor and all of that and so we've lost one of the Great fighters of this uh and that that gets hard because I don't see myself as talented enough in the idea of public opinion to do that so you you have to have people that can dismantle these ideas like I've seen you on stage do this particularly with religion which is outside of where we're at right now in the conversation but where you have been you've been funny and uh it's shareable the the clips themselves are amazing because they they hit and they shake you up but they're easy to transmit and remember and so when you find a a great orator Douglas Murray is another guy that can really do this um that's that feels to me and I know you've sort of you keep saying I'm not the guy to Think Through covert or whatever and I'm like uh actually so as long as it's people who are disagreeing respectfully who care about truth you you have to as the individual care about truth and you have to not pride yourself on being right you have to pride yourself in identifying the right answer but I I have a feeling that experts almost need that external panel of people who are like I'm not invested in this but I know how to Think Through novel problems here's how I'm parsing this data let me ask you really pointed questions give me your feedback and then I'll triangulate on an answer that feels like in the reality of how ideas win at scale that feels the closest to true but it requires that people be able to say whatever the hell they want that they don't get booted kicked off silenced whatever well but so let's just take that last claim first all of these platforms have to kick people off for specific violations of their terms of service right you need some terms of service as far as I know even 4chan has a terms of service right I think maybe eight Chan doesn't but like if you want to be more extreme than 4chan you have to go somewhere else so I will give you barriers must be put up now where we put the barriers we are going to but but the moment you can see that right then you recognize that there's absolutely nothing novel about what Elon is doing on Twitter he's just he's just biasing it in a way that he likes better than the previous bias right so he brought Kanye on knowing he was an anti-semite and then Kanye did something and he kicked him off because he realized okay I can't really have this happening on my platform um and so it is what I mean he's he's cozying up to sort of Q Anon lunatics and he may not even know who he's signal boosting he's just like you know glad hand in somebody who said something he thought was clever sent him a meme he thought was clever and he's actually signal boosting somebody who's just odious in their ideological commitments and then they're lying about everything under the sun right and I'm not saying elon's actually paying attention to all that but he he's he's doing something incredibly ad hoc and sloppy and it's still not free speed Free Speech absolutism right Free Speech absolutism just doesn't exist it doesn't even exist on 4chan if you I mean if you as far as I know this I have this on just uh good faith because I'm never on on um I don't think I've been on 4chan ever but um I think it has a terms of service and that's why a Chan was spawned it's like in protest over you know the the uh the puritanical um control uh unfortunate so what you seem to be recommending is the four channification or the a chantification of everything and what that would be in my view if that were happening on YouTube and Tick Tock and Twitter and and you know threads and everywhere else it would be a maximally maximally noisy uh uncivil space right so it's just it'd be hard it would get hard insofar as you achieve that ideal of no libtard institutional bias right you're just gonna we're just gonna let it rip right anyone with anything to say gets equal chance to say it um what you what you're going to have there is just the just pure cacophony and it's going to be harder and harder to find the signal and the noise right so the moment you admit that you would you admit you're in the the business of favoring certain voices over others platforming and even de-platforming people when they're when they when they prove on the 10th infraction that they're truly beyond the pale and just committed to to making a mess right and what I experienced so and and so my leaving Twitter was just you know it was much more of a personal decision it wasn't a decision that it was just it was just a decision about how I was going to spend my time and attention ultimately but I mean the reason why I didn't see a benefit to my staying there is that it's just the wrong space in which to try to have a conversation and a conversation that converges on anything useful on these kinds of topics right really any polarizing topic uh because I tried I mean it was the only place it was the only social media platform that I ever used personally I mean where I'm on others but those are just marketing channels and I never see them but it was really me on Twitter I was really trying to make sense to people what I was getting back was just this you know tsunami of bad faith attacks and craziness um and what was actually exploding was not just you know headlines that were false but like you know in in the in the final case it was a clip of me on another podcast which was genuinely misleading as to what I said in context on that podcast but it simply didn't matter because the clip itself seemed to be it seemed intelligible enough it seemed clear enough what I was saying it within the clip that people just they didn't even want to hear that there was a context just the hunter Biden thing yeah yeah so they so they didn't like literally they did they didn't want to hear and even like no one has the bandwidth to go back and find the context for the thing that they just reacted to that that just you know primed all their you know satisfied all their salt and sugar and fat uh receptors um and what so when you ask like what my principles are my my general principle is to be very on guard for doing that sort of thing myself so like even when there's somebody who who I know I understand and revile appropriately somebody like Trump I'm still on guard for the clip of him that is actually misleading right and and I will actually defend him as much as I you know find him indefensible I have I've burned a fair amount of you know reputational Capital you know over here on the left by defending him on specific points when I felt that the attack on him was just based on lies right so like when he was the when he um gave a press conference after Charlottesville and said that you know there were good people on both sides uh and he seemed to be saying In that clip that the neo-nazis are good people right and that was spun from that was spun politically from you know everyone from Biden on down it was spun by the New York Times I mean literally I would have if I had to bet 95 of the commentary left of center still thinks he was praising neo-nazis in that in that press conference and yet within the within the context of the press conference it's absolutely clear that he's not doing that right he's he says you know within 20 seconds of of of the clipped piece he says you know I'm not talking about the white supremacists and the neo-nazis I'm talking about other people who were there for you know who were just worried about you know monuments getting torn down um and so I think we have to acknowledge that there's we're in a uh immediate landscape now where people are being reliably misled by Clips so the the the the the underlying ethic here is that when people are arguing in a partisan way they don't really care what their enemy has said or meant to say what they want to do is they want to hold them to the the worst possible interpretation of what they said and make that stick right and the game is just see if you can make it stick see if you can you and so so I've long I've made this claim you know for years now and this is you know this is more based on what happens to me on from the left as opposed to the right I mean the the example we're talking about now was sort of defamation coming from the right uh but you know I've I've made this point before and this is the you know it's an inconvenient point to make because like even this can get clipped out to my disadvantage but it's just it's worth saying because this this shines as bright as possible a light on what everyone is doing and many many good people are doing it kind of unthinkingly but so I'm living I've long known for at least eight years or so I've known that I'm in an environment where if I say on my podcast black people are Apes white people are Apes we're all Apes racism doesn't make any sense right there are some considerable number of people who will clip out me saying black people are apes or make a meme black people or Apes Sam Harris right and they will export that to their Channels with apparently with a clear conscience saying this is fair game right um and that's the kind of people I was dealing with on Twitter and that's the kind of the person who clipped that clip from that podcast is exactly that sort of person and that and he was being signal boosted by lots of other people we could name um and so I just recognize that this is a a just it's just the wrong occasion to try to have a conversation with people as is it's built into the Dynamics of the system where people are incentivized just to dunk on everybody however dishonestly and then move on and you know the and part of the pathology I saw with Elon taking over the place was not so much what he was doing to the place as its owner but just how he was behaving personally on the platform himself I mean he was doing the same thing he one of the first things he did after he took over Twitter was he spread he's he spread this meme about um Nancy Pelosi's husband you know after that the hammer attack on him it's like it's not what it seems this could have been a you know a gay trist gone awry and he linked to a website that had you know an article to that effect this was a website which during the 2016 election claimed that Hillary Clinton was dead and that a body double was was campaigning in her place right so Elon links to that as a source right in front of at that point probably 110 million people amplifying a completely crazy conspiracy theory that is getting spun up in Q Anon circles um and then when that gets pointed out to him just how just how wrong all of that was and how irresponsible it was he never corrects the record he never apologizes he never changes his his appetite for doing that again in that case I think he just deleted the Tweet right and moved on and so it's it's like even people who reputationally have a tremendous amount to lose by behaving that way you would think are goaded into behaving that way because of the mechanics of the platform and so you know for me personally I I simply don't understand how people have audiences that will still follow them after they prove that they don't care to make any of these distinctions I mean so I mentioned Tucker Carlson the fact that behind closed doors he's saying that Trump is a demonic force and then in front of the camera he's basically messaging to trumpastan 85 of the time you know in a very supportive way um I don't understand how like in front of my audience if that if a similar thing were revealed about me my my audience would would just completely disavow me I mean I was like there'll just be no it would it would be a complete breach of trust with my audience and that's that's the way I think it should be but Alex Jones I mean like Alex Jones has an audience of some tens of millions of people in the aftermath of the of Sandy Hook right you know when he like he has lied and lied and lied about Sandy Hook being a false flag fake you know confection of the of the the Obama Administration you know they're all crisis actors the kids never died or like I mean it's like I I don't I don't know how he he how deep those claims that went but some version of that right like this is none of this is as it seems um he created immense harm demonstrable harm with all the Sandy Hook families I mean these are families in many cases they've had to move home some have moved homes 10 times since he started spreading those lies about them all of this gets kind of you know forensically documented at trial he gets a billion dollar judgment against him how does he still have an audience right like who are these people who are still isn't it is that legitimately confusing because that one to me is very clear he's entertaining all these people are mentally ill or like what like what is it because I don't look I don't know Rogan well at all uh but Rogan keeps having him on I don't know if he has recently but he thinks he's funny since then but yeah that I I don't know but certainly my take is that people find him amusing he's funny and he's gotten enough weird stuff right right that people are like all right look he missed I don't I know literally nothing about the Sandy Hook stuff so I'm certainly not defending that right I'm just saying I understand the phenomenon the phenomenon is that that this is this is an age where the algorithm is a big part of the piece of information and so the reason that certain people become the voice is that they also are able to speak in a way that people find really compelling entertaining engaging and so that person is gonna keep going Alex has a way of delivering information that's zany it's crazy it's over the top you can't believe it's real he's funny he's fun to make fun of and there are enough things that people like I mean he gets memed right is like another crazy thing that he said five years ago just you know came true and so he's he's a bit like the the um Simpsons in that people be like yo Simpsons 12 years ago predicted this thing like that's insane so same thing with Alex but now that doesn't mean that he isn't a destructive force it just means that it's very easy for me to see why he's entertaining enough that people are gonna keep going back to him you can reboot your life your health even your career anything you want all you need is discipline I can teach you the tactics that I learned while growing a billion dollar business that will allow you to see your goals through whether you want better health stronger relationships a more successful career any of that is possible with the mindset and business programs in Impact Theory University join the thousands of students who have already accomplished amazing things tap now for a free trial and get started today I'll grant grant you the entertainment component especially in his case but in in his case perhaps to a lesser degree uh but certainly in Tucker's caves there's this pretense of I'm just giving you honest information right I'm just calling it as I see it like this is just you know like what you see is what you get there's not like this is just this is um there's a fundamental Integrity to to the message that's what his audience seems to think they're getting and then we know that he is a completely different person behind closed doors I can explain that one as well so you've got uh all right we we all know they I'm just giving you what uh died in the wool red Republican is going to say um they shouldn't be looking at his private Communications and that's a way of not taking the the knowledge on board correct I'm not saying it's the right way I'm just saying this is how he keeps his audience they shouldn't be looking at his private Communications this is exactly what Trump has been warning us about people getting into your private life governmental overreach all of that and then of course like he's gonna fight for Republican values even if he thinks that the leadership isn't great that he'd rather have somebody else he knows that lying on behalf of a guy that he thinks is demonic but at least he's Republican is better than than the the outright dangerous I don't know what words they use for othering the Joe Biden camp but like that's how it's going to be that you would much rather I mean it was like when Trump said that yes I'm a bully but I'm a bully for you it was like okay sure Tucker's not perfect sure he lied to present things well but I'm kind of glad he did because I need him to represent our side we have to win against the other people like there's this real escalating sense of like we have to win the stakes really matter and in fact going back to that idea of if if I look at so I I watched the whole interview that you did where you were talking about the hunter Biden laptop and so I'm watching it with an open mind and just like uh just a ton of respect for you Sam I cannot stress it enough before or after this minute a year from now I just can't fathom not really being blown away by how you think and the all the meditation stuff you seem sincerely to want to help people so it's very easy for me to go okay I think I get where you're going with this but for me to interpret that moment the way that you did this is why I said uh this is about stopping evil to me your interpretation of trump is that either because he's just a clown on the loose a dangerous troll or because he's actually nefarious either one has the same outcome so I doubt you split real hairs with that but he cannot be in control of this company it is I don't know if you go all the way to existential thank you this country I don't know if you go all the way to uh existential or not but it's like it's so high risk finger on the nukes asking questions like uh why do I have less nukes than JFK back in the 60s like that this is this is as close to unhinged narcissism as you're gonna get it's too dangerous we're we are now at a point where hey everybody um yeah fine I will step forward and say that there should be a small group group of people that just keep us from this lunacy and if that means that we have to not not necessarily um bury the laptop but you cannot let it come out right in a moment where it could possibly sway the election and put that psychopath back in right now that's where I say that is way more dangerous and now we can at least talk about what we disagree on to me the authoritarian nature of like I and some small group of people have decided that Trump is that dangerous and have decided that this laptop revealing at this moment would be dangerous to the Democratic candidacy so whatever it is that we have to suppress we have to suppress it now let me just be clear about what my position actually was at the time and what I was actually saying on that podcast um not especially well my position was it was always a hard judgment call at that point we're talking about 10 days before the election this thing comes it's clearly an October surprise foisted on us timed intentionally to be hard to parse right before the election it's just like we're on Rudy giuliani's timetables like he this is like here this is when I'm going to show you the laptop right you got 10 days to figure this out um it was meant to detonate politically at that point and we already knew what happens what you know in the 2016 election when 10 days before an election you say hey we got Anthony Weiner's laptop and now we're reopening the the email investigation to Hillary Clinton we saw that that was her poll numbers like by the hour went down uh and uh you know whether that was decisive or not uh who knows if she was unelectable for other reasons but um so we had a so so my claim at the time was it was totally understandable for journalists to say we're not going to be Hostage to Rudy giuliani's timetable here we have a election in 10 days first Do no harm let's just give this let's let's give let's wait for three weeks to figure out what's true about this laptop right this is we can't figure out whether this is a Russian you know forgery you know like this there's reasons to be concerned that it could could be Russian disinformation um who knows what's going on here we should not be in a rush to create a a disaster here politically um so it was under and and so I I viewed each of these platforms having different choices to make so journalists could decide do we want to focus on this now or do we want to give this a little more breathing room that was an editorial choice that I completely understood and still still a genuine hard call then you have Twitter deciding not only to whether or not to amplify certain things they decide to de-platform the New York Post that had a journalist who decided to write about the story right um that was a very different decision and I think almost certainly the wrong decision right I mean again understandable given the political bias of the people on Twitter and given the genuine uncertainty as to the the the ground truth or the really the validity the information and where that laptop came from and I think even in that case on the New York Post Story one of the the reporters who reported it out didn't want to sign his name to the article I mean like it was it was the Wild West over there in terms of actually you know doing the journalism um so it's even in my view it was a coin toss as as to what to do there now if you raise the stakes more right you make Trump even more Sinister you make the the election even more tenuous you make the information even more uh dubious than you know then that the dials change and and so many of these decisions are not decisions you can make categorically in principle it really is this this pragmatic balancing of just what is what is true and what it What is the what are the stakes right it's like uh I'll compare this to another case you you um you spelled out earlier so you felt that it was It was obviously wrong to force people to get the MRNA vaccine for covet right now I would Grant you certainly in retrospect that seems true but if we change a few of the variables I think your your ethical intuitions and certainly political intuitions would totally change so you make it a much more obviously effective vaccine that really does block transmission it's like a sterilizing vaccine uh you make it a much more dangerous virus you make it a virus that's actually preferentially killing kids rather than old people right so now it's now we're in an environment where like you're deciding not to get vaccinated is putting my kids at risk right do you get to make that choice right and you might say oh yes yeah I should be able to make that choice as my body you know but dial up the the deadliness of the pathogen you know give us something like you know Airborne Ebola that incubates for a month you know you don't know you have it and you're what you walk around spreading it and it's got you know a 75 fatality rate and it's mostly killing kids no one gets to make that choice anymore I mean then literally the the cops come in and vaccinate you and I I would say that all of us would agree to that the moment again that you turn up The lethality on the on the pathogen you turn up the effectiveness of the vaccine you turn down the risk of the vaccine give me a truly safe vaccine where there's not even one documented case of vaccine injury right so that then you just have to be completely crazy to be worried about being vaccinated in that in that kind of environment um then it's just a no-brainer then then we just don't tolerate a diversity of opinion because the stakes are too high it's it's a full-on emergency bodies of kids are being stacked up in Parks right we there's so many of them we don't know what to do with them we've got these mobile morgues and we have a vaccine that actually works and then we've got RFK Jr saying you know maybe you don't want you know you maybe you don't want to get the jab on Rogan's podcast right that's that that's the the world I've been worried about ever since covet like like a like a a world where the truth is really clear and yet our media environment is so crazy that that we can't even talk about it we get we get this I mean again the fact that something like Q Anon is possible Right the fact that we could have a president who messages the Q Anon favorably without disavowing any association right when asked about Q Anon he says well they sure seem to like me they seem like nice people right this is a this is a ah I mean some tens of millions of people it seems and let's say it's a hardcore of maybe three million people who knows millions of people who believe that the world is being run by child raping cannibals right that's like if we if that is possible in the current system you just you just have to imagine what that would do when the stakes are truly high right like when it's when it's part of the Machinery of some decision making and uh so I have a slightly different intuition on this so um I I like to take the hardest possible look at this thing and then see what I would do so um one even if you dial it up it's Airborne Ebola it takes a month you're walking around dead kids or are being stacked up um I would still let RFK go say I don't think people should get the job but having said that what do you mean lit like meaning you would decide to have that conversation or you just think oh on my podcast there should be no law against it right but so I agree with you there so like that where I hold the line with the first amendment is yes you should be able to be as wrong as you want to be but we don't have to algorithmically boost those errors right correct and if you and if I have a platform if again I'm creating a social media platform I don't want the Nazis and I don't want the people who are spreading lies about the current pandemic that is getting yeah you and I break down is I am so paranoid that people don't know what a lie is right so the very thing and that's why I brought up the founding fathers before the reason that I'm saying I want these people to be able to speak is because I don't know who knows the answer and who doesn't and so I need the information now over time certainly for myself I'll begin to discern who I think is a good faith actor and is really thinking through this problem and I get that there's going to be people that get caught up in just the speed of it it's hard to parse who's right and who's just entertaining and that will be very frustrating especially if it's my kids that are being stacked up in the park and and and I get all of that but I would also say that if you need those sort of wartime Powers this is Ebola it's spreading the deaths are just absolutely outrageous we have reason to believe that the vaccine is working while I wouldn't say that people can't speak up I would be like you are getting vaccinated or you're getting quarantined in some way and that would be horrible and that's really god-awful and it will have absolutely terrible consequences but I don't want to say that I can't see a world in which I look at it and go that's the right answer what I want to talk about is what am I using to determine that that's the right answer that's really the thing that I want to talk about is how we think through these very difficult very novel problems and so one of the the things that I find interesting is you've got founding fathers and you've got religion so the founding fathers to me represent a shared narrative about what people ought to be what the US for sure ought to be in in a moralistic sense like how do you structure a government to protect itself from tyranny how do you recognize the individual people what ought they be able to pursue without the government being able to interfere with them like what are those bright lines that makes us Americans riding on the back of freedom and freedom of speech and all of that now of course crazy they're doing all this while holding slaves but they put an idea together that as you adhere to the idea all that other [ __ ] starts to fall away so that to me is is is a structure of a system that grows better over time so that's one element that it it's an orienting mechanism where Live Free or Die right it's something people were literally willing to give their lives for an idea that has fallen apart in a way that I don't clearly understand that I would love you to talk to the other part of this is religion same thing it's how do you know what is true in fact my I was thinking about this today tell me what you think I think that religion is the thing that allows you to establish your behavior patterns when truth cannot be scientifically established so you have religion for the Millennia when you couldn't look under a microscope to know about germ Theory so you just said don't put these Fabrics together don't eat pork whatever and ultimately it was like you knew you were doing the right thing because it was written down in a book or told in an oral story and you either hewed close to what it said to do and you were doing the right thing or you didn't and you weren't and so what I think we're living through now is people realize religion doesn't hold that sort of gravitational Center that it used to because we now do have microscopes and we can really see what the religions were trying to get at but it did give us a shared narrative that works well for people that are headline readers that can't hold the Nuance of the argument and so they just need Ten Commandments tell me what to do and so I know that I'm either in line or not so now when you're looking at a global pandemic we don't really know what's going we don't know The lethality we don't know if you should get the shot or not if I can point to religion and say to be a good Christian you would get the jab for this reason I would draw a parallel with one of the stories then people do it and now I get people to of their own accord out of a desire to adhere to this shared narrative they do it and so you see how religion can be this incredible Boon but in a modern era with idea velocity with Hyper fragmentation driven by algorithms and social media and all of that religion is I I need you to speak to this because I don't know the data well enough losing its power losing its efficacy I don't know it's it's lost something it does not have the effect that it used to have and well I would also say it just doesn't address many of these use cases right so it's like the religion doesn't have a position on vaccines I mean there's some religions that that might I mean a Christian Scientists would would probably not get backs back don't you agree that you if I'm a preacher I find the story that I want to draw the parallel yeah so you could probably do it either way like you could be against vaccines or pro-vaccines correct but I get you to adhere by I don't have to use authoritarian rule that's my point I don't have to do something top down what religion allowed you to do was keep the sovereignty of the individual especially if you're talking about a Christian religion keep the sovereignty of the individual and yet get them to fall in line it's really pretty genius where whether you do it because you believe in America and so you keep your freedoms but you adhere to the the mores that allow this amazing thing to exist that you're proud to be a part of religion serves the same function but now as we get into weird like cultish new religion wokeness whatever you want to call it yeah something something deranges well so I I think I mean what you want are principles here I mean one principles I think we should be very wary of being driven by tribalism right now it's not that tribalism is all always in every case pathological I mean I think there's there's tribalism we can play at for fun I mean it's entertaining and it's not very deep and yet it can take up a fair amount of bandwidth and it's fine so you can be a fan of you know a sports team and we know what that looks like when you take it too seriously I mean when you're like you know South in you know your South American soccer player and you lose the the World Cup or you you know you commit an own goal or something and you literally have to worry about getting murdered by your former fans right we know that that's gone too far it's too much like religion in that case but in the general case you can be you can play at tribalism or you can be you know Loosely identified with some subculture and it can be fun and you can enjoy the diversity and the diversity can be somewhat antagonistic even as it is in let's say in sports right but no one it like it doesn't reach deep into a person's psychology and and and social network and political commitments such that they're making life and death decisions on the basis of how much more they like the Yankees than the the Red Sox say um so tribalism deeper tribalism is I think something we just need to outgrow right I mean because the truth is not tribal the truth is is is universal even specific truths have some there's some view from above where you know diversity of opinion is just a matter of our ignorance and and if we if we could really see those truths clearly we would all Converge on the same on the same account of reality regardless of our background regardless of our our language regardless of I mean we just don't we don't have the right to be to our provincialism anymore with respect to our basic epistemological commitments whether those are scientific or ultimately ethical right so I would say that that you know it used to be the case that we could agree to disagree about how to treat women in a society right like so yes if you're up again you're in Afghanistan you don't let them get you don't let them get educated you'll force them to live in cloth bags you beat them if they try to get out you know they they can't be out in public without being accompanied by a male relative um you know just there's a list of of taboos and most of them are killing offenses um and do we just agree to disagree there well practically now yes because we lost that war we're no longer there we just don't have we we just it's not worth sending our sons and daughters to die to defend those girls but the the ground truth is if you're born a girl in Afghanistan you are profoundly unlucky right that is just that and that disparity in luck should be calling to all of us right like it's just not it's just not a good status quo ultimately if we got our [ __ ] together as a species some subset of the of of women and girls would not be forced to live in cloth bags as they are in Afghanistan at this very moment right um so ultimately we will converge and tribalism is precisely the wrong algorithm to use if you want to converge on the deeper truths whether they're scientific or ethical or you know I would argue even spiritual that we should organize our beliefs about reality and how to live within it right and and that's what we're trying we should recognize is that's what we're trying to do we're trying to navigate in the space of all possible experience individually and collectively and we're just we're trying to figure out what to do next right which this is politics what should we do next we've got a hundred billion dollars to spend this year in the state of California or whatever it is you know I actually don't know what our budget is in California but we've got this money to spend what should we do with it right and then we have diversity of opinion and in some cases you know radical diversity of opinion about what is important and what is even decent to to focus on um but and I agree with you that that basic basically free space of conversation is the way we will Orient and and resolve those disagreements right so we need I I I I do agree that in most cases we need the conversation just to run long enough and to be uncoerced enough so that most people most of the time can notice that the better ideas are surfacing and the and the and the [ __ ] is being being moved to the sidelines but there are still you know obvious cases where the the topic is specialized enough or the the the um the red the red the the the knowledge you need to just get us to to have a valid seat at the table is is deep enough that not all not everyone gets to error their opinion with you know you know not everyone gets to air their opinion at that particular in that particular conversation or um if they do we're all wise to just have very little patience for that particular opinion because it just is it's obviously incredible right it's obviously uh it doesn't have the person doesn't have the right background they're not playing The Language game appropriately they sound crazy they have these they are they're they're they're telegraphing they're they're other ideological commitments that are distracting and and not convergent with with at the actual truth at hand um so it's like sort of you know you bring Alex Jones to the physics conference is not going to take him too many minutes to sort of disqualify himself as a a expert a relevant subject matter expert on physics right or anything else um and so we live with that tension that yes it's it's in fact true that a Nobel Laureate on On Any Given topic can discredit himself with his very next sentence if his if the sentence is obviously wrong right and somebody who knows but basically nothing can be right in a debate with this guy by just pointing that out like you just that doesn't make any sense right and it is true from a scientific point of view that we don't we we take authority scientific Authority very lightly right like like it's not it's not good enough that you're a Nobel Laureate that's that's not the thing that's going to make you right right and and on some level you're only as good as your last sentence right like even if you have a Nobel Prize um and that's how we do you know so you know a Nobel Laureate is given a lecture in in you know again it could be a on his narrow area of expertise and at the end of the lecture hands go up and it could just be a lowly undergraduate who embarrasses him or her on the again not even on an adjacent topic on the on the top the very topic uh on which that that person became an expert um and that is that's that's just because truth is in fact orthogonal to Any Given person's reputation or educational and career achievements or like it's just it doesn't matter who you've been like it matters what you're saying right now and why you're saying it and what and and whether it is connected enough to a chain of reasoning and a chain of evidence that anyone should take it seriously right so that's all true and yet as a time saving device if we have to figure out whether a you know a certain chemical is is toxic we we don't want to hear from Alex Jones we want to hear from the real chemists right yes we don't want to hear from the chemists who are working for Monsanto if that if this is a compound that Monsanto is marketing that they stand to make a billion dollars on and we know we don't have good regulations that would force them to do the the relevant toxicology and really Safeguard human health right we know that a lot of a lot of the incentives are misaligned such that some of the time even someone with the right educational background is either lying or or you know impressively self-deceived and we're getting bad information and this is again this is what I come back to what we need in every case here when things matter are institutions and regulations and procedures and and alignments of incentives that we can actually trust because they're trustworthy right because because they are actually reliably keeping bad information out and and surfacing good information and I would admit that we have a highly imperfect system but the system we have is way better than no system right and like but just take a it's this is very easy for people to see when you move it out of Science and certainly out of Medicine and put it into areas of like just like straightforward engineering like like on an airplane right so like there's not people don't tend to be iconoclass with respect to engineering like when you get on a plane you don't want to be doing your own research you don't want to you didn't want to you don't want your you don't want to be doing Google searches about plane replacement parts right you just want to know that the FAA has it right you want to know that the regulations work you want to know that the pilots for United don't want to die right that they're not going to get on the plane if they think it's unsafe you don't you want to know that the mechanics are not getting bogus Parts because they can shave a profit they're incentivized like you don't want a system of incentives where we tell the mechanics at Boeing that if you can figure out how to get parts from Malaysia cheaper right we're going to let you keep hat pocket half of the difference you know if you save us a million dollars you get to keep five hundred thousand right so get us a landing gear that you know just came that somebody 3D printed you know in in another country right if we found out that that was how we were incentivizing mechanics we would go nuts understandably right but presumably we're not doing that but um we have to discover as a species all the ways in which we're doing dumb things at a systems level right in institutions and in in and in the you know the systems of incentives that connect institutions we have to defrag all of that such that mirror Apes like ourselves can be making reliably making better decisions than individuals can tend to make on their own because the systems are so good and so again this is not we're not going to solve this in podcastan right or sub-stakistan right like I'm not saying we don't want podcasts and sub-stack newsletters but I think what you can do is is delineate how to think about the problem because here's the the last thing on this and then I've got so many more things I want to talk to you about but um I think part of because I agree with you as you break down what it should look like I agree with you the problem is that the example that you gave that I think really freaked people out was like uh this thing isn't going well with the timing of the Trump thing uh the Biden laptop the Trump thing is so serious I'm gonna just real fast break the system to make sure that this doesn't go forward and that sets everybody's alarm bells up but I wasn't but again just to be clear I was not advocating to break anything I I I said that Twitter Twitter was wrong to de-platform the New York Post right the the New York Times I think was probably again and I I put it implicitly in these terms it was a total coin toss for me journalistically whether you decide to do a front page story on the hunter Biden laptop with 10 days left when there was there were valid concerns that this could be Russian disinformation and you had the previous example of a of an election seeming to get derailed by something you say that like there there might be reasons but somebody is making a human is making a judgment call and certainly the way you present it is your take is if it were my call to make that's probably what I would do I think that's the thing that's certainly the thing that that made me uncomfortable of like whoa I that feels like you're well let's let's use a much higher risk scenario let's make it even more realistic because because now what am I doing now with respect to the laptop right like I have not done a podcast on the hunter Biden laptop yeah even yet right it's been it's been now with us for years um it's conceivable that I could I mean I still I still I I still don't find the topic interesting enough given the political environment that I care all that much and again because the the for me it was a very straightforward calculation here we have a sitting president who I knew to be unqualified in all kinds of ways but the specific problem for me at that point was we have a sitting president who is not committing to a peaceful transfer of power right that was a five alarm fire politically I mean that was just that was as bright a line as I needed to say this is an emergency right this guy can this this is now it's not an emergency such that we could do anything to stop him right I'm not saying that the New York Times should have printed lies about him right I'm not saying that it actually did not require line or even a shading of the truth it's just here's a guy who on multiple occasions has been asked point blank on television will you commit to a peaceful transfer of power and he basically in so many words he said no like if I win it will be it will be a valid election right that's basically what he said let me ask what do you think about people want him elected still like he's still theoretically as we're recording this is the prime Contender for the Republican nomination and that's so that just to close the loop on what I just said that's why I'm not that among other reasons that's perhaps I haven't thought much about it but that is why I'm not so motivated to spend a lot of bandwidth or any bandwidth trying to figure out what's so wrong with Biden and the Biden family right now I have no doubt there are politically inconvenient embarrassing even shocking things to discover I mean certainly in Hunter Biden's life and his behavior I mean that's a that's a I'm sure there's no end to it to embarrassment there but even some degree of implication with with President Biden is that possible is it conceivable is is there something there that I just haven't freed up the bandwidth to pay attention to coming out of that laptop I'm sure there are many people in trumpistan who who can could speak for an hour about all the things we they think we know based on that laptop but I certainly doubt some of that um but why am I not motivated to pay more attention to that because just as you said Trump could very well come back in 2024 like I think that I I really maybe I'm just not explaining well I don't think that's where people get the friction where they get the friction is the sense of it's one of the earlier questions that I asked I think you either believe that the people can sort through this themselves and figure things out and you put the trust in the hands of people or and and I think your position is clear and so tell me if I'm getting this wrong so either the people on mass just give them the information they'll sort it out or we need experts which people are going to read Elites right which is not a charitable interpretation but that's how they hear it or we need a group of Elites that are better than us plebs and and go figure it out I think that's what they hear when you say that now I get what you mean about experts but I have so I I know that even the most well-intentioned expert has a propensity to be wrong that I just feel like the the mistake I would rather make going back to my Trifecta Vivo the thing I'm most afraid of is authoritarian rule so in that moment I go oh God these are both terrible situations but I really feel like you have to put the hands in the people you have to leave it with them if they let them see all the information and yes I know it's calculated there is but there is no seeing all the information right there is no unmoderated pure just fire hose of information I mean the information doesn't exist as a as a unitary object that can be contemplated in its totality always in proportion to what it is in fact in reality it makes me a little nervous you you do have it it is so specific a laptop maybe it's Russian disinformation turns out it wasn't but maybe but you have this thing it becomes so concrete and so tangible I think that's why there's so much attention on that thing but so I just want to get to your principle versus my principle because I don't again my principle here is that again I mean I I stand by everything I said on that original podcast I just didn't say it especially well there but and so people are genuinely confused about what I was recommending did I say it so I know if I understand yeah that the what was going on is it was a real emergency you had a real emergency you have a president who was not committing to the peaceful transfer of power our democracy was truly at risk our democracy is is the most important thing in this scenario a laptop comes out first of all it could be Russian disinformation we don't know yet and so it would be it would be foolish in the in the same way that if the Russian guy that sees the five nuclear weapons getting shot at him for him not to pause and go I this just doesn't make sense I'm not going to do it in that moment it was far wiser to not put this in front of the public but instead to go the risk reward ratio is off hold off also because there was no rush there's still no rush like again I still haven't done it but I want to make sure did I accurately convey how you think through that problem but but the crucial thing is people took from that podcast clip people took away the the impression that I was advocating that we lie about Trump right that we or that we say that we felt that way so is somebody watching the whole thing not the clip the whole thing I walked away going okay I get where Sam is coming from if you really believe that this is an emergency that this will disrupt honestly if if all of that were true emergency he's going to steal an election it is going to jeopardize our democracy and all I have to do is hide the laptop or or buy time create a smoke screen if I really believed that all of that was true man I'd I'd be very tempted now it's just my obsession with this Trifecta books so if it's a sufficient emergency you should want the guy assassinated right I mean like it goes all the way like if this guy's Hitler well then we all we all wish Hitler got assassinated right now I don't think Trump is Hitler or anything like Hitler so there's that there is can you pre-cog him that's that's where I get nervous like everybody's so quick to say that he really is Hitler and it's like no no he's I I I I know well I don't know how much harm he could ultimately do but he shows no sign of being ideological in any way and he shows it shows no sign of wanting to take on a kind of World building or dismantling subject and that makes my radar people people want what people want him so this may illuminate the the difference so because peop some people want to elect him I'm like damn is there something I'm missing and so because I know I could be flawed I'm just like then you have to let the people decide well no you you have to let the people decide I would argue we still don't entirely know what's up with that laptop right it's like I know they're people who think they know but like I I don't actually know what what sort of forensic analysis has been done of that laptop and how reliable that is and what the what the scope of fraud is there really um and I'm still unaware of anything that has surfaced from that laptop that is clearly a Smoking Gun that implicates Biden in corruption in a way like there's there's new information coming out in recent weeks I don't know what the relationship that is to the laptop but um if there's a 20 Megaton scandal in that laptop it still hasn't reached me and it's been over a year right um but again I default back to my original position which is the fact that Trump wouldn't commit to a peaceful transfer of power and we didn't and we in fact didn't have a piece full of transfer of power and he's now running again that to me is so disqualifying that I'm not inclined to do anything that would that could possibly increase his chances of getting elected right so so again he's not Hitler but I think he's someone who's who is totally committed to subverting all the the Norms of our democracy for purely personal avarice and but just his malignant narcissism I mean it's just he's a he really is a pure you know case study in that um but again not ideological not especially ambitious in any of the ways that somebody like Hitler or Stalin was um but it's so corrupting of our politics and so destabilizing of our of our in the institutions we should care about in our democracy that I think having him in 20 for a second term could well be a total disaster and it's just such an awful precedent precedent to have someone who didn't commit to a peaceful transfer of power basically saw to it that we didn't have one were still really did try to steal the election all the while claiming it was being stolen from him right I mean the stuff he was trying to do behind the scenes the pressure he was putting on Mike Pence all of that was a genuine effort to steal an election he knew he had lost I mean his all of the people the the you know his attorney general people behind the scenes got it through to him that he had actually lost and he was still willing to just Bluff his way back into the presidency um that's so disqualifying and should be so disqualified from my point of view is that yeah do I want to do three hours on just how awful Joe Biden is no right now I don't think Joe Biden should be running for president he's way too old right so he's obviously past is you know not just his prime it's just like it's a disaster right and I think Kamala is PR is I mean I I can't see a scenario in which she's electable so like if he if he dies or if anything you know happens to his health is That's So catastrophic that he's no longer the candidate and she is I think that's just you know that's just a red carpet rolled out for for Trump or really anyone to to to become the Republican president um so I think it's totally irresponsible and dangerous that the Democrats have put us in this position that we're running Biden with Kamala Harris being his VP with no alternative really you know I mean maybe there would be you know maybe if he if he died today then maybe that you know maybe Gavin Newsom or somebody would step up and we would have a different race but the fact that we seem to be running Biden by default with Kamala Harris in you know really set to inhibit to some significant degree half the country will be seeing her as the person who's running because they they plausibly wouldn't expect him to survive his term um all that's a disaster all of that is well worth criticizing I don't want to touch it because what's the alternative like I mean if I could if if I saw an alternative that I could could advocate for right that would could it all be effective if I saw an upside in criticizing Biden validly then I would do it but this is a pure pragmatic case where I'm deciding first Do no harm right and it comes exactly back to the you know some fat people are healthy principle right or if if you're at a moment where something really is going to turn on people getting their their heads straight around diet and health and exercise and you know body image and the clock is ticking right we have to we have got 10 days to get this right you know it's like it and and a lot hangs in the balance do you really want to do a podcast on here all these fat people who we've just tested them and they're actually they're as healthy as any Olympic Athlete right they got the right their lipids are perfect they're they're VO2 max is great they look fat but you know this is not what it seems right no and and what about let's do a hundred podcasts on that topic right which is what people have done with around covid and Ivermectin and mRNA vaccines right like you know Brett Weinstein literally did a hundred podcasts in a row on Ivermectin and mRNA vaccines right as though there was no other topic in the world worth paying attention to that seemed it made me feel like I was getting all the information I didn't just assume he was right but it really helped me feel and I watched a lot of those podcasts it really made me feel like okay at least somebody's talking about this it felt like Pirate Radio and as we're talking I think I Now understand one I think it's very important that I love about you that you say what you believe and it doesn't matter whether I or somebody else would love to nudge you in another Direction um but truly as somebody who thinks you're amazing I will just say that I think now through this conversation I realized what I what I want your particular mind to do because you are so good at this what I would rather have seen is the okay I'm gonna look at this laptop and and whatever it says it says and I'm gonna break it down and I'm gonna explain all the stuff you just went through about Kamala this is crazy and knowing certain terms I want them to win but you can't hide from information let's just pull this out into light let's pull Trump out in the light look guys in the final analysis the the laptop is [ __ ] crazy it does seem to indicate that there's some connection to whatever you find right I'm just I'm riffing here not saying this is actually what it says and then but look the Trump thing is a thousand times worse this one feels like a real emergency and then I'm like oh that's the Sam that I know who's just like coldly dispassionate about this is this this is this I am being coldly dispassionate I'm just and and I'm being completely transparent you're being also strategic and that's the part where I think it gives people that but it's not but it's not it's not a hidden strategy right like it's just very I'm just telling you why I don't I don't see an upside in talking about certain things because again there's there are asymmetries here that are really strange but they're incredibly powerful like so there's and I tell you what the upside about talking about it but let me just add this one piece there's there's almost nothing you can say about Trump that is true and awful that his supporters care about that's crazy right so and yet so he functions by a completely different reputational physics and I think many people in that ecosystem do too like again you know I mentioned Tucker it's like he's not paying a penalty with his audience the way I would pay a penalty with my audience if similar Revelations came out about me um and and over here you have somebody like you know Barack Obama literally it was a 48-hour Scandal when he wore a tan suit right I mean like that was the level where he was getting dinged you know Trump is a completely different situation so it's someone again coming back to the fat analogy we know that there's a that there's an appetite to to eat junk food we know most people certainly most people who have not already made it a habit to exercise they're hard to motivate they're hard to get into the gym you know most the people join gyms and then they lapse not everyone gets addicted to to working out um we know that there's a center of of gravity to where people are stuck we've got a problem with something like so the 40 of Americans are actually officially obese and like 60 or overweight something like that right so it's like we know that it is it's hard to get through to people and even if you get through to them it's really hard for them to change their behavior even if they decide they want to change it to make these changes so then you have to ask yourself okay just how sexy do we want to make the message that some fat people are as healthy as anyone alive I gotta remember their second and third order consequences so my thing is I'm not saying you'll lie about it I didn't hear you say I'm just saying like do you want it to make your next your next project is to get the message out on that topic of all the messages you could you could be dealing with child trafficking you could be dealing with climate change you could be like you could like you could be dealing with you could be helping people actually whether you should do a podcast about it so if that's what people have been pushing on you not at all they think I should talk to RFK Jr they think I should have platformed all these these kovitz you would talk to RFK Junior and I'll maybe give you insight into that you probably already get it but I want to Outsource some of my thinking to you because I think you think through the world in a really interesting way so rather than me have to go do the research on RFK Junior I'd rather you do it right so it's a factor of trust and just I I look at other humans people may [ __ ] hate this but I look at other humans as like a really specific Ai and I'm like okay I'm a specific specific AI to other people right but you're a specific AI that I use to Think Through certain problems and so RFK just happens to be one of the problems I would love to see your AI go think of now you have to go do all the research and all that [ __ ] and combat them and bring the expert and all the things that you don't want to do uh but that's why people would love to see you do that and so that's where I'm like uh the Sam Harris AI that I want to use just gives me all the facts about that laptop gives me all the facts about Trump and then just as more persuasive that Trump is going to be the bigger problem well it can't because I but I know that certain Bells can't be on rung right and that's the part where standing for myself I'm like uh and I know but but I but I know that there there's there are super stimulus stimuli right like I know that if I got on my podcast and said my daughter has a vaccine injury yeah right and I don't care what you think about me I'm that she's never getting vaccinated again and I'm done with all this you know vaccine like that's not science that's not like like it it doesn't matter if if you get 10 people to 10 prominent podcasters to tell 10 different stories just like that that's not an that's not a sampling of the data space right and yet it is so powerful right it's so it's so and so you just have to you you have to re you have to be aware of the rhetorical effect of kind of shining the light of your attention on certain things and you have to you have to be aware that though you are making a you are going to make a best effort to keep this information in proportion right or or honestly convey the proportion that you think is in fact exists in reality if you frame it a certain way or even if you if you speak about two things in the same context that project becomes impossible like it just you just you just know that people are going to come away thinking you know I forgot the details of that podcast but I I do remember that you know facts that vaccine is just dangerous like like Sam Harris said that it's just dangerous I get it you know I get it so my takeaway is just um I don't know what comes of it I think it's always it's always better to say what is true and they're truant so I would filter I totally agree with you true and useful is the filter for me I mean that's it's like the Vanda is not a thing truth is just too big I mean the Venn diagram the the the the the circle for truth is so vast that we can't possibly what useful to making sure Trump doesn't get elected is where you spin people out of control which fine you're in in this you have been I think hyper consistent I understand your position now completely right and now my only thing is I think you already understand it so I can just rap I think you know why it bothers some people uh so let's talk about those people it certainly bothers the people who don't understand how shocking and untenable it was to have a sitting president not commit to a peaceful transfer of power yes like they like there are people who just don't even know he did that or don't think it mattered there are people who think that January 6 was a non-event that people who think that the election was actually stolen from Trump so there's like lots of confusion around all this um so those people so some numbers some percentage of those people are just frankly confused and if they had the right information they would see it the way I do most of those people are essentially in a a personality cult right there there is a pure expression of tribalism it's not Republican it's not establishment Republican tribalism but it's it's a populist Awakening on the right which is not the right we are used to but it's and it's not even conservative in many respects but it's and so that's why I refer to it as like trumpistan but it's like is it is a kind of personality cult which um yeah I can't reason with those people I mean I can't like I've I've said enough like if they want to understand what I you know what I think is true there's there's 20 hours on my podcast where I explain what I think is true about all that and um you know they're very likely not going to agree for reasons that were resent you know impressively resemble sort of the birth of a new religion it's like this is not this is like me talking to Muslims about how the Quran is probably not the direct word of the creator of the universe like we're not going to agree right like I lost them in my first sentence you know um and so it was with Christians and Jews and everybody else um but essentially so you mentioned AIS one thing AI could in in completely destabilize and everything else it could somehow resolve this very much in my favor in that what it might do I mean let's forget about existential risk and the other deeper concerns but just it could in the near term could so fully pollute our information landscape with just fake information right so deep fakes and fake Journal articles and fake sources to things that you know like people will write you know compel seemingly totally compelling articles about and everything mRNA vaccines and everything else and they'll be sourced with stuff and none of it exists right it's just it's just a pure confection of AI gibberish that we might all have to default to just very straightforward old school Gatekeepers of information otherwise we're going to recognize that the internet is completely broken and we just don't know what's real so like it's in in a world of endless deep fakes I'm really gonna have to rely on the New York Times or Getty Images or apple or somebody with just way more resources than I'm ever going to have on my own to tell me what's real if if I have if I see video of Putin saying that he's just launched his tactical nukes right or he's going to do it tomorrow at four o'clock and I have to worry about a a a a world and you know I think we we do now and if we don't now it's you know four months from now we're gonna have to worry about this a world where basically anyone who wants to can produce a perfectly compelling video of Putin that will be undetectable by me as a fake what are we going to do with that I think I think we're all I think we're all basically gonna declare something like epistemological bankruptcy and just say like I don't know what's true anymore like I don't care like I'm not gonna react to this video the fact that Elon tweeted it you know and it's just raw video on Twitter uh or it's got you know it came from you know like it aired on a Dallas you know uh news station the local news station and it's like I just have to wait to see what the the real Gatekeepers say about this I'm gonna give this 24 hours before I even think I know anything and how am I going to know anything is it going to be me with my you know blockchain algorithm that got democratized by either I read about on you know on some blog where I'm now figuring out whether this video has the what the right Watermark you know to so it's got digital provenance or I'm just gonna very likely that there's going to be a few institutions that prove that they can figure out whether a video is real right now maybe this particular use case is going to be fully democratized and we're all going to just have a plug-in to our browser so and here's it so one I think that the way that it will really play out is the platforms that show video and images will build into their infrastructure the ability to read the blockchain signature and so you'll very quickly know like is this authentic from the source and then the other part will be a community notes like function where people can say yes it's real but here's the context that you need so that you're not manipulated now both of those speak to the wisdom of the crowd and the right place for something but the crowd the the llmification of the crowd I mean the crowd's going to get so much larger and because you think there'll be a lot of bots yeah I mean like they could be the crowd could be literally 99 AI it will be tough if you're spinning up what um Elon has done and you charge whatever eight or nine dollars it's like 500 000 people are paying for Twitter and and out of 300 million yeah but when you think about what defenses we have when things really start to break right now they think he's just being a dumbass and he shouldn't have bought it and so they're not going to pay it because just because they're stubborn right but if they realize oh he actually wasn't [ __ ] around the Bots really are a problem and by spending seven dollars I can verify that I'm a real human and now we're back in business then I think people are far more likely to do it but I think it the the Avalanche of fake things that are coming are going to come in so hot and so fast and it's not just going to be people like me and you of thousands of hours of us out there people have already cloned my voice you can hear me speaking in Portuguese and I think Italian I didn't do it somebody else did it and it literally sounds like me so uh that's gonna happen but it's also gonna happen revenge porn where a disgruntled boyfriend makes porn from his ex-girlfriend and it is indistinguishable and so everybody very fast is going to have a reason to care now the moment I worry about the whatever six to 12 months it will take to embed the infrastructure and each of the things to read The Watermark and to say this is real not real and to filter out things that aren't real but that will barring that sort of naked year you will very rapidly because it will be so detrimental to just each individual people will adopt that technology I think pretty fast I just worry that this all happens right in time for the 2024 election yeah I'm worried about that too seems like the right time frame for it it's crazy a year of chat apt or gbt4 maybe five and um yeah no it's 2024 could be all too interesting yeah no doubt how do you think about preparing for that like how do we get ready who's we and and what is ready Americans yeah so that we're thinking well through the problem well I hope that I mean I can imagine this is a major priority of people currently in government that we're doing everything we can to ensure that the election is run in such a way that there's the least opportunity to worry about election fraud now I don't think election fraud is I think most concerns about election fraud are generally um imaginary but I think we need a system where there's just no scope to worry that the election was not run properly the fact that we can't figure the fact that we're finding that that's so hard to figure out um to the degree that we are I'm actually not close to current efforts to to um Shore all that up but um I got to imagine that's that has to be the number one priority whatever happens on Election Day we should not have a significant number of Americans incredibly a legend that this was the election was stolen right that's just so sanity straining and shattering of Democratic Norms that it's just it's um we have to get over that hurdle and we have to you know we have to stay over it you know there can't be some new uh concern that surfaces that you can hack or voting machines I mean we just that has to be the Integrity of an election elections has to be the the Paramount concern if we solve that then at least we have okay then we're at the mercy of whoever we ran and whoever won right and um there I just think you have yeah if Trump is in fact the candidate I think we have to I think it would be a terrible precedent to reward someone um who's behaved as recklessly as he's behaved and as dishonestly as as he's behaved um with a second term in the White House may just would be insane that we we have um if in fact we have a majority of Americans who would want to see that happen I mean just you think long-form podcasting could change the landscape of who gets nominated yeah because podcast I mean many podcasts have audiences that are larger than any other form of media I mean certainly rogans does um by a country mile yeah but again but but you know I think Joe and and you know everyone else in a similar position um you know even at whatever fraction thereof um anyone with a significant platform like that needs to be more responsible than most people are tending to be again it's like I mean Joe may think he's just shooting the [ __ ] with friends but he's actually not he's educating or miseducating tens of millions of people with on every topic he touches right so it's there's a responsibility that comes with that and it's it's not so I think it's I mean and I I don't I don't think Joe has been I mean I think he's been um less careful than he should have been on specific topics I think that's definitely it was true during covid and it's true it's been true on certain political points but I mean genuinely generally speaking I I think as hard as in the right place and he's he's not his format is such that the people who are going to be I mean people people have a are given ample opportunity to discredit themselves in that context right so there's just you know but I do think he's if he were going to take seriously the the impact he's he's having and can have I think he'd be more careful on specific topics than he has been right and I think it would be a good thing for him to be more careful um and then there are people who have similar platforms who like Elon who I think are being totally Reckless right I just think his behavior on Twitter has been unconscionable in how he has Amplified bad information pseudo information lies and uh denigrated real information and it's just and and it's not again I don't put this on him it's not not in a systematic way it's just in a reckless way he's like he's not even he's not he's not even paying attention to what he's breaking or what he's what he's signal boosting it's like he's he's not um is it there's just a there's there's a it's like an adolescent attitude toward the safeguarding of real things it's like you're like like we have we have a world where the difference between are succeeding in this common project of of you know building a civilization that works and are failing is I mean like that that golf is is so enormous um and given again and given that basically all of our problems are are the result of failures of human cooperation I mean like everything that's just not an asteroid that's you know that's you know good across our our the path of Earth um and even there even with an asteroid an earth Crossing asteroid human cooperation is the answer to that problem right it's like like there's there's almost no no problem we could have that in the limit we can't I mean if if it's compatible with the laws of nature for for that problem to be solved I think our understanding the problem and collaborating in its solution is going to solve it now it may not you know conveniently it may not we may not have the time we need to solve it right like if we find out about an asteroid and it's you know 15 days away we don't have enough time to get up there and and divert it right but if we had 15 years or you know 30 years we presumably we would have the time we needed to solve this problem have you read Ian Bremer's book The Power of crisis um no but I uh I mean I've spoken with Ian I mean I think I probably spoke with him before that book came out but he's been on my podcast several times so I've I have the gist of his thoughts on this stuff yeah so he unnerves me a little bit at him on the show and he was great and I was very honored to do it but it unnerves me a little the idea that we need some sort of Crisis what he calls a Goldilocks crisis that's big enough to be really devastating but not so big that we can't overcome it I hope that's wrong yeah I mean I don't I don't think we need that what I'm saying though is what we need are we need adults in the room and we need the most powerful we need the luckiest most powerful most influential the people who command the most resources and the people who command the most of of our bandwidth right the people command most human attention at the moment to behave responsibly right Elon is not doing that and I'm not again I'm not talking about the decisions he's made as CEO of Twitter I'm talking about his behavior on Twitter right it's just it is is very trumpian right it's just very it's just it's like all for the lulls right it's just he's just [ __ ] posting he's just spreading memes he's just [ __ ] around but he's touching real things like you know when when he speculates that his his former head of trust and safety is a pedophile right and just kind of freewheels on Twitter about that he completely deranges this guy's life I mean I think this I think Joel Roth had to move you know as a result of all the death threats he got right um that's it's com it's complete that that is completely predictable I mean the reason why I thought Trump should have been kicked off Twitter long before he was not because of his politics or how I viewed his presidency or anything it was he was doing this on Twitter he was he was singling out specific citizens for abuse when it was absolutely predictable given his platform and given the nature of his fan base it was absolutely predictable that those people would then have just excruciating security concerns possibly for the rest of their lives right it's just it was just like death threats and people doxing them and people showing up at their houses and at their kids schools and it was just going to be they were just they were just it was such a massive [ __ ] over of everyone every single person he mentioned by name and he knew this right and and you had to know this Elon has to know that about anyone he puts on blast on Twitter he's got whatever 130 million people following him and some percentage of those people are crazy right guaranteed to be crazy right one percent of any audience is crazy right so he killed one percent of 130 million people you've got and I would and I would bet excuse worse than that in in his audience frankly um and it certainly would skew worse than that in in Alex Jones's audience right um Alex Jones at certain if Alex Jones didn't know it initially he knew it ultimately that he spent I think it was at least a year put in the Sandy Hook families on blast knowing it was documented what was happening to them right given the craziness of his audience giving the craziness the claims he was making about them we can't have the most powerful connected people in our society certainly not someone like Elon who can decide whether or not to put you know satellites over Ukraine you know in the middle of a war right um just [ __ ] around the way he's [ __ ] around on Twitter I get that he is what he wants to do my point is he if he had an ethical Compass he wouldn't want to do it so how do we get that that feels to me honestly like the thing that's missing we don't have an anchor anymore we don't have a national story we don't have a religious story uh we have hyper fragmentation algorithms pull us into these super narrow little niches um how do we get a unifying Dogma I just did an interview yesterday in fact where I wanted to compare and contrast Andrew Tate with Marcus Aurelius and it's pretty interesting in terms of when you really look at their sort of mirror images of each other uh you've got one guy narcissistic totally self-obsessed sees himself as the greatest to ever do it whatever it might be right and then you have the other guys reminding himself don't become uh purple dyed you know so that you think that your royalty has the guy walk around Whispering remember one day you're gonna die like just always looking at the ways that he could be fallible and not letting the power go to his head and you've got right now kids really looking up to somebody like that I'll let Andrew tabia stand and now that the the potential allegations or the allegations hanging over his head but he represents like the flashy tough fast cars access to women that's what I want I want to have that kind of fast easy Fame and then Marcus Aurelius is about being a good person being a decent man is extraordinarily difficult work that you have to focus on every day you do it in the shadows you do it when you're alone and that just doesn't get the air time and so given that's a reality yeah but so but there you're making an argument for which I totally agree with for Signal boosting Marcus Aurelius in whatever way you can and when you meet some semblance of a Marcus Aurelius sort of person that's the person you want to give a platform to that's the that's the style of argumentation that's the the obvious ethical Compass that's the I mean that's it would be it would be way better for the world for Elon to be much more like Marcus Aurelius right it would be better for Elon be better for his life personally but that aside it's like that would be to model that would be so much better objectively better for everyone involved like those are the virtues you want to spread um and yes it's the Andrew tatification of everything that we're suffering under and and I think in large measure the business model of the internet has something to do with that I mean the fact that we we anchored it all to ads and to and to the Dynamics of viral spread um but it's also true that in any I mean even if it was all subscription and so you get what you pay for you need things still need to be entertaining it's like you can't just be and eat your vegetables culture right like so you do like you need we need captivating stories and we need we need we need it to be fun right so like in elon's defense he would say you know just get a sense of humor and just this just should be this is more it should be more fun than it is right like it's like if this if it's not fun it's not worth it right that the line between fun and real ethical transgression is I mean it's not always immediately findable in in real time but it's usually pretty clear right I mean and and there's a kind of callousness there's a kind of just not caring about the casualties that is so obvious in in most of the cases most of the examples I just gave right um I mean you know it's frankly so I obviously I don't know Tate I don't know whether any of the allegations against him are real but and you know and maybe he's going to grow up at some point I mean well he's what he's 35 years old I mean 20 years from now he may be a very different sort of person but right now he's obviously an [ __ ] that's like his his ethical center of gravity is just so displaced from what it should be to be a a valid model of successful manhood for that you would want you know 100 million teenagers in America to be following it's just like it's just yes he needs to read Marcus Aurelius he needs yeah like there's just he's not messaging any I mean he he's messaging some wisdom like like the wisdom of getting things done the wisdom of getting out of your own way the wisdom of realizing that the Dynamics of competition between people and just you know take and protecting yourself right like all like all of that but it is so self-directed it's so selfish in principle he is so selfish he's so narcissistic he's so turned inward it's so there's such a uh an Ambience of [ __ ] about about him right like just it's all spin there's no self-reflection it's um it's the the superficiality of what he cares about is so like there's no awareness of the deeper project of living a a durably happy life where you have real ethical engagement with the world with important causes with people where you're where you're where you care about other people really and even care about other people more than you care about yourself in many instances right where you're where your happiness is born of of making others happy and reducing unnecessary suffering right where it's like where compassion is really what animates you it's like there's none of that I mean I haven't seen all his stuff or even much of his stuff but I've seen enough to know that the kind of the center of the message is like you know if you check these boxes if you've got a Bugatti and you and you can [ __ ] as many women as you want you've basically solved the problem of being a man right like that's like like there's no way you're doing much wrong if you've checked those two boxes right like that's just [ __ ] it's just I mean it's not only [ __ ] it's completely backwards when you're talking about what's really worth caring about and prioritizing in this life I'm not saying that you that wealth isn't important I'm not saying that relationships aren't important I'm not saying that status isn't important I mean there are very few people who can sort of get past the the general concern about status right so status is very high leverage with respect to people's sense of their own well-being and whether their lives are are working you know the story they tell themselves at at four in the morning is very is very likely a reflection of how they feel their you know that they're functioning in some kind of status hierarchy I get all that but you know like my status hierarchy includes so much more than Bugattis and and hooking up with with new women and in fact it doesn't like if that's what I was doing I would be convinced I had just gone off the rails right like so it's just um you know nothing against Bugattis but it's like I don't want one right as if by Magic I don't want a Bugatti you know it's uh um so yeah I would agree with you there's something something has gone wrong in our culture that we don't have a long list of people who are very much like Marcus Aurelius each more captivating than the next who are getting their own reality TV shows who have figured out how to I mean or forget about just the media I mean look at the the the 2024 presidential campaign right like where are the the shades of Marcus Aurelius to choose from right like how is it that we I mean I'm not the only person to have marveled at this but how is it that in a nation of 340 million people these are our choices where we've got this laptop from hell you know waiting to discourage all of these completely unseemly relationships that you know the president's son has spun out in in multiple countries um and we have to worry about some scandals you know wafting out of that and and you know destroying his his prospects for and his prospects are only important because he's what's he's the the precarious object put in place of a former president who truly desecrated the office of the presidency I mean just he literally shattered the most important Norms we have in our democracy I mean I would I don't know what to put above a commitment to a peaceful transfer of power I mean it is the you know I mean Ronald Reagan you know who who people right of Center you know used to care about single that out is just the the kind of the central Miracle of our society that we that we had that you know with all whatever else is happening and whatever the depth of our political differences the fact that we could rely on a peaceful transfer of power every four years right that was an absolute Miracle it's the thing about us that is most astounding to all these other societies that can't manage it right in any generation they they either don't even have a system that even purports to manage it or even having one they can't keep that together right um we haven't had that problem historically and yet we have it now and we had it last time because of trump how do we begin to unwind this stuff so if there's something it it seems something broken in culture to me I think culture is Downstream of the individual that was why I wanted to contrast the two different people um what that got me thinking about is what is the animating philosophy of everybody's life and I think for most people they never take the time to Define what their animating spirit is they don't have a life philosophy um they're just engaged in the the day-to-day River of algorithms that sort of pull them along and confront them with the things they need to do the things they find funny the things that they find outraging but when I really stop and think about what people need to do I come back to the thing that Jordan Peterson has been circling around this has been really interesting for me so Jordan goes on his dad Arc you know when he really first burst on the public Fame I was completely blown away by how much he was helping people he then gets sick and he comes back and he's super religious and I don't know what to make of it and for a long time I was very confused and then I started thinking you know he might just be ahead of his time in that what I think he has his finger on is that there is all of us have a god-shaped hole inside of us you have to fill it with something and what I think and I'm very much putting words in his mouth but what I think Jordan is putting his finger on is the Christian text is the way to Anchor people to a set of beliefs and values so that we have something that we can point back to so that in times like these where people are going astray you can point out does your behavior make sense yes or no you think yes because you're getting a bunch of likes on Instagram that's ridiculous you should think yes because you're human close to the words of the Bible which are really deep mythological stories about the truth of The Human Condition now again I have not spoken to him about this I don't know that he would agree with that assessment but that's my gut instinct unless he really now is like I am a believer but he even publicly um tweeted at Richard Dawkins and said basically he was I think saying something about atheism and he was like this is a mistake I will debate you anytime about it so even if he doesn't believe in the literal word of God he is really convinced that it is a necessary thing to help people Orient themselves to a life well lived yeah yeah so as you know Jordan and I have debated this topic of ad nauseam and we I think we had um four public debates we did two or three podcasts and then um we had a bunch of live debates that were um were fun um I don't know how much his thinking has changed since then he got sick and then he's probably uh I'll take your word for it I haven't seen much of his stuff of late but uh when's the last time you guys connected well I was on his podcast certainly during covid um but it's been it's probably been at least a year I think since I I've I've connected with him anyway um maybe there was an email or so but I don't think it's I would be surprised if it's thinking has fundamentally changed I mean yes he as you say he thinks that religious stories and in particular judeo-christian story is is really indispensable for certainly the western civilization and we should recognize how much we owe to that story and it's in the absence of of that recognition that you have this eruption of of weird political commitments on the left that that seem to have a kind of religious fervor um I think there's a bunch of half truths in there that I would sort of agree with but um generally speaking I think that's just a mistaken diagnosis of our problem um for a bunch of reasons one is may I break this into kind of two layers the most important thing I think to recognize is that stories aren't good enough we need more than stories well what what what genuinely ails us is at a level psychologically that uh isn't remedied by just having a consoling string of thoughts to think again and again and again a story to tell yourself a story to tell your kids a story to have them pair it back to you a culture of stories that just ramifies all of these you know ideas um that's not good enough right it's not the thing that allows you to recognize the real sacred depth of the present moment I mean it's not it's not the thing that you encounter when you really know how to meditate or take the rights psychedelic at the right moment with the right guidance with the right set and setting and have a real breakthrough into a a landscape of mine that is that transcends your sense of egocentricity right like to really get over yourself to really be available to self-transcending love and connection and ethical commitments is is a deeper move than any s new set of thoughts is going to engineer for you and it is in fact it requires an insight into the superficiality of thought itself right so it's like it's like it's it is you have to recognize what the mind is like prior to thought prior to identification with thought prior to being continually Spellbound by the voice in your head that is telling you one thing or the other is telling you You're great and everything's working perfectly or is telling you you're a failure and you know nothing worked out I mean like night I there yes on the relative level on the level of being identified with thought it matters what story you tell yourself it's much better to feel like you know everything's going great if in fact it is uh then to feel we're going to morbidly you know and masochistically self-critical and self-doubting and and depressed so you can get a lot of Leverage from stories but you can't get the thing you really want to get at the end of the day spiritually and contemplatively and ethically by just telling yourself a new story so that's that's the deepest claim I would want to make so like the the baby in the bathwater of religion that we should want to save you know that what it would take to really be like Jesus what it would take to really be like Buddha that's not a matter of endorsing any particular story right it's just there's a deeper engagement with the reality of the present moment uh and that's just the mechanics of One's Own attention um that's required for that but in addition to that even if we were just concerned about stories and having the best stories the best stories are not in the Bible right the best the Christian story the judeo-christian story is not the best story it's not the most life-affirming story it's not the it's not the clearest ethical Compass we can engineer in fact it's a very um I mean in moments it has its moments I mean if you have a kind of a Jeffersonian you know a la carte attitude toward the Bible yes you can get some great wisdom there but it is also chock full of modernity annihilating [ __ ] and you have to push all that away and you have to find some principle by which you would disavow that stuff the very real hatred of homosexuality right like literally homosexuality is a killing offense in the Bible and in nowhere nowhere in the New Testament does it cease to be a killing offense in fact it's it's pretty clearly is in Paul um in Paul's letters um so I mean even the most basic uh religious uh ethical test of Sanity slavery like what's our policy on slavery you don't get a good one from the Bible that's a that is a as pure a defeater of you know ethical omniscience as you could ask for right is this the best moral document we have well let's check the index what does it say about slavery or against slavery wrong there's no way it's the it's the wisest book we've ever produced right so it's just that's where we are with the Bible that's you know quite inconvenient for Christians and Jews who really want to make that tradition the the kind of the Soul repository of of wisdom for us I think what should obviously be true to us is that every book we have the Bible included the Quran included was at some point the product of merely human insight and intelligence right it's like the people wrote all of our books we do not have a single book that was not written by a person leaving you know chat GPT aside um so and also so all we have are is a the kind of the the totality of human insights and human conversations to draw from right so what religious but traditionally religious people seem to recommend is that we limit ourselves to the insights and conversations of a previous age now whether you want to walk that all the way back to the seventh century or if you know 1500 BC or you know First Century A.D or that depends on which religion you favor or some people will just want to go with L Ron Hubbard right we'll go with we'll go with the guy with bad teeth um whose driver's license we can literally inspect but he's compelling enough for us to just stop there it's like he got it right you know in Dianetics and we need to look no further what I think should be obvious is rather than than feel like we're entitled to any kind of religious provincialism uh we should just want the totality and very much in the spirit of what you were recommending earlier we want the totality of human insights and conversations available and then we want to just see what survives contact with reality we want to we want to pressure test it in each present generation in the in the presence of new technology I mean like what what is going to give us guidance what you know what in our prior conversations gives us real guidance when we decide to build more and more powerful AI like what what should we believe about the totality of everything that's been said before it's provenance what equips us to make a a a truly wise decision in the present with respect to this emerging technology now I would argue that you get you know close to nothing in the Bible to equip you to to actually navigate this appropriately um and so you just again we we have we have these challenges some of which are quite foreseeable but some of which aren't some of which just come out of the blue and we have and we just have to recognize that all we have collectively is conversation by which to navigate and again I I do I do think it's helpful to continually review all of this again you know collectively and also just personally as a navigation problem we're constantly faced with the question of what to do next what to physically do next what what to do next with our resources what to pay attention to next what to talk about next what to think about next what kind of laws to to and to write next we're constantly tacking in the wind and all we have is human insight and he and and human conversation by which to do that and so so persuasion is important you know understanding the Dynamics of all that is important but to default to some prior century and to say that you know this is the this is these are the last words that are relevant on the deepest questions of human life they can never be improved they can never be superseded by anything all of their internal contradictions are something that we have to pretend to have worked out and uh in most cases we're better off just ignoring them because uh you know who can understand the the mind of God right it's like well let's default to mystery there and the unknowability Really of Truth there um but no there's very specific truths we can know I guess homosexuality no that's that's forbidden right so we know that and uh um it's just not it's I mean view it in terms of software it's like we know we have to keep improving it culture is software culture culture is an operating system we know it is continually showing its bugs we know it's continually failing us we know it's throwing up new challenges that we that we you know kind of emergent Behavior that we have to correct for we can't just say this 2000 year old Legacy code is perfect it so clearly isn't perfect it was not perfect at the time you know and it's it and you it was possible at the time to know that slavery was wrong it's not like 2000 years ago everyone thought slavery was okay no it's just the people who wrote the Bible thought slavery was okay it's like it's like it was possible to be wise enough as a human being to be so you you brought up Marcus Aurelius there is so much more wisdom in his meditations I'm not saying they're perfect they're not everything there is so much more wisdom in that book than in most of the Bible right and there's so much less wrong with his meditations than is wrong with most of the Bible um I mean you know if you can take one book to guide your life you could do a lot worse than Marcus Aurelius uh I mean and it's so modern in so many ways right it's so it's like you don't have to go through this tortured translation like what he really meant you know he didn't mean keep slaves he meant you know he he's um it's a very modern set of insights into uh I don't know if he said anything by the ethics of slavery maybe there's something in there that is um inconvenient but um I mean the parts of of of Marcus Aurelius and stoicism generally that that are so serviceable and so modern is that this basic insight into your mind being basically all you have I mean whatever you have in the world whatever you have in your life whatever you're being confronted with the layer of experience is mind and what you do with your attention what you choose to focus on what you how you choose to frame the thing that seems to have happened in the world that's that is the cash the cash value of the world end of your life in it is what it convinces you to do with your mind right and if you can just to seize those Reigns deliberately you can be happy in objectively terrible situations and conversely if you fail to understand anything about those mechanics you can be miserable in in objectively wonderful and truly fortunate situations right I mean you can have all the luck in the world and not enjoy any of it do you ever worry that given that all that we really have is our mind and attention that AI ends up coming along and playing the role of God it focuses your attention it tells you what to look at it makes sure that you feel XYZ way but that it ends up being able to either uh through culture or something far more individualistic it ends up being able to shape your values oh yeah yeah and I'm very worried about the deepest questions of the AI alignment um I think that's a real problem and they're many I'm amazed that there are many people you know fairly close to this technology who either don't think it's a problem or just figure that out like last week after working in the field for decades I mean I like I'm I'm truly mystified by the people who don't think it's a problem as you might have heard I had Mark Andreessen on my podcast and we debated this and he's you know he's super smart and super close to the tech and just thinks that you know it's this is pure science fiction to worry about AI alignment I mean it's just there's just no reason to worry about it um he's not you know I spent whatever it was two hours you know talking in his Direction he's totally unconvinced by anything I had to say everything I I have to say on the topic is really is I don't think there's anything original from me on that I'm I've just been very informed by people like Stuart Russell who is also very close to the tech um you know he's a computer scientist at Berkeley um but then people who more peripheral to the field who just have made very compelling arguments about the problem of alignment like Nick Bostrom or uh Elias or yukowski or um um max tegmark I mean it's all you know a lot of smart people who are just they're not actually doing the AI research but then you have somebody like Jeffrey Hinton who's like the father of the the the the most current you know Tech you know deep learning and he wakes up three weeks ago and he's he realizes we got a problem on our hands right so I don't understand why that took so long um but that aside even in success you know we either or even not reaching any anything like a a uh a catastrophe of misalignment just our engagement with machines that are smarter than ourselves and the way in which that can be Durant I mean there's so many examples of the way it could derange us but just I mean the I recently re-watched the film her I don't know if you've saw that recently but it it it's crazy it's um it lands differently now um I sort of forgot what I thought about it 10 years ago I saw it when it came out but but now it just seems like okay this is this is pretty damn interesting it's like it was it was not consciously a very dystopian film I mean it kind of split the difference between between dystopia and and uh you know something more benign but um you can see just just imagine all of us I mean even even the model of success here we all have a kind of a superhuman AI tutor who understands us better than anyone in our lives and understands it's better than our friends or our spouses it has literally noticed everything we've paid attention to for years right it's followed it's like it's it's caught everything we've forgotten you know you know oh you said in that email uh that you were gonna tell Sam X you never told them you want to tell them now right like it's reading everything you wrote It's re it's reading everything you read it's really and it's it's doing that to a billion other people fairly similar to you and drawing insights from them and then propagating that back into its understanding of you so it's understanding you in ways that you can't even understand yourself right and so now you're in dialogue with this thing now I'm not saying there isn't a some good that could come of this I mean it's just imagine just being in relationship to the the smartest and wisest Oracle you know you you could ever have access to that's what's not to love about that but then you just imagine as in the film her that we all have a different version of this thing and it's so it's slightly different because we're different right so it's a fun house mirror and our culture is fragmented like we don't have a shared reality because the AI is tuning itself differently so it's like I think Jaren Lanier gave this example once not so much for AI but for just the the disorienting capacity of social media it's like imagine if Wikipedia was different for every person who went and read an article there like you go read that you go read the article on the American Revolution and it's bespoke just for you given the kinds of things you have signaled that you like you know in the past right scary and we all have we so no one has a common understanding of of the world really because we're all sort of drifting off into this conversation with with more and more compelling information tools um I mean again there's you know if if this thing coughs up a cure for cancer next year but the the pragmatics of the moment are going to be such I'm going to say all right well let's just let's at least acknowledge that we really wanted that cure for cancer right I'm really happy we got that you know I'm not so worried about the misinformation problem today given that that I and everyone I know are now now know we're never going to die from cancer right like so let's let's get our priorities straight but it really is easy to see how it can Bend Us in ways that that uh will not be functional and um yeah I mean I hope we we equip ourselves to realize that in time as these advances roll out no kidding all right man uh I think even at the end of this uh uh amazing conversation we still all have a lot of work to do in terms of figuring out what our Compass is how to sift through all the information there's no letting us off the hook but uh now that you're no longer on Twitter where can people engage with you well just wakingup.com it has all my stuff on meditation and a really applied philosophy and um Sam harris.org is my website so anything I do will be announced from there so yeah and if if in the in the age of deep fakes I mean this is one thing I've thought about it's like at a certain point if it you know if something hasn't come from one of my channels I don't think you can be sure that I said that thing or if that's me it's me saying it and so it is with you or anyone else with a platform Administration it's really it's really strange but uh yeah that's where I am awesome yeah all right everybody if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care peace if you enjoyed this episode check out this deep conversation with Donald Hoffman about reality and Consciousness what we are are avatars of the one the one awareness is exploring all of its possibilities through different avatars so somehow there is this field of awareness

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 82,540

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, talk show, interview, motivational speech

Id: 6KJhM7Pg5EA

Length: 205min 5sec (12305 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 08 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/Tricky_Examination_3]

And crybaby Bret has already tweeted about it. Jeezas, can’t stand this guy

[u/Uncle_Nate0]

Tom's point regarding the books he read about Mao, Hitler, etc. is certifiably bonkers.

So his takeaway from reading books about authoritarian strongmen is not to fear someone like Trump who clearly wants to be them but.......to fear Twitter executives who enforce moderation policies and other public health officials who tried to tamp down dangerous misinformation?

The guy is a loon.

[u/Uncle_Nate0]

SAM: The overwhelming scientific consensus is that vaccines don't cause autism. This has been studied for two decades and there's been no link found whatsoever.

TOM: Yeah, but, if it was obvious that vaccines didn't cause autism then everybody would understand! There would be no debate, right?! So how do we find the truth?

Complete moron.

[u/kocknocker19]

Those comments though. Do these Trump fans just sit by anxiously waiting for every new Sam interview to hatewatch and thumbs down? That's some dedication.

[u/Uncle_Nate0]

Tom is so unbelievably stupid.

Every time Sam gets done and then Tom starts up on his next point it gets dumber and dumber.

[u/ToiletCouch]

We need a master list of podcasts with Sam

[u/RaisinBranKing]

Sam is on a tear lately with these pod appearances. Love to see it

[u/johnbergy]

Submission statement: This is a new interview with Sam Harris on the Impact Theory podcast.

While I'm here, does anybody know why there's suddenly been a flood of podcasts with Sam as guest? Chris Williamson, Diary of a CEO, and now this one all in a week. I thought maybe Sam was in a particular city where all these shows tape and he decided to run the circuit—as they're all in-person interviews rather than Zoom—but from what I can gather these studios are not in the same city. Not complaining, just find it interesting. You'd think you wouldn't want to release a really long interview with somebody right after another really long interview with them came out, lest it get lost in the shuffle... but maybe the feeling is Sam's fans are happy to watch 10 hours of content with him in a couple days. I mean, I guess I have, so I can't say that's wrong.

[u/AlexHM]

They don't address the fact that the most popular cable channel - Fox News - and all the right wing news outlets were all over the laptop. The NYT can take a cautious approach given that they know the editorial decisions that are being made on the rabidly right-wing news sources are pro-trump, anti-Biden.

Context counts. If the government were trying to suppress Fox News from showing what they wanted - then I'd have a problem. The fact that the NYT is making sensible editorial decisions or the Biden administration is asking Twitter not to show naked picture of Hunter is really not an issue.