Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs | Lex Fridman Podcast #365
- The following is a
conversation with Sam Harris, his second time on the podcast. As I said two years ago, when I first met and spoke with Sam, he's one of the most influential, pioneering thinkers of our time. As the host of the "Making Sense Podcast," creator of the Waking Up App, and the author of many
seminal books on human nature and the human mind, including "The End of Faith," "The Moral Landscape," "Lying," "Free Will," and "Waking Up." In this conversation, besides our mutual fascination
with AGI and free will, we do also go deep into
controversial challenging topics of Donald Trump, Hunter Biden, January 6th,
vaccines, lab leak, Kanye West, and several key figures at the
center of public discourse, including Joe Rogan and Elon Musk, both of whom have been friends of Sam and have become friends of mine. Somehow in an amazing life trajectory, that I do not deserve in any way, and in fact, believe is probably a figment of my imagination. And if it's all right, please allow me to say a few words about this personal
aspect of the conversation of discussing Joe, Elon and others. What's been weighing heavy on my heart since the beginning of the
pandemic now three years ago is that many people I look to for wisdom in public discourse stopped
talking to each other as often with respect, humility, and love, when the world needed those
kinds of conversations the most. My hope is that they start talking again. They start being friends again. They start noticing the
humanity that connects them, that is much deeper than the
disagreements that divide them. So lemme take this moment to say, with humility and honesty, why I look up to and I'm
inspired by Joe, Elon and Sam. I think Joe Rogan is
important to the world as a voice of compassion and curiosity and open-mindedness to ideas,
both radical and mainstream, sometimes with humor,
sometimes with brutal honesty, always pushing for more
kindness in the world. I think Elon Musk is
important to the world as an engineer, leader, entrepreneur, and human being who takes
on the hardest problems that face humanity and refuses to accept the constraints of conventional thinking that made the solutions to
these problems seem impossible. I think Sam Harris is
important to the world as a fearless voice who
fights for the pursuit of truth against growing
forces of echo chambers and audience capture, taking unpopular perspectives
and defending them with rigor and resilience. I both celebrate and
criticize all three privately, and they criticize me,
usually more effectively, from which I always learn a
lot and always appreciate. Most importantly, there is respect and love for each other as human beings, the very thing that I think
the world needs most now in a time of division and chaos. I will continue to try to mend divisions, to try to understand, not deride, to turn the other cheek if
needed, to return hate with love. Sometimes people criticize
me for being naive, cheesy, simplistic, all of that. I know, I agree, but I really am speaking from
the heart, and I'm trying. This world is too fucking
beautiful not to try, in whatever way I know how. I love you all. This is the "Lex Fridman Podcast." To support it, please check out our
sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Sam Harris. What is more effective at
making a net positive impact on the world, empathy or reason? - It depends on what you mean by empathy. There are two, at least
two kinds of empathy. There's the cognitive form, which is, you know, I would argue even a species of reason. It's just understanding
another person's point of view. You know, you understand
why they're suffering or why they're happy or what, you know, just you have a theory of
mind about another human being that is accurate. And so you can navigate in relationship to them more effectively. And then there's another layer entirely, not incompatible with
that, but just distinct, which is what people
often mean by empathy, which is more a kind of
emotional contagion, right? Like you feel depressed and I begin to feel
depressed along with you, because, you know, it's
just, it's contagious, right? You know, we're so close and I'm so concerned about you, and your problems become my
problems, and it bleeds through. Right now, I think both
of those capacities are very important but the emotional contagion piece, and this is not really my thesis, this is something I have
more or less learned from Paul Bloom, the psychologist who wrote a book on this topic titled "Against Empathy." The emotional social contagion piece is a bad guide rather often
for ethical behavior and ethical intuitions. - [Lex] Oh, boy. - And so I'll give you the
clear example of this, which is, we find stories with a single identifiable protagonist who we can effortlessly empathize with far more compelling than data, right? So if I tell you, you know, this is the classic
case of the little girl who falls down a well, right? You know, this is somebody's daughter. You see the parents
distraught on television, you hear her cries from
the bottom of the well, the whole country stops. I mean, there was an
example of this, you know, 20, 25 years ago, I think, where it was just wall to wall on CNN. This is just the perfect use of CNN. It was, you know, 72
hours or whatever it was, of continuous coverage of just extracting this girl from a well. So we effortlessly pay attention to that. We care about it, we will donate money toward it. I mean, it's just, it marshals 100% of our
compassion and altruistic impulse. Whereas if you hear that
there's a genocide raging in some country you've never been to and never intended to go to, and the numbers don't make a dent, and we find the story boring, right? And we'll change the channel in the face of a genocide, right? It doesn't matter. And it literally, perversely, it could be 500,000 little
girls have fallen down wells in that country and we
still don't care, right? So it's, you know, many of us have come to
believe that this is a bug rather than a feature
of our moral psychology. And so the empathy plays
an unhelpful role there. So ultimately, I think, when we're making big decisions about what we should do and how
to mitigate human suffering and what's worth valuing and how we should protect those values, I think reason is the better tool. But it's not that I would wanna dispense with any part of empathy either. - Well, there's a lot of
dangers to go on there, but briefly to mention, you've recently talked
about effective altruism on your podcast. I think you mentioned some
interesting statement. I'm going to horribly misquote you, but that you'd rather live in a world, like it doesn't really make sense, but you'd rather live in a world where you'd care about maybe
your daughter and son more than a hundred people that
live across the world, something like this. - Yeah.
- Like where the calculus is not always perfect, but somehow it makes
sense to live in a world where it's irrational in this way, and yet empathetic in the
way you've been discussing. - Right, I'm not sure what
the right answer is there, or even whether there is one right answer. There could be multiple, you know, peaks on this part of the moral landscape. But so the opposition is between an ethic that's articulated by, you know, someone like
the Dalai Lama, right? Or really any exponent of, you know, classic Buddhism would say that sort of the ultimate enlightened ethic is true dispassion with respect to friends and strangers, right? So that you would, you know, the mind of the Buddha would
be truly dispassionate. You would love and care
about all people equally. And by that light, it seems some kind of ethical failing, or at least, you know, failure of, to fully actualize compassion
in the limit, or, you know, enlightened wisdom in
the limit, to care more, and much more about
your kids than the kids of other people or and to prioritize your energy in that way, right? So you spend all this time
trying to figure out how to keep your kids healthy and happy and you'll attend to
their minutest concerns, and however superficial. And again, there's a genocide
raging in Sudan or wherever, and it takes up less than
1% of your bandwidth. I'm not sure it would be
a better world if everyone was running the Dalai Lama program there. I think some prioritization of one's nearest and dearest ethically might be optimal, because we'll all be doing that, and we'll all be doing that in a circumstance where we have certain norms and laws and other structures that force us to be dispassionate where that matters, right? So like when I go to, when my daughter gets sick, and I have to take her to a hospital, you know, I really want her
to get attention, right? And I'm worried about her more than I'm worried about
everyone else in the lobby. But the truth is, I actually don't want a
totally corrupt hospital. I don't want a hospital that
treats my daughter better than anyone else in the lobby
because she's my daughter, and I've, you know, bribed the
guy at the door or whatever, you know, or the guy's
a fan of my podcast, or whatever the thing is. You don't want starkly,
corrupt, unfair situations. And when you sorta get pressed down the hierarchy of Maslow's needs, you know, individually and societally, a bunch of those variables change and they change for the
worst, understandably. But yeah, when everyone's corrupt, and you're in a state of collective emergency, you know, you've got a lifeboat problem, you're scrambling to get
into the lifeboat, yeah, then fairness and norms and, you know, the other vestiges of civilization begin to get stripped off. We can't reason from those
emergencies to normal life. I mean, in normal life, we
want justice, we want fairness, we're all better off for it, even when the spotlight of our concern is focused on the people we know, the people who are our friends,
the people who are family, people we have good reason to care about, we still, by default want
a system that protects the interests of strangers too. And we know that, generally speaking, interested in game theoretical terms, we're all gonna tend to be better off in a fair system than a corrupt one. - One of the failure modes of empathy is our susceptibility to anecdotal data. Just a good story will get
us to not think clearly. But what about empathy in the context of just discussing
ideas with other people, and then there's a large number of people, like in this country, you know, red and blue, half the population
believes certain things on immigration or on (chuckles) the response to the pandemic or any kind of controversial issue, even if the election was fairly executed. Having an empathy for their worldview, trying to understand
where they're coming from, not just in the explicit
statement of their idea, but the entirety of like the roots from which their idea stems, that kind of empathy, while
you're discussing ideas, what is, in your pursuit of truth, having empathy for the perspective of a large number of other people versus raw mathematical reason. - I think it's important, but it only takes you so far, right? It doesn't get you to truth, right? Truth is not a, it's not decided by, you know, democratic principles and certain people believe things
for understandable reasons, but those reasons are
nonetheless bad reasons, right? They don't scale, they don't generalize. They're not reasons anyone
should adopt for themselves or respect, you know, epistemologically. And yet their circumstance
is understandable and it's something you
can care about, right? And so, yeah, like, I mean, just take, I think there's many examples of this you might be
thinking of, but, I mean, one that comes to mind is
I've been super critical of Trump, obviously, and I've been super
critical of certain people for endorsing him or not criticizing him when
he really made it, you know, patently obvious who he was. You know, if there had
been any doubt initially, there was no doubt when we
have a sitting president who's not agreeing to a peaceful transfer of power, right? So I'm critical of all of that and yet the fact that many millions of Americans didn't see what was wrong with
Trump or bought into the, didn't see through his con, right? I mean, they bought into
the idea that he was a brilliant businessman who might just be able to change things, because he's so unconventional
and so, you know, his heart is in the right place, you know, he's really a man of the
people, even though he's, you know, gold-plated
everything in his life. They bought the myth somehow of, you know, largely because they had
seen him on television for almost a decade and a half, pretending to be this genius businessman who could get things done. It's understandable to me that
many very frustrated people who have not had their
hopes and dreams actualized, who have been the victims of globalism and many other, you know, current trends. It's understandable that
they would be confused and not see the liability of
electing a grossly incompetent, morbidly narcissistic person into the presidency. So which is to say that I don't blame, there are many, many millions of people who I don't necessarily blame
for the Trump phenomenon, but I can nonetheless
bemoan the phenomenon as indicative of, you know, very bad state of affairs
in our society, right? So there's two levels to it. I mean, one is I think you
have to call a spade a spade when you're talking about
how things actually work and what things are
likely to happen or not. But then you can recognize that people have very different life experiences and, yeah, I mean, I think
empathy and, you know, probably the better word
for what I would hope to embody there is compassion, right? Like, really, you know, to really wish people well, you know, and to really wish, you know, strangers well effortlessly,
wish them well, I mean, to realize that there is
no opposition between, at bottom, there's no real opposition between selfishness and selflessness, because why selfishness really takes into account other people's happiness. I mean, you know, do you wanna live in a society
where you have everything, but most other people have nothing? Or do you wanna live in a society where you're surrounded
by happy, creative, self-actualized people
who are having their hopes and dreams realized? I think it's obvious that the second society is much better, however much you can guard your good luck. - But what about having
empathy for certain principles that people believe, for example, the pushback, the other
perspective on this, 'cause you said, "Bought the myth of Trump
as the great businessman." There could be a lot of people
that are supporters as Trump who could say that Sam
Harris bought the myth that we have this government of the people by the people that actually represents the people, as opposed to a bunch of
elites who are running a giant bureaucracy that is corrupt, that is feeding themselves and they're actually not
representing the people. And then here's this chaos agent, Trump, who speaks off the top of his head, yeah, he's flawed in all this number of ways. He's a more comedian than he is a presidential type of figure. And he's actually
creating the kind of chaos that's going to shake up this bureaucracy, shake up the elites that
are so uncomfortable, 'cause they don't want
the world to know about the game they got running
on everybody else. So that's-
- Yeah. - That's the kind of perspective that they would take and say, yeah, yeah, there's these
flaws that Trump has, but this is necessary. - I agree with the first part, so I haven't bought the myth that it's, you know, a truly representative democracy in the way that you might idealize. And, you know, on some level, I mean, this is a different conversation, but on some level, I'm not even sure how much
I think it should be, right? Like I'm not sure we want, in the end, everyone's opinion given equal weight about, you know, just what we
should do about anything. And I include myself in that. I mean, there are many topics around, which I don't deserve to have a strong opinion because I don't know what I'm talking about, right? Or what I would be talking
about if I had a strong opinion. And I think we'll probably get to that, to some of those topics, because I've declined to
have certain conversations on my podcast just because
I think I'm the wrong person to have that conversation, right? And I think it's important
to see those bright lines in one's life and in the moment
politically and ethically. So, yeah, I think, so leave aside the viability of democracy, but I'm under no illusions that all of our institutions are, you know, worth preserving precisely
as they have been up until the moment this
great orange wrecking ball came swinging through our lives. But I just, it was a very bad bet to elect someone who is grossly incompetent and worse than incompetent, genuinely malevolent in
his selfishness, right? And this is something we know
based on literally decades of him being in the public eye, right? He's not a public servant in
any normal sense of that term. And he couldn't possibly give an honest or sane answer to the
question you asked me about empathy and reason
and like how should we, you know, what should guide us? I genuinely think he is
missing some necessary moral and psychological tools, right? And this is, I can feel compassion
for him as a human being, because I think having those
things is incredibly important and genuinely loving other
people is incredibly important. And knowing what all that's about is, that's really the good stuff in life. And I think he's missing a lot of that. But I think we don't wanna promote people to the highest positions
of power in our society who are far outliers in pathological terms, right? We want them to be far outliers in, if in the best case, in wisdom and compassion, and some of the things you've, some of the topics you've brought up. I mean, we want someone
to be deeply informed. We want someone to be unusually curious, unusually
alert to how they may be wrong or getting things wrong, consequentially. He's none of those things. And if in so far as we're
gonna get normal mediocrities in that role, which I think, you know, is often the best we could expect, let's get normal
mediocrities in that role. Not, you know, once in a
generation narcissists and frauds, I mean, it is like the, I mean, just take honesty
as a single variable, right? I think you want, yes, it's possible that most politicians lie, at least some of the time. I don't think that's a good thing. I think people should be,
you know, generally honest, even to a fault. Yes, there are certain
circumstances where lying, I think is necessary. It's kind of on a continuum
of self-defense and violence. So it's like, if you're gonna, you know, if the Nazis come to your door and ask you if you've got Anne Frank in the attic, I think it's okay to lie to them. But, you know, Trump, arguably, there's never been a person that anyone could name in human history who's lied
with that kind of velocity. I mean, it's just, he was just a blizzard of lies, great and small, you know, to pointless, and effective, but it is just, it says something fairly alarming about our society that a person of that
character got promoted. And so, yes, I have compassion and concern for half of the society
who didn't see it that way. And that's gonna sound elitist and smug or something for anyone who's on that side listening
to me, but it's genuine. I mean, I understand
that like I barely have, I'm like one of the luckiest
people in the world, and I barely have the
bandwidth to pay attention to half the things I
should pay attention to in order to have an opinion about half the things we're
gonna talk about, right? So how much less bandwidth is somebody who's working two jobs or, you know, a single mom who's, you know, raising, you know,
multiple kids, you know, even a single kid. It's just, it's unimaginable
to me that people have the bandwidth to really track this stuff. And so then they jump on social media and they get inundated by misinformation and they see what their
favorite influencer just said. And now they're worried
about vaccines and it's just, we're living in an environment where the information space
has become so corrupted and we've built machines
to further corrupt it, you know what I mean? We've built a business
model for the internet that has further corrupts it. So it is just, it's chaos in informational terms. And I don't fault people for being confused and impatient and at their wit's end. And, yes, Trump was an enormous fuck you to the establishment. And that was understandable
for many reasons. - To me, Sam Harris, the great Sam Harris is
somebody I've looked up to for a long time as a beacon of voice of reason. And there's this meme on the internet, and I would love you to steelman the case for it and against that Trump
broke Sam Harris's brain, that there is something is disproportional to the
actual impact that Trump had on our society. He had an impact on the ability of balanced, calm, rational minds to
see the world clearly, to think clearly. You being one of the beacons of that. Is there a degree to
which he broke your brain? - Well...
- Otherwise known as Trump derangement syndrome. - [Sam] Yeah, yeah, yeah. - (chuckling) Medical petition. - Yeah, I mean, I think
Trump derangement syndrome is a very clever meme because it just throws the, you know, the problem back on the person
who's criticizing Trump. But in truth, the true Trump derangement
syndrome was not to have seen how dangerous and divisive it it would be to promote someone like Trump
to that position of power and in the final moment, not to see how untenable it was to still
support someone who, you know, a sitting president
who was not committing to a peaceful transfer of power. I mean, that was, if that wasn't a bright line for you, you have been deranged by something, because that was, you know, that was one minute to
midnight for our democracy, as far as I'm concerned. And I think it really was but for the integrity of a few people that we didn't suffer some real constitutional crisis and real emergency, you know, after January 6th. I mean, if Mike Pence had caved in and decided to not certify
the election, right? Literally you can count on two hands the number of people
who held things together at that moment. And it wasn't for a want
of trying on Trump's part that we didn't succumb to some, you know, real, truly uncharted catastrophe with our democracy. So the fact that that didn't happen is not a sign that those of us who were worried that
it was so close to happening were exaggerating the problem. I mean, it's like, you know, you almost got run over
by a car, but you didn't. And so, you know, the fact that you're
adrenalized and you're thinking, you know, but boy, that was dangerous. I probably shouldn't, you know, wander in the middle of the
street with my eyes closed. You weren't wrong to feel that you really had a problem, right? And came very close to
something truly terrible. So I think that's where we were, and I think we shouldn't
do that again, right? So the fact that he's still, he's coming back around as
potentially a viable candidate, you know, I'm not spending
much time thinking about it, frankly, because it's, you know, I'm waiting for the moment where it requires some thought. I mean, it did, it took up, I mean, I don't know how
many podcasts I devoted to the topic. It wasn't that, I mean, it
wasn't that many in the end, you know, against the number of podcasts I devoted to other topics. But there are people who look at Trump and just find him funny, entertaining, not especially threatening, like not a, you know, it's just good fun to
see somebody who's like, who's just not taking anything seriously. And is just putting, you know, a stick in the wheel of business as usual again
and again and again and again. And they don't really see
anything much at stake, right? It doesn't really matter
if we don't support NATO, it doesn't really matter if
he says he trusts Putin more than our intelligence services. I mean, none of this is, it doesn't matter if he's
on the one hand saying that he loves the leader of North Korea and on the other threatens to, you know, bomb them back to the stone age, right, on Twitter. It all can be taken in the spirit of kinda reality television. It's like, this is just, this is the part of the
movie that's just fun to watch, right? And I understand that. I can even inhabit that space for a few minutes at a time but there's the deeper concern
that we're in the process of entertaining ourselves to death, right? That we're just not
taking things seriously. And this is a problem I've
had with several other people we might name who just appear to me to
be goofing around at scale. And they lack a kind of moral seriousness. I mean, they're touching big problems where lives hang in the balance, but they're just fucking around. And I think they're
really important problems that we have to get our
heads straight around. And we need, you know, it's not to say that institutions don't become corrupt. I think they do. And I think, and I'm quite worried that, you know, both about the loss of trust in our institutions and the fact that trust has eroded
for a good reason, right? That they had become less trustworthy. You know, they've become
infected by, you know, political ideologies that
are not truth-tracking. I mean, I worry about all of that, but I just think we need institutions. We need to rebuild them. We need experts who are real experts. We need to value expertise over, you know, amateurish speculation
and conspiracy thinking, and just, you know, and bullshit. - The kind of amateur
speculation we're doing on this very podcast? (Lex chuckling) - I'm usually alert to the
moments where I'm just guessing, or where I actually feel like I'm talking from within my wheelhouse. And I try to telegraph that
a fair amount with people. So, yeah, I mean, but
it's not, it's different. Like, I mean, you can invite someone onto your podcast who's an expert about something that you're not an expert about and then you, you in the process of getting
more informed yourself, your audience is getting more informed. So you're asking smart questions. And you might be pushing
back at the margins, but you know that when push
comes to shove on that topic, you really don't have a basis to have a strong opinion. And if you were gonna form a strong opinion that was this counter to the expert you have in front of you, it's gonna be by deference
to some other expert who you've brought in or
who you've heard about, or whose work you've read or whatever. But there's a paradox to how we value authority in science that most people don't understand. And I think we should, at
some point unravel that, because it's the basis for
a lot of public confusion. And frankly it's the basis
for a lot of, you know, criticism I've received on
these topics where it's, you know, people think
that I'm a, you know, I'm against free speech, or
I'm an establishment shill, or it's like I just think
I'm a credentialist. I just think people with PhDs from Ivy League Universities should, you know, run everything. It's not true, but there's a ton of, there's a lot to cut through
to get to daylight there, because people are very confused about how we value authority in the service of rationality generally. - You've talked about it,
but it's just interesting, the intensity of feeling you have. You've had this famous
phrase about Hunter Biden and children in the basement. Can you just revisit this case? So let me, let me give another perspective on the situation of January
6th and Trump in general. It's possible that January
6th and things of that nature revealed that our democracy
is actually pretty fragile and that Trump is not a malevolent, an ultra competent malevolent figure, but is simply a jokester. And he just, by creating the chaos, revealed that it's all pretty fragile, because you're a student of history, and there's a lot of people
like Vladimir Lenin, Hitler, who are exceptionally
competent at controlling power, at being executives,
and taking that power, controlling the generals, controlling all the figures involved, and certainly not tweeting, but working in the shadows,
behind the scenes to gain power. And they did so extremely competently, and that is how they
were able to gain power. The pushback with Trump is
he was doing none of that. He was creating what he's very good at, creating drama, sometimes for humor's sake, sometimes for drama's sake, and simply revealed that
our democracy is fragile. And so he's not this once in
a generation horrible figure. - Once in a generation narcissist. No, I don't think he's a truly scary, sinister, you know, Putin-like,
or, you know, Hitler, much less Hitler-like figure, not at all. I mean, he's not ideological. He doesn't care about
anything beyond himself. So it's not, no, no, he's much less scary than any really scary, you
know, totalitarian, right? I mean, and he's... - He's more "Brave New World" than 1984? - This is what, you know, Eric Weinstein never
stops badgering me about, but, you know, he's still wrong, Eric. You know, I can, you know, my analogy
for Trump was that he's an evil Chauncey Gardiner. I don't know if you remember the book or the film "Being
There" with Peter Sellers, but, you know, Peter
Sellers is this gardener who really doesn't know anything, but he gets recognized as this wise man and he gets promoted to
immense power in Washington, because he's speaking in these kinda, in a semblance of wisdom. He's got these very simple aphorisms, what seemed to be aphorisms. He's just talking, all he
cares about is gardening. He's just talking about
his garden all the time. But, you know, he'll
say something, but yeah. you know, in the spring, you know, the new shoots will bloom. And people read into that
some kind of genius, you know, insight politically,
and so he gets promoted. And so that's the joke of the film. For me, Trump has always been someone like an evil Chauncey Gardiner. It's not to say he's totally, yes, he has a certain kind of genius. He's got a genius for creating a spectacle around himself, right? He's got a genius for getting the eye of the media
always coming back to him. But it's only, it's a kind of, you know, self-promotion that only works if you actually are truly shameless and don't care about having a reputation for anything that I or
you would wanna have a reputation for, right? It's like his pure, the pure pornography of attention, right? And he just wants more of it. I think the truly depressing and genuinely scary thing was that we have a country that, at least half of the country, given how broken our society is in many ways, we have a country that didn't
see anything wrong with that. Bringing someone who
obviously doesn't know what he should know to be president and who's obviously not
a good person, right? Who obviously doesn't care about people, can't even pretend to care
about people, really, right, in a credible way. And so, I mean, if there's
a silver lining to this, it's along the lines you just sketched, it shows us how vulnerable our system is to a truly brilliant and
sinister figure, right? I mean, like, I think we are, we really dodged a bullet, yes. Someone far more competent and conniving and ideological could have exploited our system
in a way that Trump didn't. And that's, yeah, so if we plug those holes eventually, that would be a good thing and he would've done a good
thing for our society, right? I mean, one of the things we realized, and I think nobody knew, I mean, I certainly didn't know it and I didn't hear anyone talk about it, is how much our system relies
on norms rather than laws. - Yeah, civility almost.
- Right. Yeah. It's just like it's quite possible that he
never did anything illegal. You know, truly illegal. I mean, I think he probably
did a few illegal things, but like illegal such that
he really should be thrown in jail for it, you know? At least that remains to be seen. So all of the chaos, all of the, you know, all of the diminishment of
our stature in the world, all of the, just the opportunity costs of spending years focused on nonsense, all that was just norm violations. All of that was just, that was just all a matter of not saying the thing you should say, but that doesn't mean
they're insignificant, right? It's not that, it's like, it's not illegal for a
sitting president to say, no, I'm not gonna commit to a
peaceful transfer of power, right? We'll wait and see whether I win. If I win, the election was valid. If I lose, it was fraudulent, right? - But aren't those humorous perturbations to our system of civility
such that we know what the limits are, and now we start to think that and have these kinds of discussions? - But that wasn't a humorous perturbation, because he did everything he could, granted he wasn't very competent, but he did everything he could to try to steal the election. I mean, the irony is he claimed to have an election stolen from him all the while doing everything
he could to steal it, declaring it fraudulent in advance, trying to get the votes to not be counted as the evening wore on, knowing that they were gonna be disproportionately democrat votes, because of the, you know, because of the position he
took on mail-in ballots. I mean, all of it was fairly calculated. The whole circus of, you know, the clown car
that crashed into, you know, the Four Seasons landscaping, right? And you got Rudy Giuliani
with his hair dye and you got Sidney Powell and all these grossly
incompetent people lying as freely as they could breathe
about election fraud, right? And all of these things
were getting thrown out by, you know, Republican, largely Republican election
officials and Republican judges. It wasn't for want of trying that he didn't maintain
his power in this country. He really tried to steal the presidency. He just was not competent, and the people around
him weren't competent. So that's a good thing, and it's worth not
letting that happen again. - But he was incompetent, so he didn't do everything he could. - Well, no, he did everything he could. He didn't do everything
that could have been done by someone more competent. - Right, but the tools
you have as a president, you could do a lot of things. You can declare emergencies, especially during COVID. You could postpone the election. You can create military
conflict that, you know, any kind of reason to
postpone the election. There's a lot of ways.
- Well, but he tried to do things and he would have to have done those things
through other people. And there are people who
refused to do those things. There are people who said they would quit. They would quit publicly, right? I mean, this, you start, again, there are multiple books written about in the last hours of this presidency. And the details are shocking
in what he tried to do and tried to get others to do. And it's awful, right? I mean, it's just awful that
we were that close to something to a true unraveling of
our political process. I mean, it's the only time in our lifetime that anything like this has happened. And it was deeply embarrassing, right? You know, on the world stage. It's just like we looked
like a banana republic there for a while and we're the lone superpower. It's not good, right? And so we shouldn't, like there's no, the
people who thought, well, we just need to shake things up, and this is a great
way to shake things up. And having people, you know, storm our Capitol and, you
know, smear shit on the walls, that's just more shaking things up, right? It's all just for the lulls. There's nihilism and cynicism
to all of that, which again, in certain people, it's
understandable, you know, frankly, it's not understandable if
you've got a billion dollars and you, you know, have a compound in Menlo Park or wherever. It's like there are people who
are cheerleading this stuff who shouldn't be cheerleading this stuff and who know that they can
get on their Gulf Stream and fly to their compound in New Zealand if everything goes to shit, right? So there's a cynicism to all of that that I think we should
be deeply critical of. - What I'm trying to understand is not, and analyze, is not the behavior of this particular human being, but the effect it had, in part, on the division between people. And to me, the degree, the meme of Sam Harris's
brain being broken by Trump represents, you're like the person I would look to to bridge the division. - Well, I don't think there
is something profitably to be said to someone who's truly captivated by the personality cult of Trumpism, right? Like there's nothing
that I'm gonna say to, there's no conversation I'm
gonna have with Candace Owens, say, about Trump that's gonna converge on something reasonable, right?
- You don't think so? - No, I mean, I haven't
tried with Candace, but I've tried with, you know, many people who are in
that particular orbit. I mean, I've had
conversations with people who won't admit that there's anything wrong with Trump, anything. - So I'd like to push for
the empathy versus reason, 'cause when you operate in
the space of reason, yes. But I think there's a lot
of power in you showing, in you, Sam Harris,
showing that you're willing to see the good qualities of Trump, publicly showing that. I think that's the way to win over Candace Owens.
- Well, but he has so few of them. He has fewer good qualities than virtually anyone I can name, right? So he's funny. I'll grant you that, he's funny. He's a good entertainer. - There's others, look at just policies and actual impacts he had. - I've admitted that. No, no, so like, so
I've admitted that many of his policies I agree with. Many, many of his policy, I mean, so probably more often than not, at least on balance, I agreed with his policy that, you know, we should take China seriously
as an adversary, right? And I think, I mean, again, there's a lot of fine
print to a lot of this, 'cause the way he talks about these things and many of his motives that are obvious are things that I don't support, but I'm gonna take immigration. I think there's, it's obvious that we should have control of our borders, right? Like I don't see the argument
for not having control of our borders. We should let in who we wanna let in, and we should keep out
who we wanna keep out, and we should have a
sane immigration policy. So I didn't necessarily
think it was a priority to build the wall, but I never criticized the
impulse to build the wall, because if, you know, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people are coming across that border
and we are not in a position to know who's coming, that seems untenable to me. And I can recognize that
many people in our society are, on balance, the
victims of immigration, and there is, in many cases a zero sum
contest between the interests of actual citizens and the
interests of immigrants, right? So I think we should have control of our borders, we should have a sane and
compassionate immigration policy, we should let in refugees, right? So, you know, Trump on
refugees was terrible but, no, like I would say 80% of
the policy concerns people celebrated in him are concerns that I either share entirely or certainly sympathize with, right? So like that's not the issue. The issue is... - A threat to democracy in some fundamental way?
- Well, the issue is largely what you said it was. It's not so much the person, it's the effect on
everything he touches, right? He just, he has this superpower of deranging and destabilizing almost everything he touches and selling and compromising the
integrity of almost anyone who comes into his orbit. I mean, so you looked at these
people who served, you know, as chief of staff or, you know, in various cabinet positions, people who had real reputations, you know, for probity and levelheadedness, you know, whether you shared their politics or not. I mean, these were real people. These were not, you know, some of them were goofballs, but, you know, many people who just got totally trashed by proximity to him and then trashed by him when they finally parted company with him. Yeah, I mean, it's just
people bent over backwards to accommodate his norm violations. And it was bad for them and it was bad for our system. But none of that discounts
the fact that we have a system that really needs
a proper house cleaning. Yes, there are bad incentives and entrenched interests and I'm not a fan of the
concept of the deep state, 'cause it, you know, has
been so propagandized. But yes, there's something
like that, you know, that is not flexible enough to respond intelligently to the needs of the moment, right? So there's a lot of
rethinking of government and of institutions in general
that I think we should do, but we need smart, well-informed, well-intentioned people to do that job. And the well-intentioned part is hugely important, right? I mean, just give me someone who is not the most selfish person anyone has ever heard about in their lifetime, right? And what we got with
Trump was that like the, literally the one most selfish person I think anyone could name. I mean, and again, there's so much known about
this man, that's the thing. It was like, it predates his presidency. We knew this guy 30 years ago. And this is what, to come back to those inflammatory comments
about Hunter Biden's laptop. The reason why I can say with
confidence that I don't care what was on his laptop is that there is, and that includes any
evidence of corruption on the part of his father. Right now there's been
precious little of that that's actually emerged. So it's like there is no, as far as I can tell, there's not a big story
associated with that laptop as much as people bang
on about a few emails. But even if there were just
obvious corruption, right? Like Joe Biden was at this
meeting and he took, you know, this amount of money from this shady guy for bad reasons, right? Given how visible the lives of these two men have been, right? I mean, given how much
we know about Joe Biden and how much we know about Donald Trump and how they have lived in public for almost as long as I've been alive, both of them, the scale of corruption can't possibly balance out between the two of them, right? If you show me that Joe
Biden has this secret life where he's driving a Bugatti and he's living like Andrew Tate, right? And he's doing all these things
I didn't know about, okay, then I'm gonna start getting
a sense that, all right, maybe this guy is way more
corrupt than I realize. Maybe there is some deal
in Ukraine or with China that is just, like this
guy's not who he seems, he's not the public servant
he's been pretending to be, he's been on the take
for decades and decades and he's just, he's as dirty as can be. He's all mobbed up and is a nightmare and he can't be trusted, right? That's possible if you
show me that his life is not at all what it seems. But on the assumption that I, having looked at this guy
for literally decades, right? And knowing that every journalist has looked at him for decades, just how many affairs is he having? Just how much, you know, how many drugs is he doing? How many houses does he have? You know, what are the obvious conflicts of interest, you know? You hold that against what
we know about Trump, right? And, I mean, the litany of indiscretions you can put on Trump's side that testify to his personal corruption, to testify to the fact that
he has no ethical compass, there's simply no comparison, right? So that's why I don't care
about what's on the laptop. Now if you tell me Trump
is no longer running for president in 2024, and we can put Trumpism behind us, and now you're saying, listen, there's a lot of stuff on that laptop that makes Joe Biden look
like a total asshole. Okay, I'm all ears, right? I mean, it was a forced, in 2020, it was a forced choice between a sitting president who wouldn't commit to a
peaceful transfer of power and a guy who's obviously
too old to be president, who has a crack-addicted son, you know, who lost his laptop. And I just knew that
I was gonna take Biden in spite of whatever litany of horrors was gonna come tumbling
out of that laptop. - And that might involve sort of, so the actual quote is, Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in the basement. There's dark humor to it, right? Which is, I think you speak to, "I would not have cared. There's nothing, it's Hunter Biden. It's not Joe Biden. Whatever the scope of Joe
Biden's corruption is, it is infant decimally compared to the corruption we know
Trump was involved in. It's like a firefly to the sun"
is what you're speaking to. But lemme make the case
that you're really focused on the surface stuff. That it's possible to have corruption that masquerades in
the thing we mentioned, which is civility. You can spend hundreds
of billions of dollars or trillions towards the war in the Middle East, for example. Something that you've changed your mind on in terms of the negative
impact it has on the world. And that, you know, the military industrial complex, everybody's very nice. Everybody's very civil, just very upfront. Here's how we're spending the money. Yeah, it sometimes somehow
disappears in different places, but that's the way, you
know, war is complicated. And everyone is very polite. There's no coke and strippers or whatever is on the laptop. It's very nice and polite. In the meanwhile, hundreds of thousands
of civilians die, hate, just an incredible amount
of hate is created, because people lose their family members, all that kind of stuff. But there's no strippers
and coke on the laptop so. - But yeah, but it's not just superficial. It is when someone only wants wealth and power and fame, that is their objective function, right? They're like a robot that is calibrated just
to those variables, right? And they don't care about the risks we run on any other front. They don't care about, I
mean, environmental risk, pandemic risk, nuclear proliferation risk, none of it, right? They're just tracking fame and money and whatever can personally redound to their self-interest,
along those lines. And they're not informed about the other risk we're running really. I mean, in Trump, you had a president who was
repeatedly asking his generals, why couldn't we use our nuclear weapons? Why can't we have more of them? Why do I have fewer nuclear
weapons than JFK, right? As though that were a sign of anything other than progress, right? And this is the guy who's
got the button, right? I mean, somebody's following
him around with a bag waiting to take his order to launch, right? That is a, it's just it's a risk we should never run. One thing Trump has
going for him, I think, is that he doesn't drink
or do drugs, right? Although there's, you know, people allege that he
does speed, but, you know, let's take him at his word. He's not deranging himself with pharmaceuticals at least. But, apart from Diet Coke. (Lex chuckles) But-
- There's nothing wrong. Just for the record, let me push back on that, there's nothing wrong with Diet Coke.
- Nothing wrong, yeah. - You can consume it at
very large amounts so- - [Sam] I occasionally have some myself. - There's no medical, there's
no scientific evidence that I observed the
negatives of, you know, all those studies about
aspartame and all of that. There's, no, I don't know. (chuckles) - I hope you're right. - I hope so too. (chuckles) - Yeah, I mean, everything you said about the military industrial
complex is true, right? And it's been, we've been worrying
about that on both sides of the aisle for a very long time. I mean, that's just, you know, that phrase came from Eisenhower. I mean, so much of what ails us is a story of bad incentives, right? And bad incentives are so powerful that they corrupt even good people, right? How much more do they
corrupt bad people, right? Like so it's like you want, at minimum, you want
reasonably good people, at least non-pathological people in the system trying to navigate against the grain of bad incentives. And, better still, all of us can get together and try to diagnose those
incentives and change them, right? And we will really succeed when we have a system of incentives where the good incentives are so strong that even bad people are effortlessly behaving as though they're good people, because they're so
successfully incentivized to behave that way, right? That's, you know, and so it's almost almost the inversion of our current situation. So yes, and you say I changed
my mind about the war. Mot quite, I mean, I was never a supporter of the war in Iraq. I was always worried that it was a distraction from the war in Afghanistan. I was a supporter of
the war in Afghanistan. And I will admit in hindsight,
that looks like, you know, at best, a highly ambiguous
and painful exercise, you know, more likely a fool's errand, right? I was like, you know, it
did not turn out well. It wasn't for want of trying. You know, I have not done a deep dive on all of the failures there and maybe all of these failures
are failures in principle. I mean, maybe that's not the kind of thing that can be done well by anybody, whatever our intentions. But yeah, the move to Iraq
always seemed questionable to me. And when we knew the problem, the immediate problem at that
moment, you know, Al-Qaeda was in Afghanistan and, you know, and then bounced into Pakistan, anyway, you know, so, yes, but my sense of the
possibility of nation-building, my sense of, you know, in so far as the neocon spirit of, of, you know,
responsibility and idealism that, you know, America was the kind of nation that should be functioning in this way as the world's cop. And we have to get in there and untangle some of these knots by force rather often, because, you know, if we don't do it over there, we're gonna have to do it
over here kind of thing. Yeah, some of that has
definitely changed for me in my thinking. I mean, there are obviously
cultural reasons why it failed in Afghanistan, and then if you can't change the culture, you're not gonna force a change
at gunpoint in the culture, or certainly it seems that
that's not gonna happen. And it took us, you know, over 20 years to
apparently to realize that. - That's one of the things
you realize with the wars, there's not going to be a strong signal that things are not working. You can just keep pouring
money into a thing and military effort. - Well also there are
signs of it working too. You have all the stories
of girls now going to school, right? You know, the girls are
getting battery acid thrown in their faces by religious maniacs. And then we come in
there and we stop that, and now girls are getting
educated and there's, and that's all good and our
intentions are good there. And, I mean, we're on the
right side of history there. Girls should be going to school. You know, Malala Yousafzai
should have the Nobel Prize, and she shouldn't have
been shot in the face by the Taliban, right? We know what the right answers are there. The question is, what do you do when there are enough, in this particular case, religious maniacs who are willing to die and let their children die in defense of crazy ideas and moral norms that belong in the seventh century. And it's a problem we couldn't solve, and we couldn't solve it even
though we spent, you know, trillions of dollars to solve it. - Just reminded me of the thing that you and Jack Dorsey jokingly had for a while, the discussion about banning
Donald Trump from Twitter. But does any of it bother you now that Twitter files came out that, I mean, this has to do with sort
of the Hunter laptop, Hunter Biden laptop story. Does it bother you that there could be a collection of people
that make decisions about who to ban or not and that that could be susceptible to bias and to ideological influence? - Well, I think it always will be or in the absence of perfect
AI, it always will be. - And this becomes
relevant with AI as well? - [Same] Yeah. - Because there's some
censorship in AI happening. - Yeah.
- And it's an interesting question there as well. - I don't think Twitter is important as people think it is, right? And I used to think it was more
important when I was on it, and now that I'm off of
it, I think it's, I mean, first lemme say it's just
an unambiguously good thing, in my experience, to lease
your Twitter account, right? It's like it is just, even the good parts of Twitter that I miss were bad in the aggregate, in the degree to which it
was fragmenting my attention, the degree to which my
life was getting doled out to me in periods between those moments where I checked Twitter, right? And had my attention diverted. And I was, you know, I was not a crazy Twitter addict. I mean, I was probably
a pretty normal user. I mean, I was not someone who
was tweeting multiple times a day or even every day, right? I mean, I probably, I think I probably averaged
something like one tweet a day, I think I averaged, but in
reality it was like, you know, there'd be like four tweets one day, and then I wouldn't tweet for, you know, the better part of a week. But I was looking a lot,
because it was my newsfeed. I was just following, you
know, 200 very smart people, and I would just wanted to see what they were paying attention to and they would recommend articles and I would read those articles. And then when I would read an article that I thought I should
signal boost, I would tweet. And so all of that seemed good. And like that's all separable from all of the otiose
bullshit that came back at me in response to this, largely in response to
this Hunter Biden thing. But even the good stuff has a downside. And it comes at just this point of your phone is this perpetual stimulus of which is intrinsically
fragmenting of time and attention. And now my phone is much less
of a presence in my life. And it's not that I don't
check Slack or check email. I mean, you know, I use it to work but my sense of just what the world is and my sense of my place in the world, the sense of where I exist as a person has changed a lot by
deleting my Twitter account. I mean, I had, and it's just, it's, and the things that I think, I mean, we all know this phenomenon. I mean, what we say of someone, you know, that person's too online, right? Like what does it mean to be too online? And where do you draw that boundary? You know, how do you know? What constitutes being too online? Well, in some sense, just, I think being on social media at all is to be too online. I mean, given what it does to, given the kinds of information, it signal boosts and given the impulse it kindles in each of us to reach out to our audience in specific mo moments and
in specific ways, right? It's like, there are lots of moments now where I have an opinion about something, but there's nothing for me to
do with that opinion, right? Like there's no Twitter, right? So like, there are lots of
things that I would've tweeted in the last months that are not the kind
of thing I'm gonna do a podcast about. I'm not gonna roll out 10 minutes on that topic on my podcast. I'm not gonna take the time
to really think about it. But had I been on Twitter, I would've reacted to this thing in the news or this thing
that somebody did, right? - What do you do with that thought now? - I just let go of it. - Like chocolate ice cream is the most delicious thing ever. - Yeah, it's usually
not that sort of thing, but it's just, but then you look at the kinds of problems people create for themselves. You look at the life-deranging and reputation-destroying
things that people do. And I look at the things that have, the analogous things
that have happened to me. I mean, the things that have really bent my life around
professionally over the past, you know, decade. So much of it is Twitter. I mean, honestly, in my case, almost 100% of it was Twitter. The controversies I would get into, the things I would think
I would have to respond to in a, like I would release a
podcast on a certain topic. I would see some blow-back on Twitter. You know, it would give me the sense that there was some signal that
I really had to respond to. Now that I'm off Twitter, I recognize that most of that was just, it was totally speeches, right? It was not something I had to respond to. But yet I would then do a
cycle of podcasts responding to that thing that like, taking my foot outta my mouth or taking someone else's
foot outta my mouth. And it became this self-perpetuating cycle, which, I mean, it's, you know, if
you're having fun, great. I mean, if it's generative
of useful information and engagement professionally and psychologically, great. And, you know, there was some of that on Twitter. I mean, there were people
who I've connected with, because I just, you know, one of us DMed the other on Twitter, and it was hard to see how that
was gonna happen otherwise, but it was largely just a machine for manufacturing
unnecessary controversy. - Do you think it's possible
to avoid the drug of that? So now that you've achieved the zen state, is it possible for
somebody like you to use it in a way that doesn't pull
you into the whirlpool? And so anytime there's
attacks, you just, I mean, that's how I tried to use it. - Yeah, but it's not the
way I wanted to use it. It's not the way it promises itself as a- - [Lex] You wanted to have debate. - I wanted to actually
communicate with people. - [Lex] Yeah. I wanted to hear from the person because, again, it's like being
in Afghanistan, right? It's like, there are the potted cases where it's obviously good, right? It's like in Afghanistan, the girl who's getting an
education that is just here, that's why we're here. That's obviously good. I've had those moments on
Twitter where it's, okay, I'm hearing from a smart
person who's detected an error I made in my
podcast or in a book, or they've just got some
great idea about something that I should spend time on. And I would never have
heard from this person in any other format. And now I'm actually
in dialogue with them. And it's fantastic. That's the promise of it,
to actually talk to people. And so I kept getting
lured back into that. No, the way the sane or, you know, sanity preserving-way of using it is just as a marketing channel. You just put your stuff out there and you don't look at
what's coming back at you. And that's, you know, for, you know, I'm on other
social media platforms that I don't even touch. I mean, my team posts stuff
on Facebook and on Instagram. I never even see what's on there. - So you don't think it's
possible to see something and not let it affect your mind? - No, that's definitely possible. But the question is, and I did that for vast
stretches of time, right? But then the promise of the platform is dialogue and feedback, right? So why am I, if I know,
for whatever reason, I'm gonna see like 99 to 1 awful feedback, you know, bad faith feedback, malicious feedback, some
of it's probably even bots, and I'm not even aware of who's
a person who's a bot, right? But I'm just gonna stare
into this funhouse mirror of acrimony and dishonesty that is going to, I mean, the reason why I got off is, not because I couldn't recalibrate and find equanimity again with all the nastiness that was coming back at me, and not that I couldn't ignore
it for vast rushes of time, but I could see that I
kept coming back to it, hoping that it would be
something that I could use, a real tool for communication. And I was noticing that it was insidiously changing the way I felt about people, both people I know and
people I don't know, right? Like people, you know, mutual friends of ours who are behaving in certain ways on Twitter,
which just seemed insane to me. And then that became a
signal I felt like I had to take into account somehow, right? You're seeing people at their worst, both friends and strangers. And I felt that it was, as much as I could sorta
try to recalibrate for it, I felt that I was losing touch with what was real information,
because people are performing, people are faking, people
are not themselves, or you're seeing people at their worst. And so I felt like, all right, what's being advertised to me here on a, not just a daily basis, you know, an hourly basis or, you know, an increment sometimes of, you
know, multiple times an hour. I mean, I probably
checked Twitter, you know, at minimum 10 times a day. And maybe I was checking
it a hundred times a day on some days, right? Where things were really active and I was really engaged with something. What was being delivered
into my brain there was suddenly false information about how dishonest and, you know, just generally unethical, totally normal people are
capable of being, right? It was like it is a funhouse mirror. I was seeing the most
grotesque versions of people who I know, right? People who I know I could
sit down at dinner with and they would never behave this way. And yet they were coming
at me on Twitter, yeah and, I mean, it was essentially
turning ordinary people into sociopaths, right? Like people are just, you know, it's in their analogies
that many of us have made. It's like one analogy is road rage, right? Like people will behave
in the confines of a car in ways that they never would if they didn't have this
metal box around them, you know, moving at speed. And it's, you know, all of that becomes quite hilarious and, you know, obviously dysfunctional when they actually have to stop at the light next to the
person they just flipped off and they realize, they didn't understand that
the person coming outta that car next to them with cauliflower ear is someone who they
never would've, you know, rolled their eyes at in public because they would've taken one look
at this person and realize this is the last person
you want to fight with. - That's one of the
heartbreaking things is to see people who I know, who I
admire, who I know are friends, be everything from snarky to downright mean, derisive towards each other. It doesn't make any sense. Like this is the only
place where I've seen people I really admire
who have had a calm head about most things like
really be to other people. It's probably the only
place I've seen that. And I don't, I choose to maybe believe
that that's not really them. There's something about the system. Like if you go paintballing,
if you, Jordan Peterson and, you ever go paintballing
- You're gonna shoot your friends, yeah. - Yeah, you're gonna shoot your friends, but you kind of accept that that's kinda what you're doing in this
little game that you're playing, but it's sometimes hard to
remind yourself of that. - Well, and I think I was
guilty of that, definitely. You know, I don't think, there's nothing, I don't think
I ever did anything that I really feel bad about, but yeah, it was always pushing me to
the edge of snideness somehow. And it's just not healthy, it's not, so the reason why I
deleted my Twitter account in the end was that it
was obviously making me a worse person. And so, and yeah, is there some way to be on there where it's not making you a worse person? I'm sure there is, but it's, given the
nature of the platform, and given what was
coming back at me on it, the way to do that is
just to basically use it as a one-way channel of communication. Just marketing, you know? It's like, here's what
I'm paying attention to. Look at it if you want to,
and you just push it out, and then you don't look at
what's coming back at you. - I put out a call for
questions on Twitter, and then actually, quite surprising, there's a lot of good, I mean, they're like,
even if they're critical, they're like being
thoughtful, which is nice. - I used it that way too and
that was what kept me hooked. - But then there's also Touch Balls 69 wrote a question, "Ask- - I can't imagine, this is part of it, but one way to solve this is, you know, we've gotta get rid of
anonymity for this, it's like- - Let me ask the question,
"Ask Sam why he sucks," was the question. - Yeah, that's good. Well, one reason why I sucked was Twitter. That was, and I've since
solved that problem. So Touch Ball, what's that? - 69.
- 69. - [Lex] Yeah. - Touch Ball 69 should be happy that I suck a little bit less now that I'm off Twitter. - I mean, the fact-
- I don't have to hear from Touch Ball 69 on the regular. (Lex chuckling) - The fact that you have to see that, it probably can have a negative effect, just even in moderation, just to see that there is, like for me, the negative effect is
slightly losing faith in the underlying kindness of humanity. - [Sam] Yeah, that was for me, yeah. You can also just reason
your way out of it saying that this is an anonymity
and this is kind of fun, and this is kind of just
the shit show of Twitter, it's okay, but it does mentally
affect you a little bit. - Like I don't read too much
into that kind of comment. It's like it's just, that's just trolling and it's, you know, I understand the fun the person is having on the other side of that. It's like-
- Do you though? - Well, I do, I mean, I
don't behave that way, but I do and for all I know, that person could be, you
know, 16 years old, right? So it's like. - It could be also an altered
con for Elon, I don't know. - Well, yeah, that's
right, yeah, yeah, yeah. (Lex laughing) No, I'm pretty sure Elon would
just tweet that, you know, under his own name at this point. (Lex laughing) - Oh man, but you love each other. Okay, so do you think,
so speaking of which, now that Elon has taken over Twitter, is there something that he could do to make this platform better? This Twitter and just
social media in general, but because of the aggressive nature of his innovation that he's pushing, is there any way to make Twitter a pleasant place for Sam Harris? - Maybe.
- Like in the next five years? Yeah, I don't know. I think I'm agnostic
as to whether or not he or anyone could make a
social media platform that really was healthy. - So you were just observing
yourself week by week, seeing the effect it has on your mind, and on how much you're actually learning and growing as a person
and it was negative? - Yeah, and I also seen the negativity in other people's lives. I mean, it's obviously, I mean, he is not going to admit it, but I think it's obviously
negative for Elon, right? I mean, it's just not, and that was one of the
things that, you know, when I was looking into
the funhouse mirror, I was also seeing the funhouse mirror on his side of Twitter and it was just even more exaggerated. It's like when I was asking myself, why is he spending his time this way? I then reflected on why, you know, why was I spending my time this way, to a lesser degree, right? And at lesser scale. And at lesser risk,
frankly, right, and so, and it was just so, it's not just Twitter. I mean, this is in part
an internet phenomenon. It's like the whole Hunter
Biden mess that you... - Explored?
- Explored. (Lex laughing) That was based on, I mean, I was on somebody's podcast, but that was based on a clip
taken from that podcast, which was highly as misleading as to the general shape of my
remarks on that podcast. Even, you know, I had to then do my own
podcast untangling all of that and admitting that even
in the full context, I was not speaking especially well and didn't say exactly what
I thought in a way that would've been recognizable
to anyone, you know, even someone with, not functioning
by a spirit of charity. But the clip was quite distinct
from the podcast itself. The reality is is that we're living in an
environment now where people are so lazy and their attention is so fragmented that they only have time for clips, but 99% of people will see a clip and will assume there's
no relevant context I need to understand what happened
in that clip, right? And obviously the people who make those clips know that, right? And they're doing it quite maliciously. And in this case, the person who made that
clip and subsequent clips of other podcasts was
quite maliciously trying to engineer, you know, some reputational emulation for me. And being signal boosted by Elon and other prominent people who can't take the time to watch
anything other than a clip, even when it's their friend or someone who's ostensibly their
friend in that clip, right? So it's a total failure, an understandable failure of ethics, that everyone is so short on time and they're so fucking lazy that, and we now have these
contexts in which we react so quickly to things, right? Like Twitter is inviting an instantaneous reaction
to this clip that is just too tempting to just say something and not know what you're
even commenting on. And most of the people who
saw that clip don't understand what I actually think
about any of these issues. And the irony is people are gonna find clips
from this conversation that are just as misleading,
and they're gonna export those, and then people are gonna
be dunking on those clips. And, you know, we're all
living and dying by clips now, and it's dysfunctional. - See, I think it's possible
to create a platform. I think we will keep living
on clips, but, you know, when I saw that clip of
you talking about children, and so on, just knowing that
you have a sense of humor, you just went to a dark
place in terms of humor. - Right.
- So like I didn't even bother. And then I knew that the way clips work is that people will use
it for virality sake, but giving a person benefit of the doubt, that's not even the right term. It's not like I was... It was really like interpreting it in the context of knowing your past. - The truth is you even need, like I even give Trump the benefit of the doubt when I see a clip of Trump. And so, 'cause there are
famous clips of Trump that are very misleading as to what he was saying in context, and I've been honest about that. Like the whole, you know, there were good people on both sides, scandal around the, his remarks after Charlottesville, the clip that got exported and got promoted by everyone, you know, left of center,
from Biden on down, you know, the New York Times, CNN, there's nobody that I'm aware of who has honestly, you know, apologized for
what they did with that clip. He did not say what he seemed
to be saying in that clip about the Nazis at Charlottesville, right? And I have always been
very clear about that. So it's just, you know, even people who I think should
be marginalized and people who should be defenestrated, because they really are terrible people who are doing dangerous
things for bad reasons, I think we should be honest about what they actually
meant in context, right? And this goes to anyone
else we might talk about, you know, who's more, where the case is much more confusing. But, yeah, so everyone's, it's just so, and then I'm sure we're gonna get to AI, but, you know, the prospect of being
able to manufacture clips with AI and deepfakes and where it's gonna be hard for
most people most of the time to even figure out whether they're in the presence
of something real, you know, forget about being divorced from context. There was no context. I mean, that's a
misinformation apocalypse. that we are right on the cusp of. And, you know, it's terrifying. - Well, it could be just a new world like where Alice going to Wonderland where humor is the only thing we have and that will save us. Maybe in the end, Trump's approach to social media was the right one after all. Nothing is true and everything is absurd. - Yeah, but we can't live that way. People function on the basis of what they assume is true, right? They think, you know-
- People have functioned. - Well, to do anything, it's like, I mean, you have to know what you
think is gonna happen, or you have to at least give
a probabilistic weighting over the future. Otherwise you're gonna
be incapacitated by, you're not gonna, like
people want certain things, and they have to have a rational plan to get those desires gratified. And they don't wanna die. They don't want their kids to die. You tell them that there's a
comet hurling toward Earth, and they should get
outside and look up, right? They're gonna do it. And if it turns out it's
misinformation, you know, it's gonna matter, because
it comes down to like, what medicines do you
give your children, right? Like we're gonna be manufacturing
fake journal articles. I mean, this is, I'm sure
someone's using ChatGPT for this, as we speak. And if it's not credible, if it's not persuasive now to most people, I mean, honestly, I
don't think we're gonna, I'll be amazed if it's a year before we can actually create journal articles, that it would take, you know, a PhD to debunk that are completely fake. And there are people who are
celebrating this kind of, you know, coming cataclysm. But it's just, they're the people who don't have anything to
lose who are celebrating it or just are so confused, that they just don't even
know what's at stake. And then there are the people who have, the few people who we
could count on a few hands who have managed to insulate themselves, or at least imagine they've
insulated themselves from the downside here enough that they're not implicated
in the great unraveling we are witnessing or could witness. - The shaking up of what is true, so actually that returns us to experts. Do you think experts can save us? Is there such thing as expertise
and experts at something? How do you know if you've achieved it? - I think it's important
to acknowledge upfront that there's something paradoxical
about how we relate to authority, especially within science. And I don't think that
paradox is going away, and it's just, it doesn't
have to be confusing. And it's not truly a paradox. It's just like there are
different moments in time. So it is true to say that within science or within rationality generally, I mean, just whenever you're having a fact-based discussion about anything, it is true to say that the
truth or falsity of a statement does not even slightly
depend on the credentials of the person making the statement, right? So it doesn't matter if
you're a Nobel Laureate, you can be wrong, right? The thing you could, either the last sentence you spoke could be total bullshit, right? And it's also possible for someone who's deeply uninformed to
be right about something or to be right for the
wrong reasons, right? Or someone just gets lucky or someone, and they're middling
cases where you have like a backyard astronomer
who's got no credentials, but he just loves astronomy
and he's got a telescope and he spends a lot of time
looking at the night sky, and he discovers a comet
that no one else has seen. You know, not even the
professional expert astronomers. And, my God, I think that
happens less and less now, but some version of that keeps happening and it may always keep
happening in every area of expertise, right? So it's true that truth is orthogonal to the reputational concerns we have among apes who are
talking about the truth. But it is also true that most of the time, real experts are much more reliable than frauds or people who
are not experts, right, And expertise really is a thing, right? And when, you know, when you're flying an airplane in a storm, you don't want just randos
come into the cockpit saying, listen, I've got a new idea
about how to, you know, how we should tweak these controls, right? You want someone who's a trained pilot and that training gave
them something, right? It gave them a set of
competences and intuitions and they know what all those
dials and switches do, right? And I don't, right? I shouldn't be flying that plane. So when things really matter, you know, and putting this at 30,000 feet
in a storm sharpens this up, we want real experts
to be in charge, right? And we are at 30,000 feet a lot of the time on a
lot of issues, right? And whether they're public health issues, whether it's a geopolitical
emergency like Ukraine, I mean, the climate change, I
mean, just pick your topic, there are real problems and the clock is rather often ticking and their solutions
are non-obvious, right? And so expertise is a thing and deferring to experts
much of the time makes a lot of sense. At minimum, it prevents, you know, spectacular
errors of incompetence and just, you know, foolhardiness. But even in the case of some, where you're talking
about someone, I mean, people like ourselves who are
like, we're well-educated. We're not the worst
possible candidates for, you know, the Dunning-Kruger effect. When we're going into a new
area where we're not experts, we're fairly alert to the
possibility that we don't, you know, it's not as simple
as things seem at first. And we don't, you know, we don't know how our tools
translate to this new area. We can be fairly
circumspect, but we're also, because we're well-educated, and we're pretty quick studies, we can learn a lot of things pretty fast, and we can begin to play a language game that sounds fairly expert, right? And in that case, the invitation to do your
own research, right, is in, when times are good, I view as an invitation to waste your time pointlessly, right? When times are good. Now the truth is times are
not all that good, right? And we have the ongoing public display
of failures of expertise. We have experts who
are obviously corrupted by bad incentives. We've got experts who, you know, perversely won't admit they
were wrong when they in fact, you know, are demonstrated to be wrong. We've got institutions
that have been captured by political ideology
that's not truth-tracking. I mean, this whole woke encroachment into really every place, you know, whether it's
universities or science journals or government or, I mean, it's just like, that has been genuinely deranging. So there's a lot going on where experts and the very concept
of expertise has seemed to discredit itself, but the reality is is that there is a massive difference, when anything matters, when there's anything
to know about anything, there is a massive
difference most of the time between someone who has
really done the work to understand that domain
and someone who hasn't. And if I get sick or someone close to me gets sick, you know, I have a PhD
in neuroscience, right? So I can read a medical journal article and understand a lot of it, right? And, you know, so I'm just
fairly conversant with, you know, medical terminology
and I understand its methods, and I'm alert to the difference,
because I've, you know, because in neuroscience, I've spent hours and hours
in journal clubs, you know, diagnosing, you know, and analyzing the difference
between good and bad studies, I'm alert to the difference
between good and bad studies in medical journals, right? I understand that bad studies
can get published and, you know, et cetera. And experiments can be poorly designed. I'm alert to all of those things, but when I get sick or when
someone close to me gets sick, I don't pretend to be a doctor, right? I've got no clinical experience. I don't go down the rabbit
hole on Google for days at a stretch trying to become a doctor, much less a specialist
in the domain of problem that has been visited upon
me or my family, right? So if someone close to me gets cancer, I don't pretend to be an oncologist. I don't go out and start, I don't start reading, you know, in journals of oncology
and try to really get up to speed as an oncologist because one is a bad and very likely misleading
use of my time, right? And if I decide, if I had a lot of runway,
if I decided, okay, it's really important for
me to know everything I can, at this point, I know
someone's gonna get cancer. I may not go back to school
and become an oncologist, but what I wanna do is I wanna know everything I
can know about cancer, right? So I'm gonna take the next
four years and spend most of my time on cancer. Okay, I could do that, right? I still think that's a waste of my time. I still think at the end of, even at the end of those four years, I'm not gonna be the best person to form intuitions about
what to do in the face of the next cancer that
I have to confront. I'm still gonna want a better
oncologist than I've become to tell me what he or she would do if they were in my shoes
or in the shoes of, you know, my family member. You know, what I'm not advocating, I'm not advocating a blind trust in authority. Like if you get cancer and you're talking to one oncologist and they're recommending some course of treatment, by all means get a second opinion, get a third opinion, right? But it matters that
those opinions are coming from real experts and not from, you know, Robert Kennedy Jr, you know, who's telling you that, you know, you got it because you got a,
you know, a vaccine, right? It's like, it's just, we're swimming in a sea of misinformation where you've got people who are moving the opinions
of millions of others who should not have an
opinion on these topics. Like there is no scenario in which you should be
getting your opinion about vaccine safety or climate change, or the war in Ukraine or anything else that we might wanna talk about
from Candace Owens, right? It's just like she's not a relevant expert
on any of those topics. And what's more, she
doesn't seem to care, right? And she's living in a culture that has amplified that not caring
into a business model and an effective business model, right? So it's just, and there's something very
Trumpian about all that. Like that's the, you know, the problem is the culture. It's not these specific individuals. So the paradox here is that
expertise is a real thing, and we defer to it a lot as a labor-saving device. And it's just based on the reality that it's very
hard to be a polymath, right? And specialization is a thing, right? And so there are people who specialize in a very narrow topic, they know more about that
topic than the next guy, no matter how smart that guy or gal is. And that those differences matter. But it's also true that when you're talking
about facts, sometimes the best experts are wrong. The scientific consensus is wrong. You get a sea change in the thinking of a whole field because
one person who's an outlier for whatever reason decides, okay, you know, I'm gonna prove this point, and they prove it, right? So somebody like the doctor who believed that stomach ulcers
were not due to stress, but were due to H.
pylori infections, right? So he just drank a vial
of H. pylori bacteria and proved, and quickly got an ulcer, and convinced the field that at minimum, H. pylori
was involved in that process. Okay, so yes, everyone was wrong. That doesn't disprove the reality of expertise. It doesn't disprove the utility of relying on experts most of the time,
especially in an emergency, especially when the clock is ticking, especially when, you know, you're in this particular cockpit and you only have one chance
to land this plane, right? You want the real pilot at the controls. - But there's just a few things to say. - [Sam] Go. - (sighs) So one, you mentioned this example with cancer and doing your own research. There's several things
that are different about our particular time in history. One, doing your own
research has become more and more effective, because you can read, the internet made information
a lot more accessible, so you can read a lot of
different meta-analyses. You can read blog posts
that describe to you exactly the flaws and the different papers that make up the meta-analyses. And you can read a lot of those blog posts that are conflicting with each other and you can take that information in, and in a short amount of time, you can start to make good faith interpretations. For example, I don't know, I don't wanna overstate things, but if you suffer from
depression, for example, then you could go to an expert and a doctor that prescribes
you some medication, but you could also challenge
some of those ideas and seeing like, what are
the different medications? What are the different side effects, what are the different
solutions to depression? All that kind of stuff. And I think depression is just
a really difficult problem that's very, I don't wanna,
again, state incorrect things, but I think there's a lot of variability of what depression really means. So being introspective about
the type of depression you have and the different possible
solutions you have, just doing your own
research as a first step before approaching a doctor or as you have multiple opinions, could be very beneficial in that case. Now that's depression. That's something that's been
studied for a very long time. With a new pandemic that's
affecting everybody, you know, with the airplane
equated to like 9/11 or something, like the new
emergency just happened and everybody, every expert in
the world is publishing on it and talking about it. So doing your own research there could be exceptionally
effective in asking questions. And then there's a difference
between experts, virologists, and it's actually a good question, who is exactly the expert in a pandemic? - [Sam] Yeah. - But there's the actual experts doing the research and publishing stuff, and then there's the
communicators of that expertise. And the question is if the communicators are flawed to a degree where doing your own research is actually the more effective way to figure out policies and solutions, because you're not competing with experts. You're competing with the
communicators of expertise. That could be WHO, CDC in
the case of the pandemic, or politicians or political type of science figures like Anthony Fauci. There's a question there of the effectiveness of doing your research, your own research in that context. And the competing forces there, incentives that you've mentioned, is you can become quite
popular by being contrarian, by saying everybody's lying to you, all the authorities are lying to you, all the institutions are lying to you. So those are the waters
you're swimming in, but I think doing your own research in that kind of context
could be quite effective. - Let me be clear. I'm not saying you shouldn't
do any research, right? I'm not saying that you shouldn't be informed about an issue. I'm not saying you shouldn't read articles on whatever the topic is. And, yes, if I got cancer or
someone close to me got cancer, I probably would read more about cancer than I've read thus far about cancer. And I've read some. So I'm not making a virtue of ignorance and of blind obedience to authority. And again, I recognize that authorities can discredit themselves, or they can be wrong,
they can be wrong even when there's no discredit. There's a lot we don't understand about the nature of the world. But still this vast gulf between truly informed opinion and bullshit exists. It always exists. And conspiracy thinking is rather often, you know, most of the time, a species of bullshit, but it's not always wrong, right? There are real conspiracies and there really are just awful corruptions of, you know, born of bad
incentives within our, you know, our scientific processes,
within institutions. And again, we've mentioned a
lot of these things in passing, but, you know, what woke political ideology did to scientific communication
during the pandemic was awful. And it was really
corrosive of public trust, especially on the right,
for understandable reasons. I mean, it was just, it was crazy, some of the things that were
being said, and still is. And these cases are all different. Something like, you take depression. We just don't know enough
about depression for, you know, anyone to be that confident
about anything, right? And there are many different
modalities in which to interact with it as a problem, right? So there's, yes, pharmaceuticals have whatever promise they have, but there's certainly
reason to be concerned that they don't work
well for everybody and, I mean, it's obvious they
don't work well for everybody, but they do work for some people. But again, depression is
a multifactorial problem, and there are different levels
at which to influence it. And there, you know, there
are things like meditation, there are things like
just life changes and, you know, one of the first
things about depression is that when you're depressed, all of the things that
would be good for you to do are precisely the things
you don't wanna do. You don't have any energy to socialize. You don't wanna get things done, you don't wanna exercise, you don't. And all of those things, if
you got those up and running, they do make you feel better,
you know, in the aggregate. But the reality is is there're, you know, there are clinical level
depressions that are so bad that it's just, we just don't
have good tools for them. And it's not enough to tell, there's no life change
someone's gonna embrace that is going to be an
obvious remedy for that. I mean, pandemics are obviously
a complicated problem, but I would consider it
much simpler than depression in terms of, you know, what's on the menu to be this chosen among the various choices. - Just less multifactorial.
- The logic by which you would make those choices, yeah. So it's like we have a
virus, we have a new virus, it's some version of bad, you know, it's human-transmissible. We're still catching up, we're catching up to every aspect of- - We don't know how it spreads. We don't know how... - How effective masks are.
- Well, at a certain point, we knew it was respiratory but. - But how respiratory-
- But yeah. And whether it spread
by fomites and like all, we were confused about a lot of things. And we're still confused. It's been a moving target this whole time, and it's been changing this whole time. And our responses to
it have been, you know, we ramped up the vaccines
as quickly as we could, but, you know, too quick for some, not quick enough for others. We could've done human challenge trials and got them out more
quickly with better data. And I think that's something
we should probably look at in the future, because, you know, to my eye that would make ethical sense to do challenge trials. And so much of my concern
about COVID, I mean, many people are confused
about my concern about COVID. My concern about COVID
has, for much of the time, not been narrowly focused on COVID itself, how dangerous I perceive
COVID to be as a illness. It has been for the longest time even more a concern about
our ability to respond to a truly scary pathogen next time. Like I, for, you know, outside those initial months, you know, give me the first six months
to be quite worried about COVID and the unraveling of society but. - And the supply of toilet paper. - You wanna secure a steady
supply of toilet paper. But beyond that initial period, when we had a sense of
what we were dealing with, and we had every hope that the vaccines are actually gonna work and we knew we were getting those vaccines in short order, right? Beyond that, and we
knew just how dangerous the illness was and how
dangerous it wasn't. For years now, I've just
been worrying about this as a failed dress rehearsal for
something much worse, right? I think what we proved to ourselves at this moment in history is that we have built informational tools that we do not know how to use, and we have made ourselves, we've basically enrolled
all of human society into a psychological experiment that is deranging us and making it virtually impossible to solve coordination problems that we absolutely have to solve next time when things are worse. - Do you understand who's at fault for the way this unraveled? The way we didn't seem to have the distrust in institutions, in the institution of science that grew like seemingly exponentially or got revealed through this process. Who is at fault here? And what's the fix? - So much blame to go around, but so much of it is not a matter of bad people conspiring to do bad things. It's a matter of incompetence and misaligned incentives and just ordinary, you know, just
plain vanilla dysfunction. - But my problem was that people like you, people like Bret Weinstein, people like that I look to for reasonable difficult
conversations on difficult topics have a little bit lost their mind, became emotional and dogmatic
in style of conversation. Perhaps not in the depth of actual ideas, but they're, you know, I tweeted something of that
nature, and not about you, but just it feels like the pandemic made people really more
emotional than before. And then Kimbal Musk responded, I think something I think you
probably would agree with. Maybe not, "I think it
was the combo of Trump and the pandemic. Trump triggered the far
left to be way more active than they could have been without him. And then the pandemic handed big government nanny state lefties a huge platform on a silver platter, a one-two punch, and here we are." - Well, I would agree with some of that. I'm not sure how much to read into the nanny state concept, but. - But yet like basically got people on the far left really activated - Yeah.
- And then gave control to, I don't know if you say nanny state, but just control to government that when executed poorly, has created a complete
distrust in government. - My fear is that there was gonna be that complete distrust anyway, given the nature of the information space, given the level of conspiracy thinking, given the gaming of these tools by an anti-vax cult. I mean, there really is an anti-vax cult that just ramped up its energy during this moment. - But it's a small one. It's not to say that everything, every concern about vaccines is a species of, was born of misinformation, or born of this cult, but there is a cult that
is just, you know, I mean, and, you know, the core
of Trumpism is a cult. I mean, a QAnon on is a cult. And so there's a lot of lying and there's a lot of confusion. You know, there are, it's almost impossible to exaggerate how confused some people are and how fully their lives are organized
around that confusion. I mean, there are people who think that the world's being run by
pedophile cannibals and that, you know, Tom Hanks and Oprah Winfrey and Michelle Obama are
among those cannibals. I mean, like they're
adjacent to the pure crazy. There's the semi-crazy and
adjacent to the semi-crazy, there's the grifting
opportunist asshole and the layers of bad faith are, you know, hard to fully diagnose. But the problem is, all of this is getting signal boosted by an outrage machine that is preferentially
spreading misinformation. It has a business model that is guaranteeing that is preferentially sharing misinformation. - Can I actually, just on a small tangent. - Yeah.
- How do you defend yourself against the claim that you're a pedophile and cannibal? - It's difficult.
- Here's the case I would make.
- Yeah. Because I don't think you can use reason. I think you have to use empathy. You have to understand-
- or, no, but what, like part of it, I mean I find it very difficult to believe that anyone
believes these things. I mean, I think that there's, and there's, I'm sure there's some number of people who are just pretending to believe these things, because it's just, again, this is sort of like the
4Chanification of everything. It's just Pepe the Frog, right? Like none of this is what it seems. They're not signaling an alliance with white
supremacy or neo-Nazism, but they're not not doing it. Like they just don't fucking care. It's just cynicism
overflowing its banks, right? It's just fun to wind
up the normies, right? Like look at all the
normies who don't understand that a green frog is just a green frog, even when it isn't just
a green frog, right? It's like that just, it's just gumming up everyone's cognitive bandwidth
with bullshit, right? I get that that's fun if you're a teenager and
you just wanna vandalize our news sphere, but at a certain point, we have to recognize that real questions of human welfare are in play, right? There's like, they're really, there're wars getting fought or not fought and there's a pandemic
raging and there's medicine to take or not take. But, I mean, to come back
to this issue of COVID, I don't think I got so
outta balance around COVID. I think people are quite confused about what I was concerned about. I mean, like there was a, yes, there was a period where I was crazy, because anyone who was taking
it seriously was crazy, 'cause they had no idea what was going on. And so it's like, yes, I was wiping down packages with alcohol wipes, right? Because people thought it was
transmissible by touch, right? And then when we realized
that was no longer the case, I stopped doing that. So again, it was a moving target, and a lot of things we did in hindsight around masking and school closures looked fairly dysfunctional,
right, and unnecessary. - I think the criticism that people would say about your talking about COVID, and maybe you can correct me, but you were skeptical, or you were against skepticism of the safety and efficacy of the vaccine. So people who get nervous
about the vaccine, but don't fall into the
usual anti-vax camp, which I think there was a significant- - Yeah, yeah, there was.
- Enough number. - Oh yeah.
- They were asking, they were getting nervous. I mean, (chuckles) especially
after the war of Afghanistan and Iraq, I too was nervous about anything where a lot of money could be made. And you start, you just see how the
people who are greedy, they come to the surface all of a sudden, and then a lot of them
that run institutions actually are really good human beings. And I know a lot of them, but it's hard to know how
those two combine together when there's hundreds of billions, trillions of dollars to be made. And so that skepticism, I guess, the sense was that you weren't open enough to the skepticism. - I understand that
people have that sense. I'll tell you how I thought
about it and think about it. One, again, it was a moving target. So there was a point in the timeline where it was totally rational to expect that the vaccines were both working, both, they were reasonably safe. And that COVID was reasonably dangerous. And that the trade off
for basically everyone was it was rational to get vaccinated, given the level of testing and how many people had
been vaccinated before you, given what we were
seeing with COVID, right? That that was a forced
choice, are you thinking, you're eventually gonna get
COVID and the question is, do you wanna be vaccinated
when you do, right? There was a period where
that forced choice, where it was just obviously
reasonable to get vaccinated, especially because there was
every reason to expect that, while it wasn't a perfectly
sterilizing vaccine, it was going to knock
down transmission a lot. And that matters. And so it wasn't just a personal choice. You were actually being a good citizen when you decided to run
whatever risk you were gonna run to get vaccinated. Because there are people in our society who actually can't get vaccinated. I mean, I know people who
can't take any vaccines. They're so allergic to, I mean, they, in their own person, seem to justify all of the
fears of the anti-vax cult. I mean, it's like they're
the kind of person who Robert Kennedy Jr.
can point to and say, see, vaccines will fucking kill you, right? Because of the experience and were still, I know people who have kids who
fit that description, right? So we should all feel a
civic responsibility to be vaccinated against egregiously awful and transmissible diseases for which we have relatively safe vaccines to keep those sorts of people safe. - And there was a period of time when it was thought that the vaccine could stop transmission. - Yes, and so again, all
of this has begun to shift. I don't think it has shifted as much as Bret Weinstein thinks it's shifted. But yes, there are safety
concerns around the mRNA vaccines, especially for young men, right? As far as I know, that's the purview of
actual heightened concern. But also there's now, is a lot of natural immunity out there, basically everyone who's
gonna get vaccinated, has gotten vaccinated. The virus has evolved to the point in this context, where
it seems less dangerous. You know, again, I'm going
more on the seem-ins than on research that I've done at this point, but I'm certainly less
worried about getting COVID. I've had it once, I've been vaccinated. It's like, so you ask me now, how do I feel about
getting the next booster? I don't know that I'm going to
get the next booster, right? So I was somebody who was waiting in line at 04:00 in the morning, you know, hoping to get some overflow vaccine when it was first available. And that was, at that point, given what we knew, or given
what I thought I knew based on the best sources I could
consult and based on, you know, based on anecdotes that were
too vivid to ignore, you know, both data and personal experience, it was totally rational for me to wanna get that vaccine
as soon as I could. And now I think it's totally
rational for me to do a different kind of cost
benefit analysis and wonder, listen, do I really need
to get a booster, right? You know, like, how many of
these boosters am I gonna get for the rest of my life, really? And how safe is the mRNA vaccine
for a man of my age, right? And do I need to be worried
about myocarditis for, you know? All of that is completely
rational to talk about now. My concern is that at
every point along the way, I was the wrong person and Bret Weinstein was the wrong person, and there's many other people
I could add to this list, to have strong opinions
about any of this stuff. - I just disagree with that. I think, yes, in theory, I agree 100%, but I feel like experts
failed at communicating. Not at doing
- They did. - And I just feel like
you and Bret Weinstein actually have the tools with the internet, given the engine you have in your brain of thinking for months at a time, deeply about the problems
that face our world, that you actually have the tools to do pretty good thinking here. You see, the problem I have with experts- - But there would be deference to experts and pseudo-experts behind all of that. - Well, the papers, you would stand on the
shoulders of giants, but you can surf those shoulders better than the giants themselves. - Yeah, but I knew we were
gonna disagree about the, like I saw his podcast where
he brought on these experts who had, many of them had
the right credentials, but for variety of reasons, they didn't pass the smell test for me. Maybe one larger problem, and this goes back to the problem of how we rely on authority in science, is that you can always find a PhD or an MD to champion any crackpot idea, right? I mean, it is amazing, but you could find PhDs and
MDs who would sit up there in front of Congress and say that they thought smoking
was not addictive, you know, or that it was not harmful to, there was no direct link
between smoking and lung cancer. You could always find those people. But, you know, some of the people Bret found were people who had obvious tells to my
point of view, to my eye. I mean, and I saw them on, some of the same people were
on Rogan's podcast, right? And it's hard because if a person does have
the right credentials and they're not saying
something floridly mistaken, and we're talking about something where they're genuine unknowns, right? Like how much do we know about the safety of these vaccines, right? It's, at that point, not
a whole hell of a lot. I mean, we have no long-term
data on mRNA vaccines. But to confidently say that
millions of people are gonna die because of these vaccines, and to confidently say that
ivermectin is a panacea, right? Ivermectin is the thing
that prevents COVID, right? There was no good reason to
say either of those things at that moment. And so given that that's where Bret was, I felt like there was just no, there was nothing to debate. We're both the wrong people to be getting into the weeds on this. We're both gonna defer
to our chosen experts. His experts look like crackpots to me and, or at least the ones
who are most vociferous on those edgiest points that seem most... - And your experts seem
like, what is the term? Mass hysteria, I forgot the term. - Well, it's, no, but it's like with, you know, climate science. I mean, there's this old, it's received as a canard in half of our society now, but the claim that 97% of
climate scientists agree that human cause climate
change is a thing, right? So do you go with the 97% most of the time or do you go with the 3% most of the time? It's obvious you go with the 97% most of the time for anything that matters. It's not to say that
the 3% are always wrong. Again there are, things get overturned. And yes, as you say, and I've spent much more
time worrying about this on my podcast than I've
spent worrying about COVID, our institutions have lost trust for good reason, right? And it's an open question whether we can actually get things done with this level of transparency and pseudo-transparency, given
our information ecosystems. Like can we fight a war, really fight a war that
we may have to fight, like the next Nazis? Can we fight that war when
everyone with an iPhone is showing just how awful it is that little girls get blown up when we drop our bombs, right? It's like, could we as a society
do what we might have to do to actually get necessary things done when we're living in this
panopticon of just, you know, everyone's a journalist, right? Everyone's a scientist,
everyone's an expert. Everyone's got direct
contact with the facts or semblance of the facts, I don't know. - I think yes, and I think voices like yours
are exceptionally important and I think there's certain
signals you send in your ability to steal me on the other side
and your empathy essentially. So that's the fight, that's the mechanism by which you resist the dogmatism of this binary thinking. And then if you become a
trusted person that's able to consider the other side, then people will listen to you as the aggregator, as the
communicator of expertise. 'Cause the virologists haven't been able to be good communicators. I still, to this day, don't really know what is the, (chuckling) what am I supposed to
think about the safety and efficacy of the vaccines today? As it stands today, what
are we supposed to think? What are we supposed
to think about testing? What are we supposed to
think about the effectiveness of masks or lockdowns? Where's the great communicators
on this topic that, consider all the other
conspiracy theories, all the communication that's out there and actually aggregating it together and be able to say, this is actually what's
most likely the truth. And also some of that has to do with humility, epistemic humility, knowing that you can't
really know for sure, just like with depression, you
can't really know for sure. - Yeah.
- Like where is the, I'm not seeing those communications being effectively done, even still today. - Well, I mean the jury is
still out on some of it, and again, it's a moving target. And some of it, I mean, it's complicated. Some of it's a
self-fulfilling dynamic where, so like lockdowns, in theory, a lockdown would work
if we could only do it, but we can't really do it. And there's a lot of
people who won't do it, because they're convinced that this is the totalitarian boot, you know, on finally on the neck of the good people who are always having their interests, you know, introduced by the elites, right? So like this is, if you have enough people
who think the lockdown, for any reason, in the face of any
conceivable illness, right? Is just code for the
new world order coming to fuck you over and
take your guns, right? Okay, you have a society
that is now immune to reason, right? 'Cause there are absolutely
certain pathogens that we should lock down
for next time, right? And it was completely rational in the beginning of
this thing to lock down, to attempt to lock down, we never really locked down, to attempt some semblance of
a lockdown just to, quote, bend the curve to spare
our healthcare system, given what we were seeing
happen in Italy, right? Like that moment was not hard to navigate, at least in my view. It was obvious at the time. In retrospect, my views on
that haven't changed except for the fact that I recognize maybe it's just impossible, given the nature of people's response to
that kind of demand, right? We live in a society that's
just not gonna lock down. - Unless the pandemic is much more deadly. - Right, so that's the point
I made, which, you know, was maliciously clipped
out from some other podcast where someone was trying
to make it look like I wanna see children die, it's a pity more children
didn't die from COVID, right? This is actually the same person who and that's the other thing
that got so poisoned here. It's like that person, this psychopath or effective psychopath who's creating these
clips of me on podcasts, the second clip of me seeming to say that I wish more children
died during COVID, but it was so clear in context, what I was saying, that even
the clip betrayed the context, so it didn't actually work. This psycho, and again, I don't know whether he
actually is a psychopath, but he's behaving like one, because of the incentives of Twitter. This is somebody who Bret signal boosted as a very reliable source
of information, right? He kept retweeting this guy
at me, against me, right? And this guy, at one glance, I knew how unreliable this guy was, right? But I think I'm not at all set, one thing I think I did wrong,
one thing that I do regret, one thing I have not sorted out for myself is how to navigate the professional and
personal pressure that gets applied at this moment
where you have a friend or an acquaintance or someone you know who's behaving badly in
public or behaving badly, behaving in a way that you
think is bad in public. And they have a public platform where they're influencing a lot of people and you have your own public platform where you're constantly
getting asked to comment on what this this friend or acquaintance or colleague is doing. I haven't known what I think
is ethically right about the choices that seem forced
on us at moments like this. So like I've criticized
you in public about your interview with Kanye. Now in in that case, I reached out to you in private first and told you exactly what I thought. And then when I was
gonna get asked in public or when I was touching
that topic on my podcast, I more or less said the same thing that I said to you in private, right? Now that was how I navigated that moment. I did the same thing with Elon, at least at the beginning. You know, we have maintained good vibes, which is not what I could say about Elon. - (chuckles) I don't think so, I disagree with you 'cause
good vibes in the moment, there's a deep core of good
vibes that persists through time between you and Elon, and I would argue probably between some of the other folks you mentioned. - I think with Bret, I failed to reach out in private to the degree that I should have. And we never really had a, we had tried to set up a
conversation in private that never happened, but
there was some communication, but it would've been much better for me to have made more
of an effort in private than I did before it
spilled out into public. And I would say that's true
with other people as well. - What kind of interaction in private do you think you should have with Bret? Because my case would be,
beforehand and now still, the case I would like, and this part of the
criticism you sent my way, maybe it's useful to go to that direction. Actually, let's go to that direction, because I think I disagree
with your criticism as you stated publicly, but this is- - Are you talking of your interview with Kanye?
- Kanye, yeah, yeah. The thing you criticized me for is actually the right thing
to do with Bret, okay. You said, "Lex could have
spoken with Kanye in such a way as to have produced a useful document. He didn't do that because he
has a fairly naive philosophy about the power of love." (Lex chuckling) - Let's see if you can
maintain that philosophy in the present in the midst
- Let's go. - Of criticism.
- No, it's beautiful. He seemed to think that if he
just got through the minefield to the end of the conversation
where the two of them still were feeling good about one
another and they can hug it out, that would be, by definition, a success. So lemme make the case for this power of love philosophy, right? And first of all, I love you, Sam. You're still an inspiration and somebody I deeply admire, okay. - [Sam] Back at you. - (chuckles) To me, in the case of Kanye, it's not only that you get
through the conversation and have hugs, it's that the display that you're willing to do that has power. So even if it doesn't end
in hugging, the actual, the turning the other cheek, the act of turning the other
cheek itself communicates both to Kanye later, and to
the rest of the world, that we should have empathy and compassion towards each other. There is power to that. Maybe that is naive, but I believe in the power of that. So it's not that I'm
trying to convince Kanye that some of his ideas are wrong, but I'm trying to illustrate
that just the act of listening and truly trying to
understand the human being, that opens people's minds to actually questioning
their own beliefs more. It takes them out of the dogmatism, it deescalates the kind of
dogmatism that I've been seeing. So in that sense, I would
say the power of love is the philosophy you might apply to Bret, because the right conversation
you have in private is not about, hey, listen, you know, the experts you're talking to, they seem credentialed, but they're not actually as credentialed as they illustrating, they're not grounding their
findings in actual meta-analysis and papers, and so on. Like making a strong case, like what are you doing? This is gonna get a lot
of people in trouble. But instead just saying like, being a friend in the dumbest of ways, being like respectful, sending love their way, and just having a conversation
outside of all of this, like basically showing that like removing the emotional
attachment to this debate. Even though you are very
emotionally attached, because in the case of COVID specifically, there is a very large
number of lives at stake. But removing all of that and remembering that you have a friendship. - Yeah, well, so I think these are highly non-analogous cases, right? So your conversation with Kanye misfired, from my point of view, for
a very different reason. And it was, it has to do with Kanye. I mean, so Kanye, I don't know, I've never met Kanye, so
obviously I don't know him, but I think he's either obviously in the midst of a mental health crisis or he's a colossal asshole, or both. I mean, actually those
aren't mutually exclusive. So one of three possibility. But he's either mentally ill, he's an asshole, or he's
mentally ill and an asshole. - I think all three of those
possibilities are possible for the both of us as well. - No.
- At the moment. I would argue none of those
are likely for either of us, but.
- Possible. - Not to say we don't
have our moments but. So the reason not to talk to Kanye, so I think you should've had the conversation you
had with him in private. That's great, and I've got no
criticism of what you said, had it been in private. In public, I just thought
you're not doing him a favor, if he's mentally ill, right? If he's in the middle
of a manic episode or, you know, I'm not a
clinician, but, you know, I've heard it said of
him that he is bipolar. You're not doing him a favor
sticking a mic in front of him and letting him go off on the
Jews or anything else, right? We know what he thought about the Jews. We know that there's not much illumination that's gonna come from him on that topic. And if it is a symptom
of his mental illness that he thinks these things, well, then you're not doing
him a favor making that even more public. If he's just an asshole and he's just an anti-Semite, an ordinary, you know, garden variety anti-Semite, well, then there's also not much to say unless you're really gonna dig in and kick the shit out of him in public. And I'm saying you can do that with love. I mean, that's the other thing here, is that I don't agree that compassion and love always have this patient, embracing acquiescent face, right? They they don't always feel
good to the recipient, right? There is a sword of wisdom that you can wield compassionately in moments like that where
someone's full of shit and you just make it
absolutely clear to them and to your audience that
they're full of shit. And there's no hatred being communicated. In fact, you could just like, listen, I'm gonna do everyone a favor
right now and, you know, just take your foot out of your mouth. And the truth is, you know, I just wouldn't have
aired the conversation. Like I just don't think it was a document that had to get out there, right? I get that many, this is not a signal you're likely to get from your audience, right? Like I get that many people
in your audience thought, oh my God, that's awesome. You're talking to Kanye and
you're doing it in Lex style where it's just love and
you're not treating him like a pariah and, you know, you're holding this tension between he's this creative
genius who his work we love, and yet he's having this
moment that's so painful and what a tightrope walk and, I get that maybe 90% of your
audience saw it that way. They're still wrong and I still think that was, on balance, not a good thing to
put out into the world. - You don't think it opens up the mind and heart of people that listen to that? Just seeing a person-
- If it does, if it's opening it up
in the wrong direction where just gale force
nonsense is coming in, right? I think we should have an
open mind and an open heart, but there's some clear things here that we have to keep in view. One is the mental illness
component is its own thing. I don't pretend to understand
what's going on with him. But insofar as that's
the reason he's saying what he's saying, do not put this guy on camera and let- - But I had, sorry, on
that point real quick, I had a bunch of
conversations with him offline and I didn't get a
sense of mental illness. So that's why I chose to sit down. - Okay.
- And I didn't get it, I mean, mental illness is such a. - But when he shows up in a gimp hood on Alex Jones's podcast, I mean, either that's more, you know, genius performance in his world or he's unraveling further. - I wouldn't put that
under mental illness. We have to, I think there's another
conversation to be had about how we treat artists. - [Sam] Right. - Because they're weirdos. They're very, I mean, you know, (chuckles) taking words from a Kanye as if he's like Christopher Hitchens
or something like that, like very eloquent, researched, you know, written many books on history, on politics and
geopolitics, on psychology. Kanye didn't do any of that. He's an artist just spouting off. And so that's a different
style conversation and different way to treat the words that are coming out of his mouth.
- So let's leave the mental illness aside,
so if we're gonna say that there's no reason to
think he's mentally ill, and this is just him being
creative and brilliant and opinionated, well, then that falls into the asshole bucket for me. It's like then he's someone, and honestly, the most offensive thing
about him in that interview, from my point of view, is not the anti-Semitism, which, you know, we can talk about, 'cause I think there are
problems just letting him spread those memes as well. But the most offensive thing is just how delusional egocentric he is or was coming off in that interview and in others. Like he has an estimation of himself as this omnibus genius to not only to rival Shakespeare, to exceed Shakespeare, right? I mean, it's like he is the greatest mind that has ever walked among us. And he's more or less
explicit on that point. And yet he manages to talk for hours without saying
anything actually interesting or insightful or factually
illuminating, right? So it's complete delusion
of a very Trumpian sort. You know, it's like, you know, when Trump says he's a genius who understands everything, but nobody takes him seriously, and one wonders whether Trump
takes himself seriously, Kanye seems to believe, he seems to believe his own press. He actually thinks he's, you know, just a colossus. And he may be a great musician. You know, I'm not, you know, it's certainly not my
wheelhouse to compare him to any other musicians but one thing that's patently
obvious from your conversation is he's not who he thinks
he is intellectually or ethically or in any other relevant way. And so when you couple that to the anti-Semitism he was spreading, which was genuinely noxious
and Ill-considered and has potential knock on effects
in the Black community. I mean, there's an ambient
level of anti-Semitism in the Black community that
is worth worrying about and talking about anyway. There's a bunch of guys, you know, playing the knockout game in Brooklyn, just punching Orthodox Jews in the face. And I think letting Kanye
air his anti-Semitism that publicly only raises the likelihood of that
rather than diminishes it. - I don't know, so lemme
say just a couple things. So one, my belief at
the time was it doesn't, it decreases it, showing empathy while
pushing back decreases the likelihood of that. It might, on the surface,
look like it's increasing it, but that's simply
because the anti-Semitism or the hatred in general
is brought to the surface and that people talk about it. But I should also say that
you're one of the only people that wrote to me privately criticizing me. And like out of the people
I really respect and admire. And that was really valuable. That like I had to, painful, 'cause I had to think
through it for a while. - Yeah. - It still haunts me, because the other kind of
criticism I got a lot of, people basically said things towards me, based on who I am, that
they hate me, just- - You mean anti-Semitic things or that- - Yeah, anti-Semitic things. I just hate the word anti-Semitic. It's like racist. - Well, but here's the reality. So I'm someone, so I'm Jewish, you know, although obviously not religious. I have never taken, you know, I've been a student of
the Holocaust, obviously. I know a lot about that and there's reason to be a student of the Holocaust. But in my lifetime and in my experience, I have never taken
antisemitism very seriously. I have not worried about it. I have not made a thing of it. I've done exactly one podcast on it. You know, I had Berry Wise on my podcast when her book came out. But it really is a thing and it's something we have to
keep an eye on societally, because it's a unique
kind of hatred, right? It's unique in that it seems, it's knit together with, it's
not just ordinary racism, it's knit together with
lots of conspiracy theories that never seem to die out. It can, by turns, equally animate the left and the right politically. I mean, what's so perverse
about anti-Semitism, look in the American
context, with the far right, you know, with white supremacists, Jews aren't considered
white, so they hate us in the same spirit in which
they hate Black people or brown people or anyone who's not white. But on the left, Jews are
considered extra white. I mean, we're the extra beneficiaries of white privilege, right? And in the Black community,
that is often the case, right? We're a minority that has thrived. And it seems to stand as a counterpoint to all of the problems that other minorities suffer,
in particular, you know, African-Americans in the American context. And, yeah, Asians are now
getting a little bit of this, you know, like the model minority issue. But Jews have had this
going on for centuries and millennia, and it
never seems to go away. And again, this is something
that I've never focused on, but this has been at a slow boil for as long as we've been alive. And there's no guarantee it
can't suddenly become much, much uglier than we have any reason to expect it to become,
even in our society. And so there's kind of a special concern at moments like that where you have an immensely
influential person in a community who already
has a checkered history with respect to their own
beliefs about the Jews and the conspiracies and all the rest. And he's just messaging, you know, not especially fully opposed by you and anyone else who's given him the microphone at that
moment, to the world. And so that, you know, made my Spidey-Sense tingle. - Yeah, it's complicated.
The stakes are very high. And I, somebody that's
been obviously family and also reading a lot about World War II, and just this whole period, it was a very difficult conversation. But I believe in the power, especially given who I am of, not always, but sometimes
often turning the other cheek. - Oh yeah, and again, things change when they're for public
consumption, you know, so it's like, I mean, the cut for me that, you know, has just, the use case
I keep stumbling upon is the kinds of things that I will
say on a podcast like this, or if I'm giving a public lecture versus the kinds of things
I will say at dinner with strangers or with friends. Like if I'm in an elevator with strangers, and I hear someone say something stupid, I don't feel an intellectual
responsibility to turn around in the confines of that
space with them and say, listen, that thing you
just said about X, Y or Z is completely false and here's why, right? But if somebody says it in front of me on some public dais where I'm
actually talking about ideas, that's when, you know, there's a different responsibility
that comes online so- - The question is how you
say it, how you say it. - Or even whether you say
anything in those, I mean, there are moments there, there are definitely moments
to privilege civility or just to pick your battles. I mean, sometimes it's just not worth it to get into it with
somebody out in real life. - I just believe in the power of empathy, both in the elevator, and when a bunch of people are listening, that when they see you willing to consider another human being's perspective, it just gives more power
to your words after. - Well, yeah, but until it doesn't. Like 'cause you can... - Right, there's a balance.
- You can extend charity too far, right? Like it can be absolutely obvious what someone's motives really are and they're, you know,
dissembling about that, right? And so then you're taking at face value their representations, begins to look like you're
just being duped and you're not actually doing the work of putting pressure on
a bad actor, you know? So it's, and again, the mental illness component here makes it very difficult to think about what you should or shouldn't
have said to Kanye. - So I think the topic of platforming is pretty interesting. Like what's your view on
platforming controversial people? Let's start with the old, would you interview
Hitler on your podcast? And how would you talk to him? Oh, and follow-up question. Would you interview him in 1935, '41, and then like '45? - Well, I think we have
an uncanny valley problem with respect to this issue of whether or not to speak
to bad people, right? So if a person's sufficiently bad, right? If they're all the way out of the valley, then you can talk to them and it's just, it's totally unproblematic
to talk to them, because you don't have to
spend any time signaling to your audience that you
don't agree with them. I mean, if you're interviewing Hitler, you don't have to say, listen, I just gotta say before we start, I don't agree with the whole, you know, genocide thing and, you know,
I just think you're killing, you know, killing mental
patients and vans and that was all bad, that's a bad look. So you just, it can go without saying that you don't agree with this person and you're not platforming them to signal boost their views. You're just trying to, if
they're sufficiently evil, you can go into it very much
as an anthropologist would. You just wanna understand
the nature of evil, right? You just wanna understand
this phenomenon, like, how is this person who they are, right? And that strikes me as a
intellectually interesting and morally necessary thing to do, right? So yes, I think you
always interview Hitler. - Wait, wait, wait, wait,
wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. - Well when you know, once he's Hitler- - But when do you know it? - Once he's legitimately Hitler- - But when do you know it? Is genocide really happening? - Yeah, yeah.
- It's 1942, '43- - No, no, no, if you're on the cusp of it where it's just he's someone
who's gaining power and you don't wanna help facilitate that, then there's a question of whether you can undermine him while
pushing back against him in that interview, right? So there are people I wouldn't talk to just because I don't
wanna give them oxygen, and I don't think that in the context of my interviewing them, I'm gonna be able to take the wind out of their sails at all, right? So it's like for whatever, either because, an asymmetric advantage, because I just know that they
can do something that they, within the span of an hour, that I can't correct for, you know? It's like they can light many small fires and it just takes too
much time to put them out. - That's more like on
the topic of vaccines, for example, having a debate
on the efficacy of vaccines. - Yeah.
- Okay.. - It's not that I don't think sunlight is usually the best disinfectant. I think it is. You know, even these
asymmetries aside, I mean, it is true that a person can always make a mess faster than you
can clean it up, right? But still, there are debate's worth having even given that limitation. And they're the right people
to have those specific debates. And there's certain
topics where, you know, I'll debate someone just
because I'm the right person for the job and it doesn't matter how messy they're gonna be, it's just worth it because I can make my points land at least to the right part of the audience. - So some of it is just your own skill and competence and also
interest in preparing correctly? - Well, yeah, yeah, in the
nature of the subject matter and yeah, but there are other
people who just, by default, I would say, well, there's no reason to
give this guy a platform. And there are also people
who are so confabulatory that they're making such
a mess with every sentence that you, insofar as you're even trying to interact with what they're saying, you're, by definition, going to fail, and you're going to seem to fail to a sufficiently large uninformed audience where it's gonna be a net negative for the cause of truth, no matter how good you are. So like, for instance, I think talking to Alex Jones on any topic for any reason
is probably a bad idea, because I just think he's just neurologically
wired to just, I mean, utter a string of sentences. He'll get 20 sentences out, each of which has to be, each of which is, you know, contains more lies than the last. And there's not time enough in the world to run down, and certainly not time enough in the span of a conversation to run
down each of those leads to bedrock so as to falsify it. I mean, he'll just make shit up or make shit up and then weave it in with, you know, half truths and and micro truths that give some semblance of credibility to somebody out there. I mean, apparently millions
of people out there. And there's just no way to untangle that in real time with him. I have noticed that you
have an allergic reaction to confabulatorization. - [Sam] Yeah, confabulation, yeah. - Confabulation.
- Yeah, yeah. - That if somebody says
something a little micro untruth, it really stops your brain. - Here I'm not talking
about micro untruths, I'm just talking about making
up things out of whole cloth. Just like if someone says
something like, well, what about, and then the thing they put at the end of that sentence is just a set of pseudo facts, right? That you can't possibly authenticate or not in the span of that
conversation, they will, you know, whether it's about
UFOs or anything else, right? They will seem to make you
look like an ignoramus, when in fact everything they're
saying is specious, right? Whether they know it or not. I mean, there's some
people who are just crazy and there's some people who are just bullshitting
and they're not even tracking whether it's true. It just feels good and there's some people who are consciously lying about things. - But don't you think there's just a kinda jazz masterpiece of untruth that you should
be able to just wave off by saying like, well, none of that is backed up by any evidence and just almost like take
it to the humor place? - Well, yeah.
- And then... - But the thing is is, I mean, just the place I'm
familiar with doing this and not doing this is on specific conspiracies
like 9/11 truth, right? Like the 9/11, so because of my, because of what 9/11 did
to my intellectual life, I mean, it really just, you know, it sent me down a path for
the better part of a decade, like I became a critic of religion when I don't know if I was ever gonna be a critic of religion, right? But that like, it happened
to be in my wheelhouse, 'cause I had spent so much time
studying religion on my own, and I was also very interested in the underlying spiritual
concerns of every religion. And so I was, you know, I devoted more than a
full decade of my life to just, you know, what is real here? What is possible? What is the nature of subjective reality and how does it relate
to reality at large? And is there anything to, you know, who was someone like Jesus or Buddha? And are these people frauds or are these just myths or is there really a continuum of insight to be had
here that is interesting? So I spent a lot of time on that question through the full decade of my 20s. - [Lex] And that was launched
in part by 9/11 truth or- - No, but then when 9/11 happened, I had spent all this time, you know, reading religious books, understanding, empathically understanding the motivations of religious people, right? Knowing just how fully
certain people believe what they say they believe, right? So I took religious
convictions very seriously. And then people started flying
plants into our buildings and so I knew that there was something to be said about that-
- Allegedly. - The core doctrines of
Islam, yeah, exactly. So I went down, so that became my wheelhouse
for a time, you know, terrorism and jihadism and related topics. And so the 9/11 truth
conspiracy thing kept, you know, getting aimed at me. And the question was, well, do I wanna debate these people, right, like.
- Yeah, Alex Jones, perhaps? - Yeah, I mean, yeah, so Alex Jones, I think
was an early purveyor of it, although I don't think I knew
who he was at that point. And privately I had some very long debates with people who, you know, one person in my family went
way down that rabbit hole. And I just, you know,
every six months or so, I'd literally write the
two-hour email, you know, and that would try to deprogram him, you know, however ineffectually. And so I went back and forth
for years on that topic in private with people, but I could see the
structure of the conspiracy. I could see the nature of how impossible it was to play Whac-A-Mole sufficiently well, so as to convince anyone of anything who was not seeing the problematic structure
of that way of thinking. I mean, it's not actually a thesis. It's a proliferation of anomalies that you can't actually
connect all the dots that are being pointed to. They don't connect in a coherent way. They're incompatible thesis that are not, and their incompatibility
is not being acknowledged. But they're running this algorithm of things are never what they seem. There's always malicious
conspirators doing things perfectly that we see all, we see evidence of human
incompetence everywhere else. No one can tie their shoes, you know, expertly anywhere else. But over here, people are perfectly competent, they're perfectly concealing thing, like thousands of people
are collaborating, you know, inexplicably, I mean,
incentivized by what, who knows? They're collaborating to murder thousands of their neighbors and no one
is breathing a peep about it. No one's getting caught on camera. No one's breathed a word of
it to a journalist and so I've dealt with that style of thinking and I know what it's like to be in the weeds of a conversation like that
and the person will say, okay, well, but what
do you make of the fact that all those F-16s were flown 800 miles out to sea on the morning of 9/11 doing an exercise that hadn't even been scheduled
for that day, but it was, and now all of these are, I dimly recall some thesis of that kind, but I'm just making these
things up now, right? So like that detail, hadn't even been scheduled for that day, inexplicably run that day. Like so how long would it take
to track that down, right? The idea that this is anomalous, like that there was a F-16 exercise run and it wasn't even supposed
to be run that day, right? - [Lex] Yeah. - Someone like Alex Jones, their speech pattern is to pack as much of that stuff in as possible at the highest velocity
that a person can speak. And unless you're knocking
down each one of those things to that audience, you appear
to just be uninformed. You appear to just not be,
you know, wait a minute, he didn't know about the F-16s? - [Lex] Yeah, sure. - He doesn't know about
Project Mockingbird? You haven't heard about
Project Mockingbird? I just made up Project Mockingbird. I don't know what it is, but that's the kind of thing
that comes tumbling out in a conversation like that. That's the kind of thing, frankly, I was worried about in
the COVID conversation, because not that someone like
Bret would do it consciously, but someone like Bret is swimming in a sea of misinformation
on social, living on Twitter, getting people sending the
blog post and the study from, you know, the Philippines that
showed that in this cohort, ivermectin did X, right? And like to actually run
anything to ground, right? You have to actually do
the work journalistically and scientifically and
run it to ground, right? So for some of these questions, you actually have to be a
statistician to say, okay, they used the wrong statistics
in this experiment, right? Now, yes, we could take
all the time to do that, or we could, at every stage along the way, in a context where we have experts we can trust, go with what 97% of the
experts are saying about X, about the safety of mRNA, about the transmissibility of COVID, about whether to wear
masks or not wear masks. And I completely agree
that that broke down unacceptably over the last few years, but I think that's largely, social media and blogs and the efforts of podcasters
and Substack writers were not just a response to that, I think it was a symptom of
that and a cause of that, right? And I think we are living
in an environment where people, we've basically, we have trained ourselves not to be able to agree about facts on any topic, no matter how urgent, right? What's flying in our sky? You know, what's happening in Ukraine? Is Putin just de-Nazifying Ukraine? I mean, like, there are people who we respect who are spending time down
that particular rabbit hole. Like this is, you know, maybe there are
a lot of Nazis in Ukraine, and that's the real problem, right? Maybe Putin's not the
bad actor here, right? How much time do I have to spend empathizing with Putin to
the point of thinking, well, maybe Putin's got a point. And it's like, what about the polonium
and the nerve agents and the killing of journalists and the, you know, Navalny and
like, does that count? Well, no, listen, I'm not paying so much attention to that, because I'm following all
these interesting people on Twitter and they're giving
some pro-Putin material here. And there are some Nazis in Ukraine. It's not like there are
no Nazis in Ukraine. How am I gonna weight these things? I think people are being
driven crazy by Twitter. - Yeah, but you're kinda
speaking to conspiracy theories that pollute everything, but every example you gave is kind of a bad faith style of conversation. - But it's not necessarily
knowingly bad faith by, I mean, the people who are
worried about Ukrainian Nazis, I mean, they're some of the same people. They're the same people
who are worried about ivermectin got suppressed. Like Ivermectin is really a panacea, but it got suppressed, because no one could make billions on it. It's the same, it's literally, in many cases, the same
people and the same efforts to unearth those facts.
- And you're saying it's very difficult to have conversations with those kinds of people. What about a conversation
with Trump himself? Would you do a podcast with Trump? - No, I don't think so. I don't think I'd be
learning anything about him. It's like with Hitler, and I'm not comparing
Trump to Hitler, but- - Clips guy, here's your chance. - Yeah.
- You got this one. - With certain world historical figures, I would just feel like, okay, this is an opportunity to learn something that I'm not gonna learn. I think Trump is among the
most superficial people we have ever laid eyes on, right? Like he is in public view, right? And I'm sure there's some
distance between who he is in private and who he is in public, but it's not gonna be the kind of distance that's gonna blow my mind. And I think, so I think the liability of, so for instance, I think Joe Rogan was very wise not to have
Trump on his podcast. I think all he would've been doing is he would've put himself in a situation where he couldn't adequately contain the damage Trump was doing and he was just gonna make
Trump seem cool to a whole new, you know, potentially new cohort of his massive audience, right? I mean, they would've had a lot of laughs. Trump's funny, I mean, the entertainment value of
things is so influential. I mean, there was that one
debate where Trump, you know, got a massive laugh
on, you know, his line, you know, only Rosie O'Donnell, right? The truth is, we're living in a political
system where if you can get a big laugh during a
political debate, you win. It doesn't matter who you are, right? Like that's the level of, you know, it doesn't matter how uninformed you are, it doesn't matter that
half the debate was about what the hell we should
do about, you know, a threat of nuclear war or anything else. It's, we're monkeys, right? And we like to laugh. - Well, 'cause you brought up Joe, he's somebody like you I look up to. I've learned a lot from him, because I think who he is
privately as a human being, also he's kind of the
voice of curiosity to me. He inspired me that, so
unending, open-minded curiosity, much like you are the voice of reason. They recently had a podcast, Joe had recently a podcast
with Jordan Peterson and brought you up saying
they still have hope for you. - Mm-hmm. Yeah. - Any chance that-
- Saw that clip. Yeah. - Any chance that you'd talk to Joe again and reinvigorate your friendship? - Yeah, well, I reached
out to him privately when I saw that clip.
- Did you use the power of love? - Joe knows I love him and
consider him a friend, right? So there's no issue there. He also knows I'll be
happy to do his podcast when we get that together,
you know, so there's no, I've got no policy of not talking to Joe or not doing his podcast. I mean, I think we got a little sideways along these same lines where, you know, we've talked about Bret
and Elon and other people. It was never to that
degree with Joe because Joe's in a very different lane, right? And consciously so, I mean, Joe is a standup comic who interviews, who just is interested in everything, interviews the widest
conceivable variety of people and just lets his interests collide with their expertise, sort of, you know, lack of expertise. I mean, he's, again, it's a super wide variety of people. He'll talk about anything, and he can always pull the
rip cord saying, you know, I don't know what the fuck I'm saying, I'm a comic, I'm stoned. We just drank too much, right? Like it's very entertaining. It's all in, you know, to my eye, it's all in good faith. I think Joe is an extraordinarily
ethical, good person. - Also doesn't use Twitter. Doesn't really use Twitter.
- Right. Yeah, yeah. No, but the crucial difference though is because he is an entertainer first, I mean, I'm not saying he's not smart and he doesn't understand things. I mean, what's potentially
confusing is he's very smart and he's also very informed. His full-time job is, you know, when he is not doing standup or doing color commentary for the UFC, his full-time job is talking
to lots of very smart people at great length. So he's created, you know, the Joe Rogan University for himself and he's gotten a lot of
information crammed into his head. So it's not that he's
uninformed, but he can always, when he feels that he's uninformed or when it turns out he
was wrong about something, he can always pull the rip chord and say, I'm just a comic. We were stoned. It was fun. You know, don't take
medical advice from me. I don't play a doctor
on the internet. Right? I can't quite do that, right? You can't quite do that.
We're in different lanes. I'm not saying you and I are
in exactly the same lane, but for much of Joe's audience, I'm just this establishment shill who's just banging on about, you know, the universities and medical journals and it's not true, but that
would be the perception. And as a counterpoint to
a lot of what's being said on Joe's podcast or, you know, certainly Bret's podcast on these topics, I can see how they
would form that opinion. But in reality, if you
listen to me long enough, you hear that I've said as
much against the woke nonsense as anyone, even any lunatic on the right who can only keep that
bright shining object in view, right? So there's nothing that Candace Owens has said about wokeness that
I haven't said about wokeness insofar as she's speaking
rationally about wokeness. But we have to be able to keep multiple things in view, right? If you could only look at
the problem of wokeness and you couldn't acknowledge the problem of Trump and Trumpism and QAnon and the explosion of
irrationality that was happening on the right and bigotry that
was happening on the right, you were just disregarding
half of the landscape and many people took half of the problem. in recent years, The last five years is a story
of many people taking half of the problem and monetizing
that half of the problem and getting captured by an audience that only wanted that half of the problem talked about in that way. And, I mean, this is the larger issue of audience capture,
which, you know, is very, I'm sure it's an ancient problem, but it's a very helpful phrase that I think comes to us courtesy of our mutual friend Eric Weinstein and audience capture's a thing. And I believe I've
witnessed many, you know, casualties of it. And if there's anything
I've been on guard against in my life, you know,
professionally it's been that. And when I noticed that I had
a lot of people in my audience who didn't like my criticizing Trump, I really leaned into it. And when I noticed that
a lot of the other cohort of my audience didn't like
me criticizing the far left and wokeness, they thought I was, you know, exaggerating that problem. I leaned into it because
I thought those parts of my audience were absolutely wrong. And I didn't care about
whether I was gonna lose those parts of my audience. There are people who
have created, you know, knowingly or not, there are people who've
created different incentives for themselves, because
of how they've monetized their podcast and because
of the kind of signal they've responded to in their audience. And I worry about, you know, Bret would consider
this a totally invidious ad hominem thing to say, but I really do worry that
that's happened to Bret. I think I cannot explain
how you do a hundred, with all the things in the
universe to be interested in and of all the things he's competent to speak intelligently about, I don't know how you do a hundred podcasts in a row on COVID, right? It's just, it makes no sense. - You thin,k in part, audience
capture can explain that? - I absolutely think it can. Yeah. - What about, do you, like, for example, do you feel pressure to not admit that you made a mistake on COVID or made a mistake on Trump? I'm not saying you feel that way, but do you feel this pressure? So you've attacked audience capture within the way you do stuff, so you don't feel as much
pressure from the audience, but within your own ego? - I mean, again, the people who think I'm wrong about any of these topics are gonna think, okay, you're just not admitting
that you're wrong. But then now we're having a
dispute about specific facts. There are things that
I believed about COVID or worried might be true
about COVID two years ago that I no longer believe or
I'm not so worried about now and vice versa. I mean, like things have flipped, certain things have flipped upside down. The question is, was I wrong? So here's the cartoon version of it, but this is something I
said probably 18 months ago, and it's still true. You know, when I saw what
Bret was doing on COVID, you know, let's call it two years ago, I said, even if he is right, even if it turns out that
ivermectin is a panacea and the mRNA vaccines kill
millions of people, right? He's still wrong right now. His reasoning is still flawed right now. His facts still suck right now, right? And his confidence is, is unjustified now. That was true then, that will
always be true then, right? And so, and not much has changed for me to revisit any of my time points along the way. Again, I will totally concede that if I had teenage boys and their schools were demanding that they be vaccinated
with the mRNA vaccine, I would be powerfully annoyed, right? Like I wouldn't know
what I was gonna do and I would be doing more
research about myocarditis, and I'd be badgering our doctors, and I would be worried that
we have a medical system and a pharmaceutical system
and a healthcare system and a public health system
that's not incentivized to look at any of this in a fine grain way and they just want one blanket admonition to the entire population. Just take the shot, you idiots. I view that largely, as a result, a panicked response to the
misinformation explosion that happened and the public, the populist resistance
animated by misinformation that just made it impossible to get anyone to cooperate, right? So it was just, part of it is, again, a pendulum swing in the wrong direction, somewhat analogous to the
woke response to Trump and the Trumpist response to woke, right? So a lot of people have
just gotten pushed around for bad reasons, but
understandable reasons, but yes, there are caveats to, things have changed
about my view of COVID, but the question is if you
roll back the clock 18 months, was I wrong to want to platform Eric Topol, you know, a very well-respected
cardiologist, on this topic, or, you know, Nicholas Christakis to talk about the network effects of, you know, whether we should
close schools, right? He had written a book on COVID. His, you know, network
effects or his wheelhouse, both as an MD and as a sociologist. There was a lot that we believed
we knew about the efficacy of closing schools
during pandemics, right? You know, during the Spanish
flu pandemic and others, right? But there's a lot we
didn't know about COVID. We didn't know, we didn't know how negligible the effects
would be on kids compared to older people. We didn't know, like the- - So my problem, I really enjoyed your
conversation with Eric Topol, but also didn't. So he's one of the great
communicators, in many ways, on Twitter, like distillation
of the current data. But he, I hope I'm not overstating it, but there is a bit of an arrogance from him that I think could be explained
by him being exhausted, by being constantly attacked
by conspiracy theory, like anti-vaxxers.
- Yeah. - To me, the same thing
happens with people that start drifting to be being right wing, is to get attacked so much by the left, they become almost irrational
and arrogant in their beliefs. And I felt your
conversation with Eric Topol did not sufficiently empathize with people that have skepticism, but also did not sufficiently communicate uncertainty we have. So like many of the decisions you made, many of the things you were talking about were kind of saying there's
a lot of uncertainty, but this is the best
thing we could do now. - Well, it was a forced choice. You're gonna get COVID, do you wanna be vaccinated
when you get it? That was always, in my view, an easy choice. And it's up until you start breaking apart the
cohorts and you start saying, okay, wait a minute, there
is this myocarditis issue in young men. Let's talk about that. Before that story emerged, it was just clear that this is, if it's not knocking down transmission as much as we had hoped, it is still mitigating
severe illness and death. And I still believe that it is the current view of most people competent to analyze the data, that we lost something like
300,000 people unnecessarily in the US because of a vaccine hesitancy. - But I think there's a way to communicate with humility about the uncertainty of things that would increase the vaccination rate. - I do believe that it is rational and sometimes effective to signal impatience with certain bad ideas, right? And certain conspiracy theories and certain forms of misinformation. - You think so? - 'Cause it's just- - I just think it makes you look like a douche bag most times. - Well, I mean, certain
people are persuadable, certain people are not
persuadable, but it's... No, 'cause there's not enough,
it's the opportunity cost. Not everything can be given a patient hearing. It's like you can't have
a physics conference and then let people in to just trumpet their pet theories about, you know, the grand
unified vision of physics when they're obviously crazy or they're obviously half
crazy or they're just not, you know, the people, like you begin to get a sense for this when it is your wheelhouse, but there are people who kind of declare their irrelevance to the
conversation fairly quickly without knowing that
they have done it, right? And the truth is, I think I'm one of those people on the topic of COVID, right? Like, it's like it's not, it's never that I felt, listen, I know exactly what's going on here. I know these mRNA vaccines are safe. I know exactly how to run a lockdown. No, this is a situation where
you want the actual pilots to fly the plane, right? We needed experts who we could trust. And insofar as our experts got captured by all manner of things, I mean, some of them got captured by Trump. Some of them were made to look ridiculous just standing next to Trump while he was bloviating about, you know, whatever that, you know,
it's just gonna go away. There's just 15 people, you know, there's 15 people in a cruise ship and it's just gonna go away. There's gonna be no problem. Or it's like when he said he, you know, "Many of these doctors think I understand this better than them. They're just amazed at
how I understand this." And you've got doctors, real doctors, the heads of the CDC and NIH standing around just ashen-faced while he is talking, you know? All of this was deeply corrupting of the public communication
of science on bull. And then again, I've banged on about the
depredations of wokeness. The woke thing was a disaster, right? Still is a disaster. But it doesn't mean that, I mean, but the thing is, there's a big difference between
me and Bret in this case. I didn't do a hundred podcasts on COVID. I did like two podcasts on COVID. The measure of my concern
about COVID can be measured in how many podcasts I did on it, right? It's like once we had a sense
of how to live with COVID, I was just living with COVID, right? Like, okay, you get vaxxed
or don't get vaxxed? Wear a mask or don't wear a
mask, travel or don't travel? like you've got a few things to decide, but my kids were stuck at
home on iPads, you know, for too long. I didn't agree with that. You know, it was obviously not functional. Like I criticized that on the margins, but there was not much to do about it, but the thing I didn't do is make this my life and just browbeat people
with one message or another. We need a public health regime where we can trust what
confident people are saying to us about, you know, what medicines are safe to take. And in the absence of
that, craziness is gonna, even in the presence of that, craziness is gonna proliferate, given the tools we've built. But in the absence of that, it's gonna proliferate for
understandable reasons. And that's gonna, it's not gonna be good
next time when something, orders of magnitude
more dangerous hits us. And that's, I spent a, you know, insofar as I think about this issue, I think much more about
next time than this time. - Before this COVID thing, you and Bret had some good conversations. I would say we're friends. What do you admire most about Bret outside of all the criticism we've
had about this COVID topic? - Well, I think Bret
is very smart and he's a very ethical person who wants good things for the world. I mean, I have no reason to doubt that. So the fact that we're on, you know, we're crosswise on this issue does not mean that I
think he's a bad person. I mean, the thing that worried
me about what he was doing, and this was true of Joe,
and this was true of Elon, this was the true of many other people, is that once you're messaging
at scale to a vast audience, you incur a certain kind
of responsibility not to get people killed. And I did worry that, yeah, people were making
decisions on the basis of the information that
was getting shared there. And that's why I was, I think, fairly circumspect. I just said, okay, give me the center of the fairway expert
opinion at this time point and at this time point
and at this time point, and then I'm out, right? I don't have any more to say about this. I'm not an expert on COVID. I'm not an expert on the
safety of mRNA vaccines. If something changes, so is to become newsworthy,
then maybe I'll do a podcast, so I just did a podcast on the lab leak. - Right, the lab leak.
- Right? I was never skeptical of
the lab leak hypothesis. Bret was very early on saying, "This is a lab leak, right?" At a point where my only position was who cares if it's a lab leak, right? Like the thing we have to get straight is what do we do given the
nature of this pandemic? - But also we should say
that you've actually stated that it is a possibility. - Oh yeah.
- You just said it doesn't quite matter. - I mean, the time to figure that out, now I've actually, I have had, my podcast guest on this
topic changed my view of this because, you know, one of the guests, Alina Chan, made the point that, no, actually the best time to
figure out the origin of this is immediately, right, because in the avert you
lose touch with the evidence. And I hadn't really been
thinking about that. Like I didn't, if you'd come
back after a year, you know, there are certain facts
you might not be able to get in hand. But I've always felt that it didn't matter for two reasons. One is we had the genome of the virus and we could design, we're quickly immediately
designing vaccines against that genome, and
that's what we had to do. And then we had to figure
out how to vaccinate and to mitigate and to develop
treatments, and all of that. So the origin story didn't matter. Generically speaking, either origin story was politically inflammatory and made the Chinese look bad, right? And the Chinese response
to this looks bad, whatever the origin story, right? They're not cooperating. They're stopping their domestic flights, but letting their
international flights go. I mean, it's just, they were bad actors and
they should be treated as such regardless of the origin, right? And, you know, I would argue that the wet market origin is even more politically invidious
than the lab leak origin. I mean-
- Why do you think? - Because the lab leak, to my eye, the lab leak could
happen to anyone, right? All these advanced countries are running these dangerous labs. That's a practice that we
should be worried about, you know, in general. We know lab leaks are a problem. There have been multiple lab
leaks of even worse things that haven't gotten out
of hand in this way, but, you know, worse pathogens. We're wise to be worried about this. And on some level, it could
happen to anyone, right? The wet market makes them
look like barbarians, live in another century. Like you gotta clean up those wet markets. Like what are you doing putting a bat on top of a pangolin on
top of a duck on top. It's like, get your shit together. So like if anything, the wet
market makes them look worse, in my view. Now I'm sure there's, I'm sure that what they actually
did to conceal a lab leak, if it was a lab leak, I mean, all of that is gonna look odious. - Do you think we'll ever
get to the bottom of that? I mean, one of the big negative, I would say, failures of
Anthony Fauci, and so on, is to be transparent and clear, and it's just a good communicator about gain of function research, the dangers of that, the
success, like the, you know, why it's a useful way of research, but it's also dangerous. - [Sam] Right. - You know, just being
transparent about that as opposed to just
coming off really shady. Of course the conspiracy theorists and the politicians are not helping, but this just created a giant mess. - Yeah, no, I would agree. So that exchange with Fauci
and Rand Paul that went viral, yeah, I would agree that
Fauci looked like he was taking refuge in kind of
very lawyered language and not giving a straightforward account of what we do and why we do it. And so, yeah, I think it looked shady. It played shady and it probably was shady. I mean, I don't know how
personally entangled he is with any of this, but yeah, the gain of function
research is something that I think we're wise to be worried about. And in so far as I judge myself adequate to have an opinion on this, I think it should be banned, right? Like probably a podcast I'll do, you know, if you or
somebody else doesn't do it in the meantime, you know, I would like a virologist on to defend it against a virologist who would criticize it. Forget about just the
gain of function research. I don't even understand
virus hunting at this point. It's like, I don't know. I don't even know why you
need to go into a cave to find this next virus
that could be circulating among bats that may
jump zoonotically to us. Why do that when we can make, when we can sequence in
a day and make vaccines in a weekend? I mean like what kind of head start do you think you're getting? - That's the surprising new thing, how quickly we can develop a vaccine. - [Sam] Exactly. That's, (chuckling) yeah.
That's really interesting. But the shadiness around lab leak. - I think the point I didn't
make about Bret's style of engaging this issue is
people are using the fact that he was early on lab leak to suggest that he was
right about ivermectin and about mRNA vaccines and all the rest. Like, no, none of that connects and it was possible to
be falsely confident, like you shouldn't have
been confident about lab, no one should have been
confident about lab leak early, even if it turns out
to be lab leak, right? It was always plausible. It was never definite,
it still isn't definite. Zoonotic is also quite plausible. It certainly was super plausible then. Both are politically uncomfortable. Both at the time were inflammatory to be banging on about when we were trying to secure some kind of cooperation
from the Chinese, right? So there's a time for these things and it's possible to be
right by accident, right? You're reasoning, the
style of reasoning matters whether you're right or not, you know? It's like, because your style of reasoning is dictating what you're
gonna do on the next topic. - Sure, but this is, this multi-variate situation here, it's really difficult to
know what's right on COVID, given all the uncertainty, all the chaos, especially when you step
outside the pure biology, virology of it and you
start getting into policy. - [Sam] Hmm. - It's really-
- Yeah. It's just trade-offs. Yeah. - Like transmissibility of the virus. Sure, just knowing if 65% of the population gets vaccinated, what effect would that have? Just even knowing those things, just modeling all those things. Given all the other incentives. I mean, Pfizer. I dunno what to think
- But you had the CEO of Pfizer on your podcast. Did you leave that
conversation feeling like this is a person who is consciously reaping windfall profits on a dangerous vaccine and putting everyone at intolerable risk or did you think this person was making a good faith
attempt to save lives and had no taint of bad incentives
or something between. - The thing I sensed, and I felt in part, it was a failure on my part, but I sensed that I was
talking to a politician. So it's not thinking of
there was malevolence there or benevolence, there was... - He just had a job. - He put on a suit and
I was talking to a suit, not a human being. Now he said that his son was
a big fan of the podcast, which is why he wanted to do it. So I thought I would be
talking to a human being. And I asked challenging questions, but I thought the
internet thinks otherwise. Every single question in that interview was a challenging one,
but it wasn't grilling, which is what people seem to want to do with pharmaceutical companies. There's a deep distrust with
pharmaceutical companies. - But what's the alternative? I mean, I totally get-
- Right. - That windfall profits, at a time of, you know, a public health
emergency looks bad. It is a bad look, right? But how do we reward and return capital to risk takers who will spend a billion
dollars to design a new drug for a disease that maybe only harms, you know, a single digit percentage
of the population. It's like, well, what
do we wanna encourage? And who do we want to get rich? I mean, so like the
person who cures cancer, do we want that person to get rich or not? We want the person who gave
us the iPhone to get rich, but we don't want the person who cures cancer to get rich? I mean, what are we trying to do- - I think it's a very gray area. So what we want is the person who declares that they have a cure for cancer to have authenticity and transparency. Like I think we're good now, as a population, smelling bullshit. And there is something about the Pfizer CEO, for example, just CEOs of pharmaceutical
companies in general, just because they're so lawyered up, so much marketing, PR people, that they are, you just smell bullshit. You're not talking to real human, that it just feels like none of it is transparent to us as a public. So like this whole talking point that Pfizer's only
interested in helping people just doesn't ring true, even though it very well could be true. It's the same thing with Bill Gates, who seems to be, at scale, helping a huge amount
of people in the world. - Yeah.
- And yet there's something about the way he delivers that message where people are like, these seem suspicious. What's happening underneath this? - [Sam] Right. - There's certain kinds of
communication styles that seem to be more, serve as better catalysts
for conspiracy theories. And I'm not sure what that is, because I don't think there's
an alternative for capitalism in delivering drugs that help people. But also at the same time, there seems to need to
be a more transparency and plus like regulation that
actually makes sense versus it seems like pharmaceutical companies are susceptible to corruption. - Yeah, I worry about all that, but I also do think that most of the people going into those fields, and most of the people
going into government- - They wanna do good.
- Are doing it for a good, they're non-psychopaths
trying to get good things done and trying to solve hard problems. And they're not trying to get rich. I mean, many of the people are, it's like, I mean, bad incentives
are something, again, I've uttered that phrase
30 times on this podcast, but it's just, almost everywhere it
explains normal people creating terrible harm, right? It's not that there are that
many bad people, you know? And, yes, it makes the truly bad people that much more remarkable and worth paying attention to. But the bad incentives and the power of bad ideas do much more harm. Because, I mean, that's what gets good people
running in the wrong direction or doing things that are clearly creating
unnecessary suffering. - You've had, and I hope still have a friendship with Elon Musk, especially over the topic of AI. You have a lot of interesting
ideas that you both share, concerns that you both share. Well, let me first ask, what
do you admire most about Elon? - Well, you know, I had
a lot of fun with Elon. I like Elon a lot. I mean, Elon, I knew as
a friend, I like a lot. And, you know, it's not gonna surprise anyone. I mean, he's done and he's
continuing to do amazing things. And I think he's, you know, I think if many of
his aspirations are realized, the world would be a much better place. I think it's just, it's amazing to see what he's built and what he's attempted to
build and what he may yet build. - So with Tesla, with SpaceX, with- - Yeah, no, I'm a fan
of almost all of that. I mean, there are
wrinkles to a lot of that, you know, or some of that. - All humans are full of wrinkles. - There's something very Trumpian about how he's acting on Twitter, right? I mean, Twitter, I think Twitter's, he thinks Twitter is great. He bought the place because
he thinks it's so great. I think Twitter's
driving him crazy, right? I think he's needlessly
complicating his life and harming his reputation
and creating a lot of noise and harming a lot of other people. I mean, so like, the thing that I objected
to with him on Twitter is not that he bought it
and made changes to it. I mean, that was not, again, I remain agnostic as to whether or not he can improve the platform. It was how he was personally
behaving on Twitter, not just toward me, but toward the world. I think when you, you know, forward an article about
Nancy Pelosi's husband being attacked, not as
he was by some lunatic, but that it's just some
gay tryst gone awry, right? That's not what it seems and you link to a website that previously claimed that Hillary Clinton was dead and that a body double was
campaigning in her place, that thing was exploding in Trumpistan as a conspiracy theory, right? And it was having its effect, and it matters that he
was signal boosting it in front of 130 million people. And so it is with saying that your, you know, your former employee, Yoel Roth is a pedophile, right? I mean, it's like that
has real consequences. It appeared to be complete bullshit. And now this guy's getting inundated with death threats, right? And Elon, all that's
totally predictable, right? And so he's behaving quite recklessly and there's a long list
of things like that that he's done on Twitter. It's not ethical. It's not good for him. It's not good for the
world. It's not serious. It's just, it's a very
adolescent relationship to real problems in our society. And so my problem with how he's behaved is that he's purported to
touch real issues by turns. Like, okay, do I give the
satellites to Ukraine or not? Do I minimize their use of them or not? Should I publicly worry about
World War III or not, right? He's doing this shit on Twitter, right? And at the same moment, he's doing these other very impulsive ill-considered things, and he's not showing any willingness to really clean up the mess he makes. He brings Kanye on knowing
he's an anti-Semite who's got mental health problems and then kicks him off for a swastika, which I probably wouldn't
have kicked him off for a swastika. It's like that's even, like can you really kick
people off for swastikas? Is that something that you get banned for? I mean, are you a free speech absolutist if you can't let a swastika show up? I'm not even sure that's an enforceable terms of service, right? There are moments to use swastikas that are not conveying
hate and not raising the risk of violence. - Clip that. - Yeah, but so much of what he's doing, given that he's, again, scale matters. He's doing this in front
of 130 million people, that's very different
than a million people. And that's very different
than 100,000 people. And so when I went off
the tracks with Elon, he was doing this about COVID and again, this was a situation where I tried to privately mitigate a friend's behavior and it didn't work out very well. - Did you try to correct him sort of highlighting things he might be wrong on? - Yeah.
- Or did you use the Lex power of love method? I should write like a pamphlet for Sam Harris to follow.
- Well, no, but it was totally coming
from a place of love, because I was concerned
about his reputation. I was concerned about what he, I mean, there was a twofold concern. I could see what was
happening with the tweet. I mean, he'd had this
original tweet that was, I think it was panic over COVID is dumb, or something like that, right? This is in March. This is early March, 2020. - Oh, super early days.
- Super early. When nobody knew anything, but we saw what was
happening in Italy, right? It was totally kicking off. - God, that was a wild time. That's when the toilet paper. - It was totally wild. But that became the most influential tweet on Twitter for that week. I mean, it had more engagement
than any other tweet, more than any crazy
thing Trump was tweeting. I mean, it went off, again, it was just a nuclear bomb of information. And I could see that people
were responding to it. Like wait a minute, okay, here's this genius technologist who must have inside information
about everything, right? Surely he knows something that is not on the surface about this pandemic. And they were reading into it a lot of information that
I knew wasn't there, right? And at the time, I didn't think he had any
reason to be suggesting that. I think he was just
firing off a tweet, right? So I reached out to him
in private, and, I mean, because it was a private
text conversation, I won't talk about the details, but I'm just saying
that's a case, you know, among the many cases of friends
who have public platforms and who did something that
I thought was dangerous and ill-considered. This was a case where I
reached out in private and tried to help, genuinely help because it was just, I thought it was harmful in every sense, because it was being misinterpreted. And it was like, oh, okay, you can say that panic over
anything is dumb, fine, But this was not how this was landing. This was like non-issue, conspiracy, there's gonna be no covid in the US. It's gonna peter out. It's just gonna become a cold. I mean, that's how this
was getting received. Whereas at that moment, it was absolutely obvious how
big a deal this was gonna be or that it was gonna, at minimum, going to be a big deal. - I don't know if it was obvious, but it was obvious there was a significant probability
that it could be a big deal. I remember in March, it
was unclear like how big, 'cause there was still stories of it. Like it's probably going to like, the big concern, the
hospitals might overfill, but it's gonna die out in
like two months or something. - Yeah, we did, no, but there was no way we
weren't going to have tens of thousands of deaths at
a minimum at that point. And it was every, it was totally rational to be worried about hundreds of thousands. And when Nicholas Christakis
came on my podcast very early, you know, he predicted quite confidently that we would have about
a million people dead in the US, right? And that didn't seem, you know, it was, you know, I think appropriately hedged,
but, I mean, it was still, it was just like, okay, it's just gonna, we're just kind of riding
this exponential and you know, it'd be very surprising not to have that order of magnitude and not something much, much less. And so, anyway, I mean, again, to close the story on Elon, I could see how this was being received and I tried to get him to walk that back. And then we had a fairly long and detailed exchange on this issue and so that intervention didn't work. And it was not done, you
know, I was not an asshole. I was not, I was just
concerned, you know, for him, for the world, and, you know. And then there are other
relationships where I didn't take the, again, that's an example where taking
the time didn't work, right? Privately, there are other
relationships where I thought, okay, this is just gonna be
more trouble than it's worth. And so I just ignored it, you know? And there's a lot of that and, again, I'm not comfortable with
how this is all netted out, because I don't know if, you know, you know, frankly, I'm not
comfortable with how much time in this conversation
we've spent talking about these specific people, like, what good is it for me to talk about Elon or Bret or any of- - I think there's a lot of good, because those friendships,
listen, as a fan, these are the conversations I loved, love as a fan. And it feels like COVID
has robbed the world of these conversations, because you were exchanging
back and forth on Twitter, but that's not what I
mean by conversations. Like long form discussions,
like a debate about COVID, like a normal debate. - But there is no, Elon and I shouldn't be debating COVID. - You should be. Here's the thing, with humility, like basically saying
we don't really know, like the Rogan method, we're
just a bunch of idiots. Like one is an engineer, you're
a neuroscientist, but like, and just kind of, okay, here's the evidence and
be like normal people. That's what everybody was doing. The whole world was like trying
to figure out what the hell? - Yeah, but the issue was that at that, so at the moment I had
this collision with Elon, certain things were not debatable, right? It was just, it was absolutely clear
where this was going. It wasn't clear how far it was gonna go or how quickly we would mitigate it, but it was absolutely
clear that it was gonna be an issue, right? The train had come off
the tracks in Italy, we knew we weren't gonna seal our borders. There were already people, you know, there ARE already cases known
to many of us personally in the US at that point. And he was operating by a very different logic that I couldn't engage with. - Sure, but that logic represents
a part of the population, and there's a lot of
interesting topics that have a lot of uncertainty around them, like the effectiveness of masks, like- - Yeah, but no, but
where things broke down was not at the point of, oh, there's a lot to talk
about, a lot to debate. This is all very interesting. And who knows what's what. It broke down very early at, this is, you know, there's nothing to talk about here. Like either there's a
water bottle on the table or there isn't, right, like. - Well, technically there's only 1/4 of a water bottle.
- Right, yep. - So what defines a water bottle? Is it the water inside the water bottle or is it the water bottle? What I'm giving you is an example of it's worth a conversation. - This is difficult, because this is, we had an exchange in private and I wanna- - [Lex] Sure, sure, sure. - I wanna honor not exposing the details of it, but, you know, the details convinced me that there was not a
follow-up conversation on that topic.
- On this topic. - Yeah.
- That said, I hope, and I hope to be part
of helping that happen, that the friendship is rekindled, because one of the topics
I care a lot about, artificial intelligence,
you've had great public and private conversations
about this topic and- - Yeah, and Elon was very formative in my taking that issue seriously. I mean, he and I went to
that initial conference in Puerto Rico together and it was only because he was going and I found out about it through him, and I just rode his coattails to it, you know, that I got dropped
in that side of the pool to hear about these
concerns at that point. - It would be interesting to hear how's your concern evolved with the coming out of ChatGPT and these new large language models that are fine-tuned with
reinforcement learning and seemingly to be able to do some incredible human-like things. There's two questions. One, how has your concern in terms of AGI and super intelligence evolved and how impressed are you with ChatGPT as a student of the human
mind and mind in general? - Well, my concern about AGI is unchanged. And so I did a, I've spoken about it
a bunch on my podcast, but, you know, I did a TED Talk in 2016, which was the kinda summary of what that conference and, you know, various conversations
I had after that did to my brain on this topic. - Basically that once super
intelligence is achieved, there's a takeoff, it becomes exponentially
smarter and in a matter of time, they're just, we're ants and they're gods. - Well, yeah, and unless we find some way of permanently tethering a super intelligent self-improving
AI to our value system. And, you know, I don't believe anyone has
figured out how to do that or whether that's even
possible in principle. I mean, I know people like Stuart Russell who I just had on my podcast, are- - Oh, really? Have you released it yet? - I Haven't released it yet.
- Oh, great. - He's been on a previous podcast, but we just recorded this week. - 'Cause you haven't done
an AI podcast in a while, so it's great.
- Yeah. Yeah.
- It's great. He's a good person to
talk about alignment with. - Yeah, so Stuart I mean,
Stuart has been, you know, probably more than anyone,
my guru on this topic. I mean, like just reading
his book and doing, I think I've done two podcasts
with him at this point. - I think It's called
"The Control Problem" or something like that? - His book is "Human Compatible." - Human Compatible.
- Yeah, he talks about the control problem. And yeah, so I just think the idea that we can
define a value function in advance that permanently tethers a self-improving, super-intelligent AI to our values as we continue to
discover them, refine them, extrapolate them in an open-ended way, I think that's a tall order. And I think there are many more ways, there must be many more ways
of designing super intelligence that is not aligned in that way and is not ever approximating
our values in that way. So, I mean, Stuart's idea, to
put it in a very simple way, is that he thinks you don't wanna specify the value function upfront. You don't wanna imagine you
could ever write the code in such a way as to admit of no loophole. You want to make the AI uncertain as to what human values are and perpetually uncertain
and always trying to ameliorate that uncertainty by hewing more and more closely to what our professed values are. So like, just it's always
interested in us saying, oh, no, no, that's not what we want. That's not what we intend. Stop doing that, right? Like no matter how smart it gets, all it wants to do is more perfectly
approximate human values. I think there are a lot of
problems with that, you know, at a high level, I'm not
a computer scientist, so I'm sure there are many
problems at a low level that I don't understand or. - Like how to force a
human into the loop always no matter what. - There's that and like
what humans get a vote and just what is, you know, what do humans value and what
is the difference between what we say we value and our
revealed preferences, which, I mean, if you just, if you were a super intelligent AI that could look at humanity now, I think you could be
forgiven for concluding that what we value is
driving ourselves crazy with Twitter and living
perpetually on the brink of nuclear war and, you know, just watching, you know, hot girls in yoga pants on TikTok again and again and again, it's like, what- - And you're saying that is not what we- - This is all revealed preference and it's what is an AI to make of that, right? And what should it optimize? Like, so part of, this is also Stuart's observation that one of the insidious things
about like the YouTube algorithm is that it's not that it just
caters to our preferences, it actually begins to change us in ways so as to make us more predictable. Like it finds ways to
make us a better reporter of our preferences and to trim our preferences down so that it can further train to that signal. So the main concern is that most of the people in the field seem not to be taking
intelligence seriously, like. - Still?
- Yeah, as they design more and
more intelligent machines, and as they profess to
want to design true AGI, they're not, again, they're not spending the time
that Stuart is spending trying to figure out how to do
this safely, above all. They're just assuming that these problems are gonna solve themselves as we make that final
stride into the end zone. Or they're saying very, you know, pollyannish things like, you know, an AI would never form a motive to harm human, like why
would it ever form a motive to be malicious toward humanity, right? Unless we put that motive in there, right? And that's not the concern. The concern is that in the presence of, of vast disparities in competence and in, certainly in a condition where the machines are improving themselves, they're improving their own code, they could be developing
goal instrumental goals that are antithetical to our wellbeing without any intent to harm us, right? It's analogous to what we do to every other species on Earth. I mean you and I don't
consciously form the intention to harm insects on a daily basis, but there are many things we
could intend to do that would in fact, harm insects, because, you know, you decide to repave your driveway or whatever you're doing,
like you're just not taking the interest of insects into account, because they're so far beneath you in terms of your cognitive horizons. And so the real challenge here is that if you believe that
intelligence, you know, scales up on a continuum toward heights that we can only dimly imagine, and I think there's every
reason to believe that, there's just no reason to
believe that we're near the summit of intelligence. And you can, you know, define, maybe there's some forms of intelligence for which this is not true, but for many relevant forms, you know, like the top 100 things
we care about cognitively, I think there's every reason to believe that many of those things, most of those things are
a lot like chess or Go where once the machines
get better than we are, they're gonna stay better than we are. Although they're, I dunno if you caught the recent thing with Go where, ' this actually came outta Stuart's lab. - One.
- Yeah, yeah, - Yeah, one time a human beat a machine. - Yeah, they found a hack for that. But anyway, ultimately, there's gonna be no looking back and then the question is what do we do in relationship to these systems that are
more competent than we are in every relevant respect? Because it will be a relationship. It's not like, the people who think we're
just gonna figure this all out, you know, without thinking
about it in advance, the solutions are just
gonna find themselves, seem not to be taking the prospect of really creating autonomous
super intelligence seriously. Like what does that mean? It's every bit as independent and ungovernable ultimately as us having created, I mean, just imagine if we
created a race of people that were 10 times smarter than all of us. Like how would we live with those people? They're 10 times smarter than us, right? Like they begin to talk about
things we don't understand. They begin to want things
we don't understand. They begin to view us as
obstacles to them that, so they're solving those problems or gratifying those desires. We become the chickens or the
monkeys in their presence. And I think that it's, but for some amazing solution of the sort that Stuart is imagining that we could somehow anchor their reward function permanently, no matter how intelligent scales. I think it's really worth
worrying about this. I do buy the, you know, the sci-fi notion that
this is an existential risk if we don't do it well. - I worry that we don't notice it. I'm deeply impressed with ChatGPT and I'm worried that it will
become super intelligent. These language models would
become super intelligent, because they're basically trained in the collective intelligence
of the human species. And then it'll start
controlling our behavior if they're integrated into our algorithms, the recommender systems, and then we just won't notice that there's a super intelligent system
that's controlling our behavior. - Well, I think that's true even before, far before super-intelligence, even before general intelligence. I mean I think just
the narrow intelligence of these algorithms and of what something like, you know, Chat GPT can do, I mean, it's just far short of it developing its own goals and that they are at
cross purposes with ours. Just just the unintended consequences of using it in the ways we are going to be incentivized to
use it and, you know, the money to be made
from scaling this thing and what it does to our information space and our sense of just being able to get the ground truth on any facts, it's, yeah, it's super scary. And it was, it's... - Do you think it's a giant
leap in terms of the development towards AGI, ChatGPT, or we still, is this just an impressive little toolbox? So like when do you think
the singularity's coming or is it to you, doesn't
matter if eventually- - Yeah, I have no intuitions on that front apart from the fact that if
we continue to make progress, it will come, right? So you just have to assume
we continue to make progress. There's only two assumptions. You have to assume substrate independence. So there's no reason why
this can't be done in silico. It's just we can build
arbitrarily intelligent machines. There's nothing magical
about having this done in the wetware of our own brains. I think that is true, and
I think that's, you know, scientifically parsimonious
to think that that's true. And then you just have to assume we're gonna
keep making progress. It doesn't have to be any
special rate of progress. It doesn't have to be Moore's Law. It can just be, we just keep going. At a certain point we're
gonna be in relationship to minds, leaving consciousness aside, I don't have any reason to believe that they'll necessarily be conscious by virtue of being super intelligent. And that's its own
interesting ethical question. But leaving consciousness aside, they're gonna be more
competent than we are. And then that's like, you know, the aliens
have landed, you know? That's literally, that's
an encounter with, again, leaving aside the possibility that something like Stuart's path is actually available to us, but it is hard to picture, if what we mean by intelligence, all things considered,
and it's truly general, if that scales and, you know, begins to build upon itself, how you maintain that perfect slavish devotion until the end of time in those systems. - The tether to humans
- Yeah. - I think my gut says
that that tether is not, there's a lot of ways to do it. So it's not this increasingly
impossible problem. - Right, so I have no, you know, as you know, I'm not a computer scientist, so I have no intuitions about, just algorithmically, how
you would approach that and what's somewhat possible. - My main intuition is
maybe deeply flawed, but the main intuition is
based on the fact that most of the learning is currently
happening on human knowledge. So even ChatGPT is just
trained on human data. - [Sam] Right. - I don't see where the takeoff happens where you completely
go above human wisdom. The current impressive
aspect of ChatGPT is that it's using collective
intelligence of all of us. - Well, from what I gleaned, again, from people who know much
more about this than I do, I think we have reason to be skeptical that these techniques of, you know, deep learning are actually
going to be sufficient to push us into AGI, right? So it's just, they're not generalizing
in the way they need to, they're certainly not
learning like human children. And so there's brittle and strange ways. It's not to say that the
human path is the only path, you know, and maybe there's, we might learn better lessons by ignoring the way brains work, but we know that they don't generalize and use abstraction the way we do and so. - Although the interesting-
- They strange holes in their competence. - But the size of the holes
is shrinking every time and that's, so the intuition
starts to slowly fall apart. You know, the intuition is like, surely can't be this simple
to achieve super intelligence. - [Sam] Yeah, yeah. - (chuckle) But it's
becoming simpler and simpler, so I don't know. The progress is quite incredible. I've been extremely impressed with ChatGPT and the new models, and there's a lot of financial
incentive to make progress in this regard so we're going to be living through some very interesting times. In raising a question that I'm
going to be talking to you, a lot of people brought up this topic, probably because Eric Weinstein
talked to Joe Rogan recently and said that he and you were
contacted by folks about UFOs. Can you clarify the
nature of this contact? Can you-
- Yeah, yeah. - That you were contacted-
- Well, I mean, I've got very little to say on this. I mean, he has much more to say. I think he went down
this rabbit hole further than I did, which
wouldn't surprise anyone. He's gotten much more of a taste for this sort of thing than I do, but I think we were
contacted by the same person. It wasn't clear to me who this person was or how this person got
my cell phone number. It didn't seem like we
were getting Punked. I mean, the person seemed credible to me. - And they were talking to you about the release of different videos on UFOs? - Yeah, and this was when there was a flurry of activity around this, so there was like a, there was a big New
Yorker article on UFOs, and there was rumors of
congressional hearings, I think, coming and there were the videos that were
being debunked or not. And so this person contacted both of us, I think around the same time. And I think he might've
contacted Rogan or other, Eric is just the only person
I've spoken to about it, I think, who I know was contacted and what happened is the
person kept, you know, writing a check that he didn't cash. Like he kept saying, "Okay,
next week I'm gonna, you know, I understand this is sounding
spooky and, you know, you have no reason to really trust me, but next week I'm gonna put you on a
Zoom call with people who you will recognize and
they're gonna be, you know, former heads of the CIA and, you know, people who just, you're gonna, within five seconds
of being on the Zoom call, you'll know this is not a hoax." And I said, "Great, just let me know. Just send me the Zoom link, right?" And I went, that happened
maybe three times, you know, but there was just one phone conversation and then it was just texts, you know, it was just a bunch of texts. And I think Eric spent more time with this person, and I haven't spoken to him about it. I know he spoke about it publicly but. So, you know, it's not that my bullshit
detector ever really went off in a big way. It's just the thing never happened and so I lost interest. - So you've made a comment,
which is interesting, that you ran the, which I really appreciate, that you ran a thought
experiment of saying, okay, maybe we do have alien spacecraft, or just a thought experiment
that aliens did visit. - Yeah.
- And then this very kind of nihilistic sad thought that it wouldn't matter. It wouldn't affect your life. Can you explain that? - Well, no, I was, I think
many people noticed this. I mean, this was a sign of
how crazy the news cycle was at that point, right? Like we had COVID, and we had Trump, and I forget when the UFO
thing was really kicking off. But it just seemed like
no one had the bandwidth to even be interested in this. It's like I was amazed to notice in myself that I wasn't more
interested in figuring out what was going on. It's like, and I considered,
okay, wait a minute. If this is true, this is the biggest story
in anyone's lifetime. I mean, contact with alien intelligence is by definition the biggest
story in anyone's lifetime, in human history. Why isn't this just totally captivating? And not only was it not
totally captivating, it would just barely
rise into the level of my being able to pay attention to it. And I view that, I mean, one, as, to some degree, an understandable
defense mechanism against the bogus claims that have been made about this
kind of thing in the past. You know, the general sense
that it's probably bullshit or it probably has some
explanation that is, you know, purely terrestrial and not surprising. And there is somebody who, what's his name, isn't it Mick West? I forget, is it a YouTuber?
- Yeah, Mick West, Yeah.
- Yeah. - He debunked stuff.
- Yeah. I mean, you know, I have since seen some of those videos. I mean, now this is going
back still at least a year, but some of those videos seem like fairly credible debunkings of
some of the optical evidence. And I'm surprised we
haven't seen more of that. Like there was a fairly credulous "60 Minutes" piece that came out around that time looking at some of that video and it was the very video that
he was debunking on YouTube and, you know, his video
only had like 50,000 views on it or whatever. But again, it seemed like a
fairly credible debunking. I haven't seen debunkings
of his debunkings, but. - I think there is, but
he's basically saying that there is possible explanations for it. - [Sam] Right. - And usually in these kinds of contexts, if there's a possible explanation, even if it seems unlikely, it's going to be more likely than an alien civilization visiting us. - Yeah, it's the extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence principle, which I think is generally true. - Well, with aliens, I think generally, I think there should
be some humility about what they would look
like when they show up. But I tend to think they're already here. - The amazing thing about
this AI conversation though is that we're talking about a circumstance where we would be designing the aliens. - Yeah.
- And there's every reason to
believe that eventually this is gonna happen. Like I said, I'm not
at all skeptical about the coming reality of the aliens, that we're gonna build them. - Now here's the thing, does this apply to when
super intelligence shows up? Will this be trending on Twitter for a day and then we'll go on to complain about something Sam Harris once again said on his podcast next day?
- Yeah, yeah. - You tend to (chuckles) trend on Twitter, (laughing) even though
you're not on Twitter, which is great. - Yeah, I haven't noticed. I mean, I did notice when I was on, but.. - Did you have this concern about AGI, basically the same kind of thing, that we would just look the other way? Is there something about this time where even like World War III, which has been thrown
around very casually, concerningly so, even that,
the new cycle wipes set away? - Yeah, well, I think we have this general problem that we can't make certain information, even, you know, unequivocally certain
information emotionally salient. Like we respond quite
readily to certain things. I mean, as we talked about, we respond to the little girl who fell down a well. I mean, that just, that gets 100% of our emotional resources, but the abstract probability of nuclear war, right? Even a high probability, even just, even an
intolerable probability, even if we put it at 30%, right? You know, like it's just like that's Russian roulette with a, you know, gun with three chambers. And, you know, it's aimed at
the heads, not only your head, but your kid's head and
everyone's kids' head and it's just 24 hours a day and, I mean, I think people who've, this is pre-Ukraine, I think the people who have
made it their business to, you know, professionally, to think about the risk of nuclear war and to mitigate it, you know, people like Graham
Allison or William Perry, or, I mean, I think they were putting like the ongoing risk, I mean, just the risk
that we're gonna have a proper nuclear war at
some point in, you know, the next generation, people were putting it at, you know, something like 50%, right? They were living with this sort
of Damocles over our heads. Now you might wonder whether anyone can have reliable intuitions about the probability of that kind of thing but the status quo is truly alarming. I mean, we've got, you know, we've got ICBMs on, I mean, leave aside smaller
exchanges and, you know, tactical nukes and how we could have a world
war, you know, based on, you know, incremental changes, we've got the biggest bombs aimed
at the biggest cities in both directions, and it's old technology, right? And it's, you know, and it's vulnerable to some lunatic deciding to launch or misreading, you know, bad data. And we know we've been
saved from nuclear war, I think at least twice by, you know, Soviet submarine
commanders deciding, I'm not gonna pass this up
the chain of command, right? It's like this is almost
certainly an error. And it turns out it was an error. And it's like, and we need people to, I mean, in that particular case, like he saw, I think it was five, what seemed like five missiles launched from the US to Russia. And he reasoned, if America was gonna
engage in a first strike, they'd launch more than
five missiles, right? So this has to be fictional. And then he waited long enough to decide that it was fictional, but the probability of a nuclear war happening by mistake or some other species of inadvertence, you know, misunderstanding, technical malfunction, that's intolerable. Forget about the intentional
use of it by people who are, you know, driven crazy by some ideology. - And more and more
technologies are enabling a kind of scale of destruction. And misinformation plays into this picture in a way that is especially scary. I mean, once you can get
a deepfake of, you know, any current president of
the United States claiming to have launched a first strike, you know, and just, you know, send that everywhere. - But that could change the
nature of truth and then that might change the engine we have for
skepticism, sharpen it, the more you have deepfakes.
- Yeah, and then we might have AI and digital
watermarks that help us. Maybe we'll not trust any information that hasn't come through specific channels, right. I mean, so like in my world, it's like I no longer feel the need to, you know, respond to anything
other than what I put out in my channels of information. It's like there so many
people who have clipped stuff of me that shows the opposite of what I was actually saying in context. I mean, the people who have
like re-edited my podcast audio to make it seem like I said the opposite of what I was saying. It's like, unless I put it out, you know, you can't be sure that I
actually said it, you know? I mean, it's just, but I don't know what it's
like to live like that for all forms of information. And, I mean, strangely, I think it may require a greater siloing of
information in the end. You know, it's like, we're living through this
sort of Wild West period where everyone's got a newsletter and everyone's got a blog and
everyone's got an opinion. But once you can fake everything. - There might be a greater
value for expertise. - Yeah.
- For experts, but a more rigorous system for identifying who the experts are. - Yeah, or just knowing that, you know, it's gonna be an arms race
to authenticate information. So it's like, you can
never trust a photograph unless it has been vetted by Getty Images, because only Getty
Images has the resources to authenticate the providence
of that photograph and attest that it hasn't
been meddled with by AI. And again, I don't even know
if that's technically possible. And maybe whatever the tools available for this will be, you know, commodified and the cost
will be driven to zero so quickly that everyone
will be able to do it. You know, it could be
like encryption, but. - And it will be proven and
tested most effectively first, of course, as always in porn. - Yeah. Right.
- Which is where most of human innovation
technology happens first. Well, I have to ask, because
Ron Howard the director asked us on Twitter, since we're talking about
the threat of nuclear war and otherwise, he asked, "I'd be interested in
both your expectations for human society if
when we move beyond Mars. Will those societies be industrial-based? How will it be governed? How will criminal
infractions be dealt with? When you read or watch sci-fi, what comes closest to sounding logical? Do you think about our
society beyond Earth if we colonize Mars,
if we colonized space? - Yeah, well, I think I have a pretty... - Uh-oh.
- Humbling picture of that. I mean, 'cause we're still
gonna be the apes that we are. So when you imagine colonizing Mars, you have to imagine a
first fist fight on Mars. You have to imagine first murder on Mars. - There's also infidelity.
- Yeah. - Somebody-
- Extramarital affairs on Mars, right? So it's gonna get really homely and boring
really fast, I think, you know? It's like only the
space suits or the other exigencies of just living
in that atmosphere, or lack thereof, will limit how
badly we can behave on Mars. - But do you think most of the interaction will be still in meet
space versus digital? Do you think we're like living
through a transformation of a kind where we're
going to be doing more and more interaction than digital space? Like everything we've been
complaining about Twitter, is it possible that
Twitter's just the early days of a broken system that's
actually giving birth to a better working system
that's ultimately digital? - I think we're going to experience a pendulum swing
back into the real world. I mean, I think many of us are
experiencing that now anyway. I mean, just wanting to
have face-to-face encounters and spend less time on our phones and less time online. I mean, I think, you know, maybe everyone isn't
going in that direction, but I do notice it myself and I notice, I mean, once I got off Twitter, then I noticed the people who
were never on Twitter, right? And the people who were never, basically, I mean, I know, I have a lot of friends
who were never on Twitter. - [Lex] Yeah. - And they actually never understood what I was doing on Twitter. They just like, it wasn't that they were seeing it and then reacting to it. They just didn't know it's like being on Reddit,
like I'm not on Reddit either, but I don't spend any time thinking about not being on Reddit, right? It's like I'm just not on Reddit. - So you think the
pursuit of human happiness is better achieved, more effectively achieved
outside of Twitter world? - Well, I think all we have
is our attention in the end. And we just have to notice
what these various tools are doing to it. And it's just, it became very clear to me that it was an unrewarding use of my attention. Now it's not to say there
isn't some digital platform that's conceivable, that would be useful, and rewarding, but, yeah, I mean, we just have, you know, our life is doled out to us in moments. And we're continually
solving this riddle of what is gonna suffice to
make this moment engaging and meaningful and aligned with who I wanna be now and how I want the future to look, right? That we have this tension between being in the present and becoming in the future. And, you know, it's a seeming paradox. Again, it's not really a
paradox, but it can seem, like I do think the ground truth for personal wellbeing is to find a motive being where you can pay attention to the present moment. And this is, you know,
meditation by another name. You can pay attention
to the present moment with sufficient, you know, gravity that you recognize that just consciousness itself
in the present moment, no matter what's happening, is already a circumstance of freedom and contentment and tranquility. Like you can be happy now
before anything happens. Like before this next
desire gets gratified, before this next problem gets solved. There's this kinda ground
truth that you're free, that consciousness is free
and open and unencumbered by really any problem until you get lost in thought about all the
problems that may yet be real for you. - So the ability to catch
and observe consciousness, that in itself is a source of happiness? - Without being lost in thought. And so this happens haphazardly for people who don't meditate
because they find something in their life that's so
captivating, it's so pleasurable, it's so thrilling. And it can even be scary, but it can be, even being scared is captivating. Like it gets their attention, right? Whatever it is. Like, you know, Sebastian Junger, you know, wrote a great book about people's experience in war here. You know, it's like it can, strangely, it can be the
best experience anyone's ever had because everything, it's like only the moment matters, right? Like the bullet is whizzing by your head, you're not thinking about your 401K or that thing that you
didn't say last week to the person you shouldn't
have been talking about. You're not thinking about Twitter. It's like you're just fully immersed in the present moment. Meditation is the only way. I mean, that word can mean
many things to many people. But what I mean by meditation is simply the discovery that there is a way to engage the
present moment directly regardless of what's happening. You don't need to be in a war. You don't need to be having sex, you don't need to be on drugs,
you don't need to be surfing. It doesn't have to be a peak experience. It can be completely ordinary. But you can recognize
that in some basic sense, there's only this, and everything else is
something you're thinking. You're thinking about the past, you're thinking about the future and thoughts themselves
have no substance, right? It's fundamentally
mysterious that any thought ever really commandeers
your sense of who you are and makes you anxious or afraid or angry or whatever it is. And the more you discover that, the half-life of all of
these negative emotions that blow all of us around get much, much shorter, right? And you you can literally just, you know, the anger that would've
kept you angry for hours or days lasts, you know, four
seconds because you just, the moment it arises, you recognize it, and you can get off there. You can decide, at minimum, you can decide whether it's useful to stay angry at that moment. And, you know, obviously it usually isn't. - And the illusion of free
will is one of those thoughts. - Yeah. It's all just happening, right? Like even the mindful
and meditative response to this is just happening. It's just like even the moments where you recognize or not recognize, it's just happening. It's not that, this does open up a degree
of freedom for a person, but it's not a freedom
that gives any motivation to the notion of free will. It's just a new way of being in the world. - Is there a difference between intellectually knowing free
will is an illusion and really experiencing it? - [Sam] Yeah. Yeah. - What's the longest you've been able to experience the, escape the illusion of free will? - Well, it's always, it's always obvious to
me when I pay attention. I mean, whenever I'm mindful, the term of jargon, you
know, in the Buddhist, and increasingly, you know,
outside the Buddhist context, is mindfulness, right? But there are sort of
different levels of mindfulness and there's different degrees of insight into this. But yeah, so, I mean, what I'm calling evidence
of lack of free will and lack of, you know, lack of the self, I mean like a two sides of the same coin. There's the sense of being a subject in the middle of experience to whom all experience refers. The sense of I, the sense of me. And that's almost everybody's
starting point when they start to meditate. And that's almost always
the place people live most of their lives from. I do think that gets interrupted in ways that get unrecognized. I think people are constantly
losing the sense of I, they're losing the sense of
subject, object, distance, but they're not recognizing it. And meditation is the mode in which you can recognize, you can both consciously precipitate it. You can look for the
self and fail to find it and then recognize its absence. And that's just the flip side
of the coin of free will. I mean, the feeling of having free will is what it feels like to feel like a self who's thinking his thoughts and doing his actions and
intending his intentions. And the man in the middle
of the boat who's rowing, that's the false starting point. When you find that there's
no one in the middle of the boat, right? Or in fact there's no boat,
there's just the river, there's just the flow of experience and there's no center to it and there's no place from
which you would control it. Again, even when you're doing thing, this does not negate the
difference between voluntary and involuntary behavior. It's like I can
voluntarily reach for this, but when I'm paying attention, I'm aware that everything
is just happening. Like just the intention to
move is just arising, right? And I'm in no position to know why it didn't arise a moment
before or a moment later or, you know, 50% stronger
or weaker or, you know, so it's to be ineffective or to be doubly effective, where I lurched for it versus I move slow. I mean, I'm not, I can never run the counterfactuals. I can never, I mean, all of this opens the door to an even more disconcerting
picture along the same lines, which is, subsumes this
conversation about free will. And it's the question of whether anything is ever possible. Like what if, this is a question I haven't
thought a lot of about it, but it's been a few years I've been kicking this question around. So, I mean, what if only
the actual is possible? So we live with this
feeling of possibility. We live with a sense that, lemme tell you, so, you know, I have two daughters. I could've had a third child, right? So what does it mean to
say that I could've had a third child, right? So you don't have kids, I don't think? - No.
- So- - Not that I know of.
- Yes. - But the possibility might be there. - Right, so what do we mean when we say you could have had a child or you might have a child in the future. Like what's the relationship between possibility and
actuality and reality? Is there a reality in which non-actual things are nonetheless real? And so we have other categories of like non-concrete things. We have things that don't have
spatial temporal dimension, but they nonetheless exist. So like, you know, in the
integers, right? So numbers. There's a reality, there's an abstract reality to numbers. And it's philosophically interesting to think about these
things, so they're not like, in some sense, they're real and they're
not merely invented by us, they're discovered because
they have structure that we can't impose upon them, right? It's not like, they're not
fictional characters like, you know, I mean, Hamlet
and Superman also exist in some sense, but they exist at the level of our own fiction and abstraction. But it's like there're true and false statements you
can make about Hamlet. There're true and false statements you can make about Superman,
because our fiction, the fictional worlds we've created have a certain kind of structure. But again, this is all abstract. Like it's all abstractable from any of its concrete instantiations. It's not just in the comic
books and just in the movies. It's in our, you know, ongoing
ideas about these characters. But natural numbers or the integers don't
function quite that way. I mean, they're similar, but they also have a
structure that's purely a matter of discovery. You can't just make up
whether numbers are prime. You know, if you give me
two integers, you know, of a certain size, let's say you mentioned
two enormous integers. If I were to say, okay, well
between those two integers, there are exactly 11 prime numbers, right? That's a very specific claim about which I can be right or wrong. And whether or not anyone
knows I'm right or wrong, it's like that's just, there's a domain of facts there, but it's an abstract reality that relates in some way that's
philosophically interesting, you know, metaphysically interesting to what we call real reality, you know? The spatial temporal order,
the physics of things. But possibility, at least in my view, occupies a different space. And this is something, again, my thoughts on this are pretty in code and I think I need to talk to a philosopher of physics and/or physicist about
how this may interact with things like the
many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.
- Yeah, like that's an interesting, right, exactly. So I wonder if discoveries in physics, like further proof or more concrete proof that many-worlds interpretation
of quantum organics has some validity.
- Right. - If that completely
starts to change things. - But even, that's just more actuality. So if I took that seriously-
- Ah, sure. (chuckles) - That's a case of, and truth is that happens even if the many-worlds
interpretation isn't true, but we just imagine we have a
physically infinite universe. The implication of infinity is such that things will begin to repeat themselves, you know, the farther
you go in space, right? So, you know, if you just
head out in one direction, eventually you're gonna meet
two people just like us having a conversation just like this. And you're gonna meet them
an infinite number of times in every, you know, infinite
variety of permutations slightly different from
this conversation, right? So, I mean, infinity is just so big that our intuitions of
probability completely break down. But what I'm suggesting is maybe probability isn't a thing, right? Maybe there's only actuality. Maybe there's only what happens. And at every point along the way, our notion of what could've happened or what might've happened is just that, it's just a thought about what could've happened
or might've happened. - So it's a fundamentally different thing. If you can imagine a thing,
that doesn't make it real, 'cause that's where
that possibility exists. It's in your imagination, right? - Yeah, and possibility itself
is a kind of spooky idea, because it too has a
sort of structure, right? So like if I'm gonna say, you know, you could've
had a daughter, right? Last year. So we're saying that's
possible, but not actual. Right, that is a claim, there are things that are true and not true about that daughter, right? Like it has a kind of
structure, it's like- - I feel like there's
a lot of fog around . the possibility, right? It feels like almost
like a useful narrative. - But what does it mean, so like, what does it mean, if we say, you know, (plastic pops) I just did that, but it's conceivable that I
wouldn't have done that, right? Like it's possible that
I just threw this cap, but I might not have done that. - So you're taking it
very temporarily close to the original, like what would appear as a decision? - Whenever we're saying
something's possible, but not actual, right? Like this thing just happened, but it's possible that
it wouldn't have happened or that it would've happened differently. In what does that possibility consist? Like where is that? For that to be real, for
the possibility to be real, what claim are we making
about the universe? - Well, isn't that an
extension of the idea that free will is an illusion, that all we have is actuality? That the possibility is an illusion?
- Right, yeah, I'm just extending it beyond human action. - Ah, okay.
- But this goes to the physics of things. This is just everything. Like we're always
telling ourselves a story that includes possibility. - Possibility is really
compelling for some reason. (Lex chuckling) - Well, yeah, well, because it's, I mean, so this, yeah, I mean this could sound just academic, but every backward-looking regret or disappointment and
every forward-looking worry is completely dependent on
this notion of possibility. Like every regret is based on
the sense that something else, I could've done something else, something else could've happened. Every disposition to
worry about the future is based on the feeling that there's this range of possibilities. It could go either way. And, you know, I mean, I know, whether or not there's such
a thing as possibility, you know, I'm convinced that worry is almost never
psychologically appropriate, because the reality is
in any given moment, either you can do something to solve the problem you're
worried about or not. So if you can do something,
just do it, you know? And if you can't, your worrying is just causing you to suffer twice over, right? You're gonna, you know, you're gonna get the medical
procedure next week anyway. How much time between now and next week do you wanna spend
worrying about it, right? The worry doesn't accomplish anything. - How much do physicists
think about possibility? - Well, they think about it in terms of probability more often, but probability just describes, and again, this is a place where I might be outta my depth
and need to talk to somebody to debunk this, but. - (chuckles) Do therapy with a physicist. - Yeah, but probability, it seems, just describes a pattern of actuality that we've observed, right? I mean, there's certain things we observe and those are the actual
things that have happened. And then we have this additional
story about probability. I mean, we have the frequency with which things have
happened in the past. You know, I can flip a fair coin and I know in the abstract
that I have a belief that in the limit, that those flips, you know, those tosses should converge
on 50% heads and 50% tails. I have a story as to why it's not gonna be exactly 50% within any arbitrary timeframe. But in reality, all we ever have are the
observed tosses, right? And then we have an
additional story that, oh, it came up heads, but it
could have come up tales. Why do we think that about that last toss? And what are we claiming is true about the physics of things if we say it could have been otherwise? - I think we're claiming
that probability is true. That it just, it allows us to have a nice model about the world. It gives us hope about the world. - Yeah, it seems that
possibility has to be somewhere to be effective. It's a little bit like what's happening with the laws of, there's something
metaphysically interesting about the laws of nature too,
because the laws of nature, so the laws of nature impose their work on the world, right? We see their evidence, but they're not reducible
to any specific set of instances, right? So there's some structure there, but the structure isn't just
a matter of the actual things. We have the actual billiard balls that are banging into each other. All of that actuality can be explained by what actual things are actually doing. But then we have this notion
that in addition to that, we have the laws of nature that are explaining this action, but how are the laws of
nature an additional thing in addition to just the actual things that are actually affect-costly? And if they are an additional thing, how are they effective if they're not among the actual things that are just actually banging around? - [Lex] Yeah. - And so to some degree,
- I see, for that, possibility has to be hiding somewhere for the laws on nature to be
- To be possible. Like for anything to be possible, it has to have-
- There's a closet somewhere, I'm sure, where all the possibility goes. - It has to be attached to something, so. - And you don't think many-worlds is that? - Yeah, well-
- 'Cause many-worlds still exists.
- Well, 'cause we're in this strand of that multiverse. - Yeah.
- Right? So still you have just a local instance of what is actual. - [Lex] Yeah. - And then if it proliferates elsewhere where you can't be affected by it- - Many-world says you can't
really connect with the other. - Yeah.
- Yeah. - And so man-worlds is just a statement of basically everything that can happen happens somewhere, right? And that's-
- Yeah. - You know, and that's, I mean, maybe that's not an entirely
kosher formulation of it, but it seems pretty close. But there's whatever happens, right? In fact, there's, you
know, relativistically, there's a, you know, the
Einstein's original notion of a block universe
seems to suggest this and it's been a while since
I've been in a conversation with a physicist where I've
gotten a chance to ask about the standing of this concept
in physics currently. I don't hear it discussed much. But the idea of a block
universe is that, you know, space time exists as an totality in our sense that we are
traveling through space time, where there's a real
difference between the past and the future, that that's an illusion
of just our, you know, the weird slice we're taking of this larger object. But on some level, it's like, you know,
you're reading a novel, the last page of the
novel exists just as much as the first page when
you're in the middle of it. And they're just, you know, if we're living in anything like that, then there's no such thing as possibility, it would seem it's just what is actual. So as a matter of our
experience moment to moment, I think it's totally compatible
with that being true, that there is only what
is actual and that sounds, to the naive ear, that sounds like it would be depressing and disempowering and confining. But it's anything but. It's actually, it's a
circumstance of pure discovery. Like you have no idea what's
gonna happen next, right? You don't know who
you're gonna be tomorrow. You're only by tendency seeming to resemble yourself from yesterday. I mean, there's way more
freedom in all of that than you know, it seems true
to many people and yet the basic insight is that you're not in, the real freedom is the recognition that you're
not in control of anything. Everything is just happening, including your thoughts
and intentions and moves. - So life is a process
of continuous discovery? - You're part of the universe. Yeah, you are just this, I mean, it's the miracle that the
universe is illuminated to itself as itself where you sit and you're continually
discovering what your life is. And then you have this layer at which you're telling yourself a story that you already know what your life is and you know exactly, you know, who you should be and what's, you know, what's about to happen or
you're struggling to form a confident opinion about all of that. And yet there is this fundamental mystery to everything, even the most familiar experience. - We're all NPCs in a
most marvelous video game. - Maybe, although my sense of gaming does not run as deep as to know what I'm committing to there, it's a non-playing character? - Yeah, non-playing, oh wow.
- Yeah. Yeah. - Yes, you're more of a Mario Kart guy, I could tell. - I was an original video gamer, but it's been a long time since I, I mean, I was there for Pong. (Lex laughing) I remember when I saw the
first Pong in a restaurant in, I think it was like
Benihana's or something, they had a Pong table and that was- - Isn't it amazing.
- That that was an amazing moment when you... - You, Sam Harris, might live from Pong to the invention and deployment of a super intelligent system. - Yeah, well, that happened fast if it happens anytime in my lifetime. - From Pong to AGI.
- Yeah. - What kind of things
do you do purely for fun that others might
consider a waste of time. - Purely for fun. - Meditation doesn't count, 'cause most people would say
that's not a waste of time. Is there something like Pong that's a deeply embarrassing
thing you would never admit? - I don't think, well, I mean, once or twice a year I
will play a round of golf, which many people would find embarrassing. They might even find my play embarrassing. But it's fun.
- Do you find it embarrassing? - No, I mean, I love, golf just takes way too much time, so I can only squander a
certain amount of time on it. I do love it. It's a lot of fun. - But you have no control
over your actual performance? You're ever discovering.
- No, I do have control over
my mediocre performance, but I don't have enough control
as to make it really good, but happily I don't, I'm in the perfect spot because
I don't invest enough time in it to care how I play. So I just have fun when I play. - Well, I hope there'll be a day where you play around on golf with the Former President Donald Trump, and I would love to be- - I would bet on him if we played golf. I'm sure he's a better golfer. - (chuckles) Amidst the
chaos of human civilization in modern times, as we've talked about, what gives you hope about
this world in the coming year, in the coming decade, in
the coming a hundred years, maybe a thousand years? What's the source of hope for you? - Well, it comes back to a few of the things we've talked about. I mean, I think I'm hopeful that, I know that most people
are good and are mostly converging on the same core values, right? It's like we're not
surrounded by psychopaths and the thing that finally convinced me to get off Twitter was how different life was seeming through the lens of Twitter. It's like I just got the sense that there are way more psychopaths or effective psychopaths than I realized. And then I thought, okay, this isn't real. This is either a strange context in which
actually decent people are behaving like psychopaths
or it's, you know, it's a bot army or something that I don't have to take seriously. So yeah, I just think most people, if we can get the incentives right, I think, there's no reason why we can't really thrive collectively. Like there's enough wealth to go around. There's enough, you know, there's no effective limit,
you know, I mean, again, within the limits of
what's physically possible, but we're nowhere near
the limit on abundance. You know, forget about going to Mars, on this, the one rock, right? It's like we could make this
place incredibly beautiful and stable if we just did enough work to solve some, you know, rather long-standing political problems. - The problem of incentives. So to you, the basic
characteristics of human nature such that we'll be okay if
the incentives are okay? We'll do pretty good. - I'm worried about the
asymmetry is that, you know, it's easier to break
things than to fix them. It's easier to light a fire than to put it out and I do worry that, you know, as technology gets more and more powerful, it becomes easier for the minority who wants to screw things up
to effectively screw things up for everybody, right? So it's easier. It's like a thousand years ago, it was simply impossible for one person to derange the lives of
millions, much less billions. Now that's getting to be possible. So on the assumption that
we're always gonna have a sufficient number of
crazy individuals or malevolent individuals, it's, we have to figure out
that asymmetry somehow. And so there's some cautious exploration of emergent technology that we need to get our heads screwed on straight about. And so like, so gain of function research, like just how much do we
wanna democratize, you know, all the relevant technologies there? You know, do we want, really, you really wanna give everyone the ability to order nucleotides in the mail and give them the blueprints for viruses online because of, you know, you're a free speech absolutist and you think all PDFs need to be, you know, exportable everywhere? So I'm much more, so this is where, yeah, so there are limits to, many people are confused about my take on free speech because I've come down on the unpopular side of
some of these questions. But it's been, my overriding concern
is that in many cases, I'm worried about the free
speech of individual businesses or individual platforms
or individual, you know, media people to decide that they don't wanna be associated
with certain things, right? So like if you own Twitter, I think you should be able to kick off the Nazi you don't wanna
be associated with, because it's your platform,
you own it, right? That's your free speech, right? That's the side of my free speech concern for Twitter, right? It's not that every Nazi has the right to algorithmic speech on Twitter. I think if you own Twitter, you or the, you know, whether
it's just Elon or, you know, in the world where it wasn't Elon, just the people who own Twitter and the board and the
shareholders and the employees, these people should be free to decide what they wanna promote or not. I view them as publishers, you know, more than as platforms in the end. And that has other implications. But I do worry about this
problem of misinformation and algorithmically and otherwise, you know, supercharged misinformation. And I think, I do think we're at a bottleneck now. I mean, I guess it could be the hubris of every present generation
to think that their moment is especially important. But I do think with the
emergence of these technologies, we're some kind of bottleneck
where we really have to figure out how to get this right. And if we do get this right, if we figure out how to
not drive ourselves crazy by giving people access to all possible information and
misinformation at all times, I think, yeah, we could, there's no limit to how
happily we could collaborate with billions of creative
fulfilled people. You know, it's just- - And trillions of robots, some of them sex robots, but that's another topic.
- Yes, robots that are running the right algorithm,
whatever that algorithm is. - Whatever you need in your
life to make you happy. - Yeah.
- Sam, the first time we talked
was one of the huge honors of my life. I've been a fan of yours for a long time. The few times you were respectful but critical to me means the world. And thank you so much for
helping me and caring enough and caring enough about the
world and for everything you do. But I should say that the few of us that try
to put love in the world on Twitter miss you on Twitter but. - Well, enjoy yourselves. (laughing) - (laughing) Don't break anything, kids. - Have a good party without me. - Thanks.
- But very, very happy to do this, thanks for the invitation. - Thank you.
- Great to see you again. - Thanks for listening to this conversation with Sam Harris. To support this podcast, please check out our
sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Martin Luther King Jr., "Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend." Thank you for listening and
hope to see you next time.