YouSaid · the spoken record

Sam Harris

lines on the record: 307
first: 2023-03-14
most recent: 2023-03-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I think the point I didn't make about Brett's style of engaging this issue is people are using the fact that he was early on Lab Leak to suggest that he was right about Ivermectin and about mRNA vaccines and all the rest. Like, no, that's... 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. 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. It's possible to be right by accident.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't even understand virus hunting at this point 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? What kind of head start do you think you're getting?”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I would agree. So that exchange with Fauci and Rand Paul that went viral, 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. The gain of function research is something that I think we're wise to be worried about and insofar as I judge myself adequate to have an opinion on this Think it should be banned, right? Like probably a podcast I'll do if you or somebody else doesn't do it in the meantime. I would like a virologist to defend it against a virologist who would criticize it. Forget about the gain of function research.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're wise to be worried about this. And on some level, it could happen to anyone, right? The wet market makes them look like barbarians living in another century. Like you got to clean up those wet markets. What are you doing putting a bat on top of a pangolin on top of a duck? It's like, get your shit together. So if anything, the wet market makes them look worse, in my view. Now, I'm sure that what they actually did to conceal a lab leak, if it was a lab leak, all of that's going to look odious.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because Lab Leak, to my eye The lab leak could happen to anyone, right? We're all running all these advanced countries are running these dangerous labs. That's a practice that we should be worried about in general. We know lab leaks are a problem. There have been multiple lab leaks of even worse things that haven't gotten out of hand in this way. But worse pathogens.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Generically speaking, either origin story was politically inflammatory and made the Chinese look bad, right? And the Chinese response to this looked 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? I would argue that The wet market origin is even more politically invidious than the lab leak origin.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The time to figure that out now, I've actually my podcast guest on this topic changed my view of this because one of the guests, Alena Chan, made the point that, no, actually the best time to figure out the origin of this is immediately, right? Because in the abbot, you lose touch with the evidence. And I hadn't really been thinking about that. If you come back after a year, there are certain facts you might not be able to get in hand. 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 very quickly design immediately designing vaccines against that genome. And that's what we had to do. And then we had to figure out how to vaccinate and to mitigate and to develop treatments and all of that. So the origin story didn't matter.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Center the Fairaway Expert opinion at this time point and at this time point and at this time point and then I'm out right I don't have any more to say about this I'm not an expert on COVID I'm not an expert on the safety of mRNA vaccines If something changes so as to become newsworthy, then maybe I'll do a podcast. So I just did a podcast on The lab I was never skeptical of the Lab Lake hypothesis. Brett was very early on saying this is a lab leak, right, at a point where my only position was who cares if it's a lab leak, right? Like the thing we have to get straight is, what do we do given the nature of this pandemic?”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think Brett is very smart and he's a very ethical person who wants good things for the world. I mean, I have no reason to doubt that. So the fact that we're on, you know, we're crosswise on this issue does not mean that I think he's a bad person. I mean, the thing that worried me about what he was doing, and this was true of Joe and this was true of Elon, this is true of many other people, is that once you're messaging at scale to a vast audience, you incur a certain kind of responsibility not to get people killed. And I 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.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trust what competent people are saying to us about what medicines are safe to take. And in the absence of that, Craziness is going to, even in the presence of that craziness, is going to proliferate given the tools we've built. But in the absence of that, it's going to proliferate for understandable reasons. And that's going to be good next time when something orders of magnitude more dangerous hits us. I spent, you know, insofar as I think about this issue, I think much more about next time than this time.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it doesn't mean that the thing is there's a big difference between me and Brett in this case. I didn't do 100 podcasts on COVID. I did like two podcasts on COVID. The measure of my concern about COVID can be measured in how many podcasts I did on it, right? It's like once we had a sense of how to live with COVID, I was just living with COVID, right? Like, okay, you get vaxed or don't get vaxed. Wear a mask or don't wear a mask, travel or don't travel. Like you've got a few things to decide, but my kids were stuck at home on iPads for too long. I didn't agree with that. It was obviously not functional. 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.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Doctors, real doctors, the heads of the CDC and NIH standing around just ashen-faced while he's talking. All of this was deeply corrupting of the public communication of science. And then, again, I've banged on about the depredations of wokeness. The woke thing was a disaster. It still is a disaster.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the truth is, I think I'm one of those people on the topic of COVID, right? Like it's not that I felt, listen, I know exactly what's going on here. I know these mRNA vaccines are safe. I know exactly how to run a lockdown. No, this is a situation where you want the actual pilots to fly the plane. We needed experts who we could trust. And insofar as our experts got captured by all manner of things, I mean, some of them got captured by Trump. Some of them were made to look ridiculous just standing next to Trump while he was bloviating about whatever it's just going to go away. There's just 15 people, there's 15 people in a cruise ship and it's just going to go away. There's going to be no problem. Or it's like when he said, many of these doctors think, I understand this better than them. They're just amazed at how I understand this. And you've got doctors.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, certain people are persuadable, certain people are not persuadable, but it's no, because there's not enough. It's the opportunity called. Given a patient hearing. So you can't have a physics conference and then let people in to just trumpet their pet theories about the grand unified vision of physics when they're obviously crazy or they're obviously half crazy or they're just not, you know, the people, like you begin to get a sense for this when it is your wheelhouse, but there are people who Declare Irrelevance to the conversation fairly quickly without knowing that they have done it, right? And”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. Because it's just”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it was a forest choice. You're going to get COVID. Do you want to be vaccinated when you get it? That was always. In my view, an easy choice. And it's up until you start breaking apart the cohorts and you start saying, okay, wait a minute, there is this myocarditis issue in young men. Let's talk about that. When before that story emerged, it was just clear that. If it's not knocking down transmission as much as we had hoped, it is still mitigating severe illness and death. I still believe that it is the current view of most people competent to analyze the data that we lost something like 300,000 people unnecessarily in the US because of vaccine hesitancy.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To the woke response to Trump and the Trumpist response to woke, right? So a lot of people have gotten pushed around for bad reasons, but understandable reasons. But yes. There are caveats to my things have changed about my view of COVID. But the question is, if you roll back the clock 18 months, was I wrong to want to platform Eric Toppel, you know, a very well-respected cardiologist on this topic, or Nicholas Christakis, to talk about the network effects of whether we should close schools, right? He's written a book on COVID, he's, you know, network effects are his wheelhouse, both has an MD and as a sociologist. Was a lot that we believed we knew about the efficacy of closing schools during pandemics 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”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would be powerfully annoyed, right? I wouldn't know what I was going to do and I would be doing more research about myocarditis and I'd be badgering our doctors and I would be worried that we have a medical system and a pharmaceutical system and a healthcare system and a public health system that's not incentivized to look at any of this in a fine-grained way and they just want one blanket admonition to the entire population. Just take the shot, you idiots. 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. So it's just part of it is again a pendulum swing in the wrong direction. Somewhat analogous.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I said, even if he's right, even if he turned, if it even 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 fact still suck right now, right? And his confidence 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.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, again, the people who think I'm wrong about any of these topics are going to think, okay, you're just not admitting that you're wrong. But now we're having a dispute about specific facts. There are things that I believed about COVID or worried might be true about COVID two years ago that I no longer believe or I'm not so worried about now. And vice versa. I mean, things have flipped, certain things have flipped upside down. The question is, was I wrong? So here's the cartoon version of it, but this is something I said probably 18 months ago, and it's still true. When I saw what Brett was doing on COVID, let's call it two years ago.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ad hominy thing to say, but I really do worry that that's happened to Brett. I think I cannot explain how you do 100 with all the things in the universe to be interested in. And of all the things he's competent to speak intelligently about, I don't know how you do a hundred podcasts in a row on COVID, right? It's just, it makes no sense.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I really leaned into it. And when I noticed that a lot of the other cohort in my audience didn't like me criticizing the far left and wokeness, I 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 going to lose those parts of my audience. There are people who have created knowingly or not, there are people who've created different incentives for themselves because how they've monetized their podcasts and because of the kind of signal they've responded to in their audience. And I worry about, Brett would consider this a totally invidious”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Audience capture is a thing, and I believe I've witnessed many casualties of it. And if there's anything I've been on guard against in my life, professionally, it's been that. And when I noticed that I had a lot of people in my audience who didn't like my criticizing Trump”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have to be able to keep multiple things in view, right? If you could only look at the problem and you couldn't acknowledge the problem of Trump and Trumpism and QAnon and the explosion of irrationality that was happening on the right and bigotry that was happening on the right, you were just disregarding half of the landscape. And many people took half of the problem in recent years. The last five years is a story of many people taking half of the problem and monetizing that half of the problem and getting captured by an audience that only wanted that half of the problem talked about in that way. And this is the larger issue of audience capture, which is very, I'm sure it's an ancient problem, but it's a very helpful phrase that I think comes to us. Receive our mutual friend Eric Weinstein.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 Schill who's just banging on about the universities and medical journals. It's not true. But that would be the perception. And as a counterpoint to a lot of what's being said on Joe's podcast or certainly Brett's podcast on these topics, I can see how they would form that opinion. In reality, if you listen to me long enough, you hear that Said as much against the woke nonsense as anyone, even any lunatic on the right who can only keep that bright shiny 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.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. The crucial difference is that because he An entertainer first. I mean, I'm not saying he's not smart and 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 taught when he's not doing standup or doing color commentary for the UFC. His full time job is talking to lots of very smart people at great length. So he's created the Joe Rogan University for himself and he's gotten a lot of information crammed into his head. So it's not that he's uninformed, but he can always, when he feels that he's uninformed or when it turns out he was wrong about something, he can always pull the ripcord and say, I'm just a comic. We were stoned. It was fun. Don't take medical advice from me. I don't play a doctor on the internet, right?”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Chosen a very different lane, right? He's unconsciously so. I mean, Joe is a stand up comic who interviews, who just is interested in everything, interviews the widest conceivable variety of people, and just lets his interests collide with their expertise or lack of expertise. I mean, again, it's a super wide variety of people. He'll talk about anything. And he can always pull the ripcord 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 to my eye. I think Joe is an extraordinarily ethical, good person.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Joe knows I love him and consider him a friend, right? So there's no issue there. He also knows I'll be happy to do his podcast when we get that together. So there's no, I have got no policy of not talking to Joe or not doing his podcast. I mean, I think we got a little sideways along these same lines where we've talked about Brett and Elon and other people. It was never to that degree with Joe because”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The entertainment value of things is so influential. I mean, there was that one debate where Trump got a massive laugh on his line, only Rosie O'Donnell. The truth is we're living in a political system where if you can get a big laugh during a political debate, you win. It doesn't matter who you are. That's the level of, 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 a threat of nuclear war or anything else. We're monkeys, right? And we like to laugh.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With certain world historical figures, I would just feel like this is an opportunity to learn something that I'm not going to. 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 going to be the kind of distance that's going to blow my mind. And I think... So, I think the liability. So, for instance, I think Joe Rogan was. Very wise not to have Trump on his podcast. I think all he would have been doing is he would have put himself in a situation where he couldn't adequately contain the damage Trump was doing and he was just going to make Trump seem cool to a whole new potentially new cohort of his massive audience. I mean, they would have had a lot of laughs. Trump's funny.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, some of the same people. They're the same people who are worried about. Ivermectin got suppressed. Like Ivermectin is really the 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 fears.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Empathizing with Putin to the point of thinking, well, maybe Putin's got a point and it's like, what about the polonium and the nerve agents and the killing of journalists and the Navalny and like does that count? I'm not paying so much attention to that because I'm following all these interesting people on Twitter and they're giving me some pro Putin material here. And there is some Nazis in Ukraine. It's not like there are no Nazis in Ukraine. How am I going to weight these things? I think people are being driven crazy by Twitter.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've basically trained ourselves not to be able to agree about facts on any topic, no matter how urgent, right? What's flying in our sky? What's happening in Ukraine? Is Putin just denazifying Ukraine? I mean, 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”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They used the wrong statistics in this experiment, right? 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 Unecceptably over the last few years. But I think that's largely a social media and blogs and the efforts of podcasters and substack writers. Not just a response to that, it was, I think it was a symptom of that and a cause of that, right? And I think we're living in an environment where”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 tumbling out in a conversation like that. That's the kind of thing, frankly, I was worried about in the COVID conversation because not that someone like Brett would do it consciously, but someone like Brett is swimming in a sea of misinformation on social, living on Twitter, getting people sending the blog post and the study from the Philippines that showed that in this cohort, Ivermecton did X, right? And not 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.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 don't, he didn't know about the F-16s?”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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? Now all of these are I dimly recall some theses of that kind, but I'm just making these things up now, right? So like that detail hadn't even been scheduled for that day. It's just inexplicably run that day. How long would it take to track that down, right? The idea that this is anomalous, like that there was an F16 exercise run and it wasn't even supposed to be run that day, right?”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People are perfectly competent. They're perfectly concealing things. Like thousands of people are collaborating 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”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To play whack-a-mole sufficiently well so as to convince anyone of anything who was not seeing the problematic structure of that way of thinking. I mean, it's not actually a thesis. It's a proliferation of anomalies, you can't actually connect all the dots that are being pointed to. They don't connect in a coherent way. They're incompatible theses that are not, and their incompatibility is not being acknowledged. But they're running this algorithm of things are never what they seem. There's always malicious conspirators doing things perfectly. We see evidence of human incompetence everywhere else. No one can tie their shoes expertly, anywhere else. But over here.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. Try to deprogram them however ineffectually. 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 How impossible it was to”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The core doctrine of Islam, exactly. So I went down. So that became my wheelhouse for a time, you know, terrorism and jihadism-related topics. And so the 9-11 truth conspiracy thing kept getting aimed at me. And the question was, well, do I want to debate these people?”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, but then when 9-11 happened, I had spent all this time reading religious books, understanding empathically understanding the motivations of religious people, knowing just how fully certain people believe what they say they believe, right? So I took religious convictions very seriously People started flying planes into our buildings. And so I knew that there was something to be said about the”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who was someone like Jesus or Buddha? And are these people frauds? 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”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the thing is the place I'm familiar with doing this and not doing this is. Specific conspiracies like 9 11 truth. The 9-11, so because of what 9-11 did to my Intellectual life, and they really just, you know, it sent me down a path for the better part of a decade. Like I became a critic of religion. I don't know if I was ever going to be a critic of religion, right? But it happened to be in my wheelhouse because I spent so much time studying religion on my own. And I was also very interested in the underlying spiritual concerns of every religion. And so I was... I devoted more than a full decade of my life to just, 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”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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. Whether it's about UFOs or anything else, right? They will seem to make you look like an ignoramus. In fact, everything they're saying is specious whether they know it or not. I mean, there's some people who are just crazy. There are some people who are just bullshitting and they're not even tracking whether it's true. It just feels good. And then some people are consciously lying about things.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's not time enough in the world to run down, and certainly not time enough in the span of a conversation, to run down each of those leads to bedrock so as to falsify it. I mean, he'll just make shit up. Or make shit up and then weave it in with half-truths and micro-truths that give some semblance of credibility to somebody out there. I mean, apparently millions of people out there. And there's just no way to untangle that in real time with him.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, in the nature of the subject matter. But there are other people who just by default, I would say, there's no reason to give this guy a platform. And there are also people who are so confabulatory that Making such a mess with every sentence that insofar as you're even trying to interact with what they're saying, you're by definition going to fail and you're going to seem to fail to a sufficiently large uninformed audience where it's going to be a net negative for the cause of truth, no matter how good you are. So like for instance, I think... Talking to Alex Jones on any topic for any reason is probably a bad idea because I just think he's just neurologically wired to just utter a string of sentences. He'll get 20 sentences out, each of which has to be, each of which contains more lies than the last.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not that I don't think sunlight is usually the best disinfectant. I think it is. Even these asymmetries aside, I mean, there are, it is true that a person can always make a mess faster than you can clean it up, right? But still, there are debates worth having even given that limitation. And they're the right people to have those specific debates. And there are certain topics where I'll debate someone just because I'm the right person for the job and it doesn't matter how messy they're going to be. It's just worth it because I can make my points land at least to the right part of the audience.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, if you're on the cusp of it where it's just he's someone who's gaining power and you don't want to help facilitate that, then there's a question of whether you can undermine him while pushing back against him in that interview. So there are people I wouldn't talk to just because I don't want to give them oxygen and I don't think that in the in the context of my interviewing them, I'm going to 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 within the span of an hour that I can't correct for, you know, it's like they can lighten many small fires and it just takes too much time to put them out.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source