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

“You just want to understand the nature of evil, right? You just want to 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”
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 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 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. And if you're interviewing Hitler, you don't have to say, listen, I just got to say before we start, I don't agree with the whole genocide thing. And I just think you're killing mental patients and vans and all that. That was all bad. That's a bad look, Adolf. 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,”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can extend charity too far, right? It can be absolutely obvious what someone's motives really are and they're dissembling about that, right? And so then you're taking at face value, their representations begins to look like you're just being duped and you're not actually doing the work of putting pressure on a bad actor. So it's, and again, the mental illness component here makes it very difficult to think about what you should or shouldn't have said to Kanye.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or even whether you say anything in those, I mean, there are moments, 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.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah. And again, things change. When they're for public consumption, it's like the cut for me that has just, the use case, I keep stumbling upon is the kinds of things that I will say on a podcast like this or if I'm given a public lecture. Versus the kinds of things I will say a dinner with strangers or with friends. If you're in an elevator, if I'm in an elevator with strangers, I do not feel, and I hear someone say something stupid, I don't feel an intellectual responsibility to turn around in the confines of that space with them and say, listen, that thing you just said about X, Y, or Z is completely false, and here's Yight. But if somebody says it in front of me on some public diets where I'm actually talking about ideas, that's when there's a different responsibility that comes online.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 not especially fully opposed by you and anyone else who's given him the microphone at that moment to the world. So that made my spidey sense tingled.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the left, Jews are considered extra white. I mean, we're the extra beneficiaries of white privilege. 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 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.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But here's the reality. So I'm someone, so I'm Jewish, you know, although obviously not religious. I have never taken, I've been a student of the Holocaust, obviously. I know a lot about that, and there's reason to. To be a student of the Holocaust In my lifetime and in my experience, I have never taken antisemitism very seriously. I have not worried about it. I have not made a thing of it. I've done exactly one podcast on it. I had Barry Weiss on my podcast when her book came out But It really is a thing and it's”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. 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 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.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Spread those memes as well. But the most offensive thing is just how delusionally egocentric he is or was coming off in that interview and in others. He has an estimation of himself as this omnibus genius 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. When Trump says he's a genius who understands everything, but nobody takes him seriously, one wonders whether Trump takes himself seriously. Kanye seems to believe his own press. He actually thinks he's just a colossal.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's leave the mental illness aside. So, if we're going to 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 we can talk about because I think there are problems just letting him...”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When he shows up in a gimpood on Alex Jones's podcast, I mean, is it either that's More genius performance in his world, or he's unraveling further”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If it does, if it's opening up in the wrong direction where just gale force nonsense is coming in, right? I think we should have an open mind and an open heart, but there are some clear things here that 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 no”
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, you know, I wouldn't, I just wouldn't have aired the conversation. I just don't think it was a document that had to get out there. I get that many people, this is not a signal you're likely to get from your audience, right? 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're holding this tension between he's this creative genius whose 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.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Also, not much to say unless you're really going to 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 don't always feel good to the recipient, right? There is a sort 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 going to do everyone a favor right now. And, you know, just take your foot out of your mouth.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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 going to come from him on that topic. And if it is a symptom of his mental illness that he thinks these things, well, then you're not doing him a favor making that even more public. If he's just an asshole and he's just an anti-Semite, an ordinary garden variety anti-Semite, well then...”
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 argue none of those are likely for either of us. Not to say we don't have our moments, but So, the reason not to talk to Kanye, so I think you should have had the conversation you had with him in private. That's great. And I have got no criticism of what you said had it been in private. I just thought.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, so I think these are highly non-analogous cases, right? So your conversation with Misfired from my point of view for a very different reason. It has to do with Kanye. So Kanye, I've never met Kanye, so obviously I don't know him. I think he's either obviously in the midst of a mental health crisis or he's a colossal asshole or both. I mean, the fact that those aren't mutually exclusive. So one of three possibilities, he's either mentally ill, he's an asshole, or he's mentally ill, and an asshole.”
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 with Brett, I failed to reach out in private to the degree that I should have. And we never really had, we had tried to set up a conversation in private that never happened, but there was some communication It would have been much better for me to have made more of an effort in private than I did before it spilled out into public. And I would say that's true with other people as well.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 the case, I reached out to you in private first and told you exactly what I thought. And then when I was going to 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. Now, that was how I navigated that moment. I did the same thing with Elon, at least at the beginning. We have maintained good vibes, which is not what I'm.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not at all sad. One thing I think I did wrong, one thing that I do regret, one thing I have not sorted out for myself is how to navigate the professional and personal pressure that gets Applied at this moment where you have a friend or an acquaintance or someone you know. Who's behaving badly in public or behaving badly, behaving in a way that you think is bad in public? And they have a public platform where they're influencing a lot of people, and you have your own public platform where you're constantly getting asked to comment on what this friend or acquaintance or colleague is doing.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was 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, this second clip of me seeming to say that I wish more children died during COVID. But it was so, I was so clear in context what I was saying that even the clip betrayed the context, so it didn't actually work. This psycho, and again, I don't know whether he actually is a psychopath, but he's behaving like one because of the incentives of Twitter. This is somebody who Brett signal boosted as a very reliable source of information, right? He kept retweeting this guy at me against me. And this guy, at one glance I knew how unreliable this guy was, right? But I think I...”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, so that's a point I made, which was maliciously clipped out from some other podcast where someone's trying to make it look like I want to see children die. It's a pity more children didn't die from COVID, right?”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. 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 going to lock down.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are always having their interests introduced by the elites, right? So 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. Okay, you have a society that is now immune to reason, right? Because there are absolutely certain pathogens that we should lock down for next time. And it was completely rational in the beginning of this thing to lock down given, to attempt to lock down. We never really locked down.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the jury is still out on some of it. And again, it's a moving target. And some of it, I mean, it's complicated. Some of it's a self-fulfilling dynamic where lockdowns in theory lockdowns 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 on finally on the neck of the good people who”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, no, but it's like with climate science. I mean, 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-caused climate change is a thing, right? So do you go with the 97% most of the time, or do you go with the 3% most of the time? It's obvious you go with the 97% most of the time for anything that matters. It's not to say that the 3% are always wrong. Again, there are things get overturned. And yes, as you say, 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”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was no good reason to say either of those things at that moment. And so given that that's where Brett was, I felt like there was just no, there was nothing to debate. We were both the wrong people to be getting into the weeds on this. We're both going to defer to our chosen experts. His experts look like crackpots to me, or at least the ones who are most vociferous on those edgiest points that seem most.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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? 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 going to die because of these vaccines and to confidently say that Ivermectin is a panacea, right? Ivermectin is the thing that prevents COVID, right?”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but I knew we were going to disagree about that. I saw his podcast where he brought on these experts who had many of them had the right credentials. But for a variety of reasons, they didn't pass the smell test for me. One larger problem, and this goes back to the problem of how we rely on authority and science, is that you can always find a PhD or an MD to champion any crackpot idea, right? I mean, it is amazing, but you could find PhDs and MDs who would sit up there in front of Congress and say that they thought smoking was not addictive, or that it was not harmful to there was no direct link between smoking and lung cancer. You could always find those people. But some of the people Brett found were people who had obvious tells to my point of view, to my eye, and I saw them on the same page. We're on Rogan's podcast, right?”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Age, right? And do I need to be worried about myocarditis? 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 Brett 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.”
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 know that I'm going to get the next booster, right? So I was somebody who was waiting in line at four in the morning, you know, hoping to get some overflow vaccine when it was first available. And 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 anecdotes that were too vivid to ignore, both data and personal experience, It was totally rational for me to want to 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 the, how many of these boosters am I going to get for the rest of my life, really? And how safe is the mRNA vaccine for a man of my”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. And so again, all of this has begun to shift. I don't think it has shifted as much as Brett Weinstein thinks it's shifted. But yes, there are safety concerns around the mRNA vaccines, especially for young men, right? As far as I know, that's the purview of actual heightened concern. But also... There's now a lot of natural immunity out there. Basically, everyone who was going to get vaccinated has gotten vaccinated. The virus has evolved to the point in this context where it seems less dangerous. Again, I don't go on the seemings than on research that I've done at this point, but I'm certainly less worried about getting COVID. I've had it once. I've been vaccinated. So you ask me now, how do I feel about getting the next booster?”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 going to 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-vaccult. 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 if they experience it, and we're still, I know people have kids who fit that description, right?”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 going to get COVID? And the question is, do you want to be vaccinated when you do? There was a period where that force choice, where it was just obviously reasonable to get vaccinated, especially because there was every...”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Target and a lot of things we did in hindsight around masking and school closures Looks fairly dysfunctional, right? But unnecessary.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But at a certain point, we have to recognize that real questions of human welfare are in play, right? There's like there are really war is getting fought or not fought, and there's a pandemic raging and there's medicine to take or not take. But to come back to this issue of COVID, I don't think I got so out of 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 because 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? So when we realized that was no longer the case, I stopped doing that. So again, it was a move.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But part of it, I mean, I find it very difficult to believe that anyone believes these things. I mean, I think that there's, and 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 four-channification 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 doing it. 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 that 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 gumming up everyone's cognitive bandwidth with bullshit, right? I get that that's fun if you're a teenager and you just want to vandalize our new sphere.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 it is preferentially sharing misinformation.”
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 a small one. It's not to say that every concern about vaccines is a species of born of misinformation or born of this cult, but there is a cult that is just, you know, and the core of Trumpism is a cult. I mean, QAnon is a cult. And so there's a lot of lying and there's a lot of confusion. 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 Tom Hanks and Oprah Winfrey and Michelle Obama are among those cannibals. I mean, like they're... Adjacent to the pure crazy, there's the semi crazy, and adjacent to the semi crazy, there's the grifting opportunist asshole. And the layers of bad faith are hard to fully diagnose. But the problem is.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My fear is that there was going to 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.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 plain vanilla dysfunction.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Want to secure a steady supply of toilet paper, but beyond that initial period. When we had a sense of what we were dealing with and we had every hope that the vaccines are actually going to work and we knew we were getting those vaccines in short order, right? Beyond that, and we knew just how dangerous the illness was and how dangerous it wasn't. For years now, I've just been worrying about this as a failed dress rehearsal for something much worse, right? I think what we prove 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 Arranging us and making it”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even more a concern about our ability to respond to a truly scary pathogen next time. Outside those initial months, give me the first six months to be quite worried about COVID and the unraveling of society.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 too quick for some, not quick enough for others. We could have 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 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 and how dangerous I perceive COVID to be as an illness. It has been for the longest time.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Masks are. But at a certain point, we knew it was respiratory, but whether it's spread by fomites, like all that we were confused about a lot of things.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 it.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source