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

“that even bad people are effortlessly behaving as though they're good people because they're so successfully incentivized to behave that way. So it's almost the inversion of our current situation. So yes, and you say I changed my mind about the war, not 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... At best, a highly ambiguous and painful exercise, more likely a fool's errand, right? It's like that, you know, it did not turn out 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 hope you're right. Everything you said about the military industrial complex is true, right? And we've been worrying about that on both sides of the aisle for a very long time. I mean, that's just, that phrase came from 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? 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. And we will really succeed when we have a system of incentives where The good incentives are so strong.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this is the guy who's got the button, right? I mean, he's got somebody's following him around with a bag waiting to take his order to launch, right? Just a risk we should never run. One thing Trump has going forward, I think, is that he doesn't drink or do drugs, right? People allege that he does speed. But let's take him at his word. He's not deranging himself with pharmaceuticals, at least. But apart from Diet Coke.”
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'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. 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? As though that were a sign of anything other than progress, 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 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 was obviously too old to be president who has a crack addicted son who lost his laptop. And I just knew that I was going to.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Looked at him for decades. Just how many affairs is he having, just how much is he doing? How many houses does he have? What are the obvious conflicts of interest? You hold that against what we know about Trump.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The scale of corruption can't possibly balance out between the two of them. 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 going to start getting a sense that, all right, maybe this guy is way more corrupt than I realized. 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 as dirty as can be. He's all mobbed up and it's 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 having looked at this guy for literally decades, right, and knowing that every journalist has”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Given how visible the lives of these two men have been, right? Given how much we know about Joe Biden and how much we know about Donald Trump and how they have lived in public for almost as long as I've been alive, both of them.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this is why 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 this amount of money from this shady guy for bad reasons, right?”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Should do, but we need smart, well informed, well-intentioned people to do that job. And the well-intentioned part is hugely important, right? 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 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's like it predates his presidency. We knew this guy 30 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
“But none of that discounts the fact that We have. System that really needs proper house cleaning. Yes, there are bad incentives and entrenched interests. And I'm not a fan of the concept of the deep state because it has been so propagandized. But yes, there's something like that that is not. Flexible enough to respond intelligently to the needs of the moment. So there's a lot of rethinking of government and of institutions in general that I think”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 has this superpower of Deranging and destabilizing Almost everything he touches, and sullying and compromising the integrity of almost anyone who comes into his orbit. I mean, so you looked at these people who served as his chief of staff or in various cabinet positions, people who had real reputations for probity and level-headedness, whether you shared their politics or not. I mean, these were real people. These were not some of them were goofballs. 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, people bent over backwards to accommodate his norm violations. And it was bad for them and it was bad for our system.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That seems untenable to me. So, and I can recognize that many people in our society 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. So I think we should have control of our borders. We should have a sane and compassionate immigration policy. We should let in refugees. Trump on refugees was terrible. No, I would say 80% of the policy concerns. Celebrated in him are concerns that I either share entirely or certainly sympathize with. So that's not the issue. The issue is”
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 admitted that. No, no. So, like, so I've admitted that many of his policies I agree with, many, many of his policies. Probably more often than not, at least on balance, I agreed. I agreed with his policy that 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 because the way he talks about these things and many of his motives that are obvious are things that I don't support. But I mean, take immigration. I think there's obvious that we should have control of our borders. Like I don't see the argument for not having control of our borders. We should let in who we want to let in, and we should keep out who we want to keep out, and we should have a sane immigration policy. So I didn't necessarily think it was a priority to build the wall, but I didn't, I never criticized the impulse to build the wall because if 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.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But he has so few of them, he has fewer good qualities virtually anyone I can name, right? He's funny. I'll grant you that he's funny. He's a good entertainer.”
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 think there something profitably to be said to someone who's truly captivated by the personality cult of Trumpism's going to say to there's no conversation I'm going to have with Candace Owens say about Trump that's going to converge on something reasonable I don't think so No, I mean, I haven't tried with Candace, but I've tried with many people who. In that particular orbit, I mean, I've had conversations with people who Won't admit that there's anything wrong with Trump. Anything”
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 the lone superpower. It's not good. And so we shouldn't, 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 storm our capital and smear shit on the walls. That's just more shaking things up, right? It's all just for the lulls. There's a nihilism and cynicism to all of that, which again, in certain people it's understandable. You know, frankly, it's not understandable if you've got a billion dollars and you're 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. So there's a cynicism to all of that that I think we should be deeply critical of.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But he tried to do things, and he would have to have done those things through other people, and there are people who refuse to do those things. There are people who said they would quit. They would quit publicly, right? I mean, you start, again, there are multiple books written about the last hours of this presidency. The details are shocking in what he tried to do and try 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. It's the only time in our lifetime that anything like this has happened. And it was deeply embarrassing on the world stage. It's just like we looked like a banana republic there for a while.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About election fraud, right? And all of these things are getting thrown out by 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.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 going to be disproportionately Democrat votes because of the position he took on mail in ballots. I mean, all of it was fairly calculated, the whole circus of the clown car that crashed into Four Seasons landscaping. 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.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's just like possible that he never did anything illegal. It's truly illegal. I think he probably did a few illegal things, but like illegal such that he really should be thrown in jail for it. At least that remains to be seen. So all of the chaos, all of the diminishment of our stature in the world, all of the opportunity costs of spending years focused on nonsense. All of that was just norm violations. All that was just, that was just all a matter of not saying the thing you should say. But that doesn't mean they're insignificant, right? It's not that it's like it's not illegal for a sitting president to say, No, I'm not going to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, right? We'll wait and see whether I win. If I win, the election was valid. If I lose, it was fraudulent, right?”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If there's a silver lining into 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 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 have done a good thing for our society, right? I mean, one of the things we realized. I think nobody knew. I mean, I certainly didn't know it and I didn't hear anyone talk about it. How much our system relies on norms rather than laws?”
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 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. He obviously doesn't care about people, can't even pretend to care about people really, right, in a credible way.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For me, Trump has always been someone like an evil Chauncey Gardner. 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. He's got a genius for getting the eye of the media always coming back to him. But it's a kind of 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 want to have a reputation for, right? It's like it's pure, the pure pornography of attention, right? And he just wants more of it. I think the truly depressing and genuinely scary thing was that”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is what Eric Weinstein never stops badgering me about. But he's still wrong, Eric. My analogy for Trump was that he's an evil Chauncey Gardener. I don't know if you remember the book or the film Being There with Peter Sellers. But Peter Sellers is this gardener who really doesn't know anything, but he gets recognized as this wise man and gets promoted to immense power in Washington because he's speaking in these kind of semblance of wisdom. He's got these very simple aphorisms or what seem to be aphorisms. He's just talking, all he cares about is gardening. He's just talking about his garden all the time. But he'll say something. But in the spring, the new shoots will bloom. And people read into that some kind of genius insight politically. And so he gets promoted. And so that's the joke of the film.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Once in a generation narcissist. No, I don't think he's a truly scary, sinister, Putin-like or 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 totalitarian, right? And he's...”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The basis For a lot of public confusion. And frankly, it's a basis for a lot of criticism I've received on these topics where it's people think that I'm a 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 run everything. It's not true, but there's a ton of cut through to get to daylight there because people are... Very confused about how we value authority in the service of rationality generally.”
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 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 different. You can invite someone onto your podcast who's an expert about something that you're not an expert about. And then 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 going to form a strong opinion that was this counter to the expert you have in front of you, it's going to be by deference to some other expert who you've brought in or who you've heard about or whose work you've read or whatever. But there's a paradox to how we value authority in science that most people don't understand. And I think we should at some point unravel that because it's.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 amateurish speculation and conspiracy thinking and just bullshit.”
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 a deeper concern that we're in the process of entertaining ourselves to death, right? That we're just not taking things seriously. And it's 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 there are really important problems that we have to get our head straight around. And we need, it's not to say that institutions don't become corrupt. I think they do. And I think, and I'm quite worried that both about the loss of trust in our institutions and the fact that trust has eroded for good reason, right? That they have become less trustworthy. They've become infected by political ideologies that are not truth tracking. I worry about all.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. It doesn't matter if he's on the one hand saying that he loves the leader of North Korea and on the other threatening threatens to bomb them back to the Stone Age right on Twitter. It all can be taken in the spirit of kind of reality television. This is the part of the movie that's just fun to watch, right? I understand that. I can even inhabit that space for a few minutes at a time.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It wasn't that many in the end against the number of podcasts I devoted other topics. But there are people who look at Trump and just find him funny, entertaining, not especially threatening. It's just good fun to see somebody who's just not taking anything seriously. And it's just putting a stick in the wheel of business as usual again and again and again and again.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you're thinking, you know, but boy, that was dangerous. I probably shouldn't wander in the middle of the street with my eyes closed. You weren't wrong to feel that you really had a problem, right? Came very close to something truly terrible. So I think that's where we were, and I think we shouldn't do that again. So the fact that he's coming back around as potentially a viable candidate, you know, I'm not spending much time thinking about it, frankly, because I'm waiting for the moment where it requires some thought. I mean, it did. Took up I don't know how many podcasts I devoted to the top”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The integrity of a few people that we didn't suffer some real constitutional crisis and real emergency 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. So it wasn't for want of trying on Trump's part that we didn't succumb to some 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 a driver.”
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, I think Trump's arrangement syndrome is a very clever meme because it just Throws the problem back on the person who's criticizing Trump, but in truth, the true Trump derangement syndrome was not to have seen how dangerous and divisive it would be to promote someone like Trump to that position of power and to not, and in the final moment not to see how untenable it was to still support someone who is 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 one minute to midnight for our democracy as far as I'm concerned and I think it really was but for”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Inundated by misinformation, and they see what their favorite influencer just said. And now they're worried about vaccines. We're living in an environment where the information space becomes so corrupted. And we've built machines to further corrupt it. We've built a business model for the internet that further corrupts it. So it is just chaos in informational terms. I don't fault people for being confused and impatient at their wit's end. And yes, Trump was an enormous fuck you to the establishment. And that was understandable for many reasons.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 going to 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 I barely have the, I'm like one of the luckiest people in the world and I barely have the bandwidth to pay attention to half the things I should pay attention to in order to have an opinion about half the things we're going to talk about, right? So how much less bandwidth is somebody who's working two jobs or a single mom who's raising 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.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most politicians lie, at least some of the time. I don't think that's a good thing. I think people should be 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 going to, 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. 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, to pointless and effective. But it's just. It says something.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In pathological terms, right? We want them to be far outliers, in the best case, in wisdom and compassion and some of the things, 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 insofar as we're going to get normal mediocrities in that role, which I think is often the best we could expect, let's get normal mediocrities in that role, not once in a generation narcissists and I mean, it is like just take honesty as a single variable, right? I think you want, yes, it's possible that”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 what should guide us. I genuinely think he is missing some necessary moral and psychological tools. 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 really the good stuff in life. And I think he's missing a lot of that. But I think we don't want to promote people to the highest positions of power in our society who are far outliers in”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. 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. I'm under no illusions that all of our institutions are 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. And this is something.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I agree with the first part, so I haven't bought the myth that it's. A truly representative democracy in the way that we would idealize. And 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? I'm not sure we want, in the end, everyone's opinion given equal weight about 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 or what I would be talking about if I had a strong opinion. And I think we'll probably get to that”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To really wish people well and really wish strangers well effortlessly wish them well and to realize that there is no opposition between in the bottom there's no real opposition between selfishness and selflessness because why is selfishness really takes into account other people's happiness? I mean, which do you want to live in a society where you have everything, but most other people have nothing? Or do you want to live in a society where you're surrounded by happy, creative, self-actualized people who are having their hopes and dreams realized? I think it's obvious that the second society is much better, however much you can guard your good look.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 very bad state of affairs in our society. 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. Then you can recognize that people have very different life experiences. And yeah, I mean, I think empathy and probably the better word for what I would hope to embody there is compassion, right?”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 his heart is in the right place. He's really a man of the people, even though he's a gold-plated everything in his life. They bought the myth somehow of 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. 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 current trends. Understandable that they would”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And 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 patently obvious who he was, 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? I'm critical of all of that, and yet the fact that”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's important, but I just it only takes you so far, right? It doesn't get you to truth, right? Truth is not decided by 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 epistemologically. And yet their circumstances 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.”
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 know that, generally speaking, just in game theoretic terms, we're all going to tend to be better off in a fair system than a corrupt one.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A bunch of those variables change and they change for the worse, understandably. But yeah, when everyone's corrupt and you're in a state of collective emergency, you've got a lifeboat problem. You're scrambling to get into the lifeboat. Yeah, then fairness and norms and 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 want, 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 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.”
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 want her to get attention, 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 have 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. When you sort of get pressed down the hierarchy of Maslow's needs, you know, individually and societally.”
2023-03-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source