#365 Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs

You've got people who are moving the opinions of millions of others who should not have an opinion on these topics. There is no scenario in which you should be getting your opinion about vaccine safety or the war in Ukraine or anything else that we might want to talk about from Candace Owens.

Even if there were just obvious corruption—Joe Biden was at this meeting, and he took this amount of money from this shady guy for bad reasons... Given how much we know about Joe Biden and how much we know about Donald Trump... the scale of corruption can't possibly balance out between the two of them.

I've never met Kanye ... One of three possibilities: He's either mentally ill, he's an asshole, or he's mentally ill and an asshole.

Your phone is this perpetual stimulus... which is intrinsically fragmenting of time and attention. And now, my phone is a much less of a presence in my life ... My sense of just what the world is and my sense of my place in the world, the sense of where I exist as a person has changed a lot by deleting my Twitter account.

The prospect of being able to manufacture clips with AI and deep fakes... That's a misinformation apocalypse that we are right on the cusp of, and it's terrifying.

When things really matter—and putting this at 30,000 feet in a storm sharpens this up—we want real experts to be in charge. And we are at 30,000 feet a lot of the time on a lot of issues—whether they're public health issues; whether it's a geopolitical emergency, like Ukraine; climate change. I mean, just pick your topic.

What do humans value? ... If you were a superintelligent AI that could look at humanity now, I think you could be forgiven for concluding that what we value is driving ourselves crazy with Twitter and living perpetually on the brink of nuclear war and just watching hot girls in yoga pants on TikTok again and again and again.

We all know this phenomenon: We could say of someone, that person's too online ... I think being on social media at all is to be too online.

The truth or falsity of a statement does not even slightly depend on the credentials of the person making the statement. It doesn't matter if you're a Nobel Laureate, you can be wrong ... And it's also possible for someone who's deeply uninformed to be right about something, or to be right for the wrong reasons.

It is also true that, most of the time, real experts are much more reliable than frauds or people who are not experts. And expertise really is a thing. When you're flying an airplane in a storm, you don't want just randos coming into the cockpit saying, 'Listen, I've got a new idea about how to tweak these controls.' You want someone who's a trained pilot.

You ask me now, how do I feel about getting the next booster? I don't know that I'm going to get the next booster.

You can always find a PhD or an MD to Champion any crackpot idea ... 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 there was no direct link between smoking and lung cancer. You can always find those people.

I think Trump is among the most superficial people we have ever laid eyes on ... I think Joe Rogan was very wise not to have Trump on his podcast.

He's created the Joe Rogan University for himself ... When it 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.' I can't quite do that.

There's something very Trumpian about how [Elon Musk] is acting on Twitter ... I think Twitter is driving him crazy right. I think he's needlessly complicating in his life, and harming his reputation, and creating a lot of noise, and harming a lot of other people.

I don't think Twitter is important as people think it is ... It's just an unambiguously good thing, in my experience, to delete your Twitter account.

If you listen to me long enough, you hear that I've said as much against the woke nonsense as anyone—even as any lunatic on the right who can only keep that bright shiny object in view.

When I noticed that I had a lot of people in my audience who didn't like my criticizing Trump, I really leaned into it. And when I noticed... the other cohort of my audience didn't like me criticizing the far left and wokeness... 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.

I still believe that it is the current view of most people competent to analyze the data that we lost something like 300,000 people unnecessarily in the US because of a vaccine hesitancy.

Certainly in a condition where these machines are improving themselves or are improving their own code, they could be developing instrumental goals that are antithetical to our well-being without any intent to harm us. It's analogous to what we do to every other species on Earth.

I'm not sure we want, in the end, everyone's opinion given equal weight ... And I include myself in that. I mean, there many topics around which I don't deserve to have a strong opinion because I don't know what I'm talking about.

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... In the final moment, not to see how untenable it was to still support... a sitting president who was not committing to a peaceful transfer of power.

This vast gulf between truly informed opinion and bullshit exists ... Conspiracy thinking is, rather often, most of the time, the species of bullshit—but it's not always wrong; there are real conspiracies.

We have trained ourselves not to be able to agree about facts on any topic, no matter how urgent.

I really do worry that that's happened to Bret [Weinstein] ... Of all the things he's competent to speak intelligently about, I don't know how you do 100 podcasts in a row on COVID. It just makes no sense.

When I saw what Bret was doing on COVID, let's call it 2 years ago, I said even if he is right, if it turns out that Ivermectin is a panacea and the mRNA vaccines kill millions of people, he's still wrong right now; his reasoning is still flawed right now; his facts still stuck right now.

I will totally concede that if I had teenage boys and their schools were demanding that they be vaccinated with the mRNA vaccine, I would be powerfully annoyed.

There's a big difference between me and Bret in this case. I didn't do 100 podcasts on COVID; I did like 2 podcasts on COVID. The measure of my concern about COVID can be measured in how many podcasts I did on it.

The gain-of-function research is something that I think we're wise to be worried about ... I think it should be banned.

The point I didn't make about Bret... 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.

I do think the ground truth for personal well-being is to find a mode of being where you can pay attention to the present moment and recognize that just consciousness itself in the present moment... is already a circumstance of freedom and contentment...

Maybe probability isn't a thing; maybe there's only actuality; maybe there's only what happens, and at every point along the way, our notion of what could have happened or what might have happened is just that—it's just a thought about what could have happened.

Every backward-looking regret or disappointment and every forward-looking worry is completely dependent on this notion of possibility. Every regret is based on the sense that I could have done something else ... Every disposition to worry about the future is based on the feeling that there's this range of possibilities.

You know, Trump, arguably there's never been a person in that anyone could name in human history whose lied with that kind of velocity.

All we have is our attention in the end, and we just have to notice what these various tools are doing to it.