Today
humans, welcome to uncomfortable conversations the safe space for Dangerous ideas. What a program today. I'll tell ya, I'll tells you, you got lots to look forward to today. Ha ha. Whoa, Nelly. I'm jealous of you that I've already had this conversation and you get to enjoy it for the very first time. It's a conversation between myself and Sam. Harris, you can probably tell that because the title of the show is come from conversations with Josh, zepps and the title of the episode is Sam Harris.
So therefore through a process of deduction, you might say you've probably concluded that this is Josh zepps and Sam Harris in conversation. I give you an award and an Applause for concluding that Sam is a wonderful guys been on the show before. He's one of the few people to be invited on this or gust program more than once. And I'm honored that he's been willing to do it more than once. I see, he's been causing us some controversies lately on your social medias.
I'm not sure if this is intentional. I think he's just the type of person who people like to misconstrue and misinterpret. And, you know, he says things without fear or favor, he is basically a philosopher's brain in a vat and he he pays no heed to the possibility that he's framing things. In such a way that a person who wants to willfully misrepresent them, can very effectively willfully, misrepresent them. And I have seen many people doing just such a
Hang on social media. I would ordinarily not be inclined to have a terribly uncomfortable conversation with Sam. Because as the title of his podcast, suggests his podcast being called making sense. Sam frequently makes a lot of sense. In fact, you might say it's what he Prides himself on as a philosopher and a neuroscientist, but I did want to push him on one thing that's been bugging me a little about Sam.
Which is his association with this whole constellation of characters. Who since he collaborated with them have spun off the rails and gone into Cloud Cuckoo Land. And these are people I can't, and I'm not blaming Sam for this in the sense that I also had collaborations with these people who are alternative media people who are intellectual dark web figures, who as recently, as maybe five years ago, you might have
I said, well, these are interesting characters who are essentially bucking the media Trend and a questioning institutional narratives and are there sick and tired of the conversation being so constrained by a conventional media and mainstream outlets and institutions. And bureaucracies, I don't know Public Health officials and they're doing, they're doing the Lord's work by probing questions in bullshit, freeways that defy propriety and polite.
This and niceties and group. Think they're independent thinkers, these independent thinkers. Many of them are just now Bonkers. Ladies and gentle persons. That's the only kind word for it and that's not a very kind word. There are batshit crazy there. How about that? For a kind word. And so I wanted to talk to Sam, see Sam. And I have a bit of a history in the sense that many of those people who I'm talking about and we'll start naming some names, don't you worry about that if you're a little confused, you go on, but
Josh. Josh old buddy old boy who you're talking about, exactly. Then I say to you, firstly don't call me old, buddy. Oh boy. Okay. This is not a 1920s, sitcom. Secondly, I'm going to get to all those names in the conversation with Sam, but I wanted to pull him up on like how does he feel about having had these relationships and associations with such people. So that's that comprises. A significant portion of the conversation today and I think it's going to be useful.
I think is going to be useful for you to hear it. Was certainly useful for me to flash out and I think it's going to be useful for Sam to have this opportunity to actually in a deep and thoughtful and clear-headed way articulate, what happened?
And where the real differences of opinion and strategy are and where there may still be some common ground. If you're new to this show, if we, if you're hearing ads in this episode then you have the regular free feed and that's fine. And I hope you're enjoying it and God bless you for it. If you're not hearing ads, then that means you have been shrewd enough to go to uncomfortable conversations or sub stack.com, / wissen, and get your own private ad-free feed. It also gets you
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He's from regular subscribers. So it's worth going to uncomfortable conversation of dot subject.com /, Missin in getting your premium feed. However, this episode is entirely free with the one and only Sam Harris. If you don't know who he is, he's a neuroscientist philosopher. New York Times bestselling author. He started out as a bit of an anti religion Firebrand, his first book, the end of Faith, which he wrote I think while he was still in graduate school, doing his PhD in neuroscience.
Was a post-911 broadside against well, specifically Islam, but basically religion in general, and because he was then accused or perhaps not because of her, he was subsequently accused of being an anti-muslim bigotry because he had a problem with jihadism and Islamic terrorism. As so he went on to write letter to a Christian Nation, which is maybe the most succinctly and beautiful little book to give
To any Christians who you might want to disabuse of their faith. He is the author of seven books in total. But really, this latest incarnation of his career as a coach of mindfulness and a student of Consciousness is the most interesting phase. He's created an app called waking up to help people explore. What it what it means to sort of step away from the Clutter of your own mind and to get present
to your
own conscious awareness.
And his podcast as I mentioned is called making sense. I hope you enjoy this conversation with the one and only Sam
Harris.
Isn't that? I don't
know that awful and are you, are you, how do you feel about about it? You Shell, Shocked by the extent, to which the number of people who we had reasonably thought were worth talking to, not really that was talking to anymore.
Yeah, well again, I don't know what the ground truth is here, because I feel like, and this is a, perhaps you've heard about my leaving Twitter, of course, for leaving. Yeah, but this was really at the center of it because I got the sense that I was, you know, that Twitter was one, making people fairly crazy. And, and certainly pulling out the worst in them, but then it was also and, and one of the reasons why it was doing this, is it. I think it was
I mean, everyone, a distorted picture of everyone else and those pictures were sort of mutually amplifying so I you know, personally, I was just getting the sense that I was seeing. A misleadingly - picture of everybody. Including people. I know, right? And I don't know, I don't happen to know Lindsay. Well, I think I've only met him once, but my Twitter was clearly not good for him and you know, mm look like clinically, not good for him.
I mean the weird thing is,
Is I'm part of his whole shtick. With the last time we were talking. I don't look a little Shake part of what he was saying. The last time we were speaking was like, the left is way too up its own ass on Twitter and needs to go out and touch the grass. I mean, who literally saying, like Humanities is not going to survive unless we get off line and start touching the grass and start looking at the sky and everything. And I listen back to it and I was like so you're not unaware of that problem and like I don't want to throw him under the bus because I actually think he's like a genius. Like I think there is a class of people and I just had are
On the show again, Weinstein, how I hadn't spoken with in a while. Also, clearly a genius and I find myself halfway through the chat going. Like there are so many things that I'd have to Pedal back on in order for us to be actually bumping into anything interesting here that I don't quite even know how to navigate this because there's so much so much of a golf like every three seconds there's something that's being dropped. That requires an entire universe of kind of
Action from my perspective that we're on different. We're on Parallel train tracks. There's just no intersection.
Yeah well we should talk about if we were going to talk about individual cases, we should differentiate them because there's much less daylight between me and Eric on any interesting question. And there is between me and and several of the other people we might
definitely. Let's talk about the generic phenomenon and light up. We can talk about people if you feel comfortable. But yeah, let's just talk about a phenomenon of this code.
Of a certain cohort of people becoming increasingly conspiratorial?
Yeah well I think Twitter had a lot to do with that I mean you know obviously I larger internet phenomenon. Here's this is an algorithm that everyone is running to just quote do their own, research is producing very mixed results. And in some cases, obviously pathological ones, I'm not sure if module is still looking for Ukrainian Nazis, but
where I left him he was it was all about the Ukrainian obvious. So it's it's it's not to say there aren't any Ukrainian Nazis. I'm sure there are, but it's just to have grabbed that side of the problem of Russia's invasion of Ukraine its
peculiar and I don't I mean wouldn't he say sam the that precisely that framing is what's wrong with the world? The idea that there's a side that he has now grabbed onto and we have to think of it as being
You know, pointing out the flaws in in Ukraine or pointing out the weird hypocrisy of a mainstream media that prior to the invasion was concerned about corruption in Ukraine and father, far-right in Ukraine and now all of a sudden doesn't talk about it at all. That that that binary thinking is the problem, like I heard, who was it on rogo? I think it was
Kurt might have been but, you know, there's a whether it's Greenwald or tabi or, you know, there's this this case that says, you don't have to be pro-russia. Invasion to nonetheless, not want to be hopping on a bandwagon and thinking that there are that you have to pick a side, right?
Yeah, I mean they might say something like that. I think it's being against Putin, was always a pretty clear bright line. I mean it seen the problem with
On seeing the pathology of thinking, we could collaborate with him when he's poisoning, people with neurotoxins in London and disappear in journalists. And all the rest of it is just not. That was never tenable, and I'm not quite sure why. So many people on the right? I guess some people on the left to lost sight of that. Anyway, I just think that the generic problem is trust in institutions. The media
Especially but, you know, institutions being really everything of substances the government and any official organ of heretofore. Real information, the scientific establishment universities pharmaceutical companies, it's just trust in. All of these institutions has eroded so quickly. Obviously covid policy had a lot to do with that. Trump had a lot to do with that but the net result has been we now have this.
You know what, I'm considering a kind of new religion of contrarian ISM and conspiracy thinking, which again, it has everyone doing their own research and almost no one is qualified to do the research they're doing, and it's it's obvious. You've got Bret Weinstein doing 100 episodes of his podcast in a row, or thereabouts on the Terrors of the MRNA vaccines.
And the Sinister shadowy cabal of people who have suppressed information about the life, saving power of ivermectin is completely crazy, right? And yet, you know, I I'm not sure what. If, in each case, I'm not sure what explains it. I mean, there are people who came into this with more than the average taste for conspiracy theories in the first place. And Brett was certainly a person like that. So, the now you see the conspiracist in full flower
Are in the right conditions but still it. I don't know what explains it and it's just, it's really has been a perfect storm of loss of credibility and understandably. So it's not that I haven't criticized these institutions myself. I mean they're, you know, the woke mind virus had really has spread in in many of them and you have science getting politicized in ways that is truly dysfunctional but what we're left with is the Assumption on the parts of it.
So many are swallowed smart people that the vast majority of the most qualified experts on on many, many questions, whether you're talking about what war is to fight or what medicines to give your kids have been captured by Sinister influences of power, or just such comprehensively bad incentives. That basically, everyone who you should have been able to trust yesterday, is now wrong about very important topic,
And the outlier voices, shrieking in the wilderness are right about all of them, no matter how much they may seem like, crackpots. I mean, you, you just you poke, you know, half of these guys and they'll start telling you how they were denied a Nobel Prize, you know? I mean it's
just I mean part of the problem though is also I am so frustrated with my colleagues in the media with the way that journalists frame, this stuff with the level of kind of smug certainty that they have
Have. And I wonder, I mean, I'm trying to run the experiment in my own small way of seeing whether or not you can turn down the volume on all that bullshit by turning up the volume on the mainstream media addressing. Some of the things that these people feel the mainstream media is not addressing like the other day, a former head of the Australian Medical Association came out. She wrote it submission to Parliament, which is looking into long covid about the vaccine injury that she'd had it was her and
Wife had both had side effects from an mRNA vaccine. Now, this is a form of this. She's a physician, she's a former parliamentarians, she's for the former head of the Australian Medical Association, and I had her on my mainstream, like public broadcast radio show for half an hour at Prime Time 8:00 a.m. with the 8:30. Rather with the with a cardiologist one of Australia's leading cardiologist, who also is moderately concerned about the
Level of pericarditis that he's saying he's still very keen to point out that the risk from getting fully blown covid is 10 times or 10 times likelier to get hard inflammation and when you do get it, it's likely to be severe. Heart inflammation, from covid, from Catching covid. Then you are from getting an mRNA vaccine, but if you're a young male in particular, he's like well just get AstraZeneca or Novak's instead of fires raw moderna.
And that solves the problem. Now, the fact that I did that
I think I was the only person.
As far as I'm aware in all of Australian, mainstream media to devote a proper amount of Primetime airtime, to the question of vaccine side effects and how we should start thinking about balancing the pros and cons of vaccinations rather than simply saying insisting that vaccines are always a good idea for everyone and, you know, similarly, with trans stuff. I don't think there's a single other person who's talking about. Who's, you know, I simply interviewed the head of the psychiatrist Association about
Has concerns about affirmative care for juveniles and the inability of therapists to ask young people with gender dysphoria, about other things that are going on in their lives because to do so would be to be perceived as being transphobic and trying to steer them away from their true gender identity. Again, there's this group think and I hope that if we can get out of our own asses as journalists they'll just be less of a swamp in which all of this nonsense can happen. I don't know how confident you are that. That is a
It should or not.
It's hard to know. I really have a see the problem I see the thing that all of the contrarians are reacting to him, you just described part of it. And, you know, that when you see information being politicized, and when you hear that truly reputable people are being silenced or ignored or Shadow band on Twitter or whatever it is, is catnip for anyone who wants to connect all of the dots in a way that
Seems Sinister. The crazy interpretation is that this is all being orchestrated from some Star Chamber somewhere at the, you know, the Davos and this is all about, you know, it comprehensive effort to get people to bend the knee to increasingly stringent in a misuse of power state power rights. And I think that's where maajid went at one point on this, right? So they all the covet policies.
Really just softening us up for the orwellian boot. That would never stop stomping on our faces. Imagine I do, I just think that's Bonkers right. That it's not that that everyone is being controlled from the top, what you have, our social dynamics in largely and be getting leveraged, algorithmically and social media, and everyone's desperate efforts to, you know, Mom.
Monetize, what they can monetize and maintain the reputations then you have the Changing Winds of political opinion that everyone is reacting to on the right and the left, right? So you have your on the right, you have the people who will never say a bad word about Trump until it becomes politically expedient to admit that he's a dangerous moron and then they will begin doing that right? But for years, they wouldn't say anything in public because it was synonymous with the
Their their hopes as urbino as a republican in the u.s. So it's just, it's not mysterious as to why people hold the line on obviously dishonest points of the policy or feigned opinion. And yeah, yeah, we'd. So we do see that to a remarkable degree in in the centers of cultural power, you know, the media and Academia and Hollywood. I mean, it's just so, yeah, it's and I get why the right
It has gone berserk in the face of all that and then and obviously the rights going berserk. Seems to justify the excesses of woke - whoa cast area on the left. So is it again? They've been mutually amplifying but they're really there are two things you had to keep in view all this time. And so few people manage it. It was really like a needle that needed to be threaded here in on the on the one hand. Again, this is a smooth someone
Because this is the American view of things. But it's, it's certainly where my head has been ad for at least five or six years. On the one hand, you had to recognize how appalling Trump and trumpism was and, and is an arm. It's just it's just, yes, there were moments that there are pieces of information that we respond unfairly to his disadvantage and misinformation, right? So yes, they're apparently there were no Pete.
Tapes right? In either the steel dossier right there. There's a long list of things that were trumped
up and he wasn't literally installed by the Kremlin. Right. Exactly. In collusion with the Russians in the 1980s to try to be a Manchurian Candidate. Can you just can you just explain to people when you say it's obvious that Donald Trump was so objectionable, why in can you do one? Can you do a one sentence?
Whether what the worst thing, he did, I make this this came at the end, but this is really the thing that if you couldn't, you couldn't figure out who Trump was 44 years. The 20/20 election should have removed the the blinders from your eyes, right? I mean, we had a president, a sitting president who would not simply would not commit to a peaceful transfer of power. He was given multiple chances to do this. It was obvious, he was going to try to steal the election even before the
And was run, right? He was calling it fraudulent as a way of preparing the ground to claim victory. No matter what happened. And we did not have a peaceful transfer of power, and he did everything he could in concluding, you know, putting his vice president's life in jeopardy, to try to pressure the system, to hold, on to power, totally illegitimately. He knew he didn't win the
election, right? So, this, and he was being told all day.
He was. Yes. And he has a, he
Was happy to try to convince half of America that their democracy had been stolen from, while trying to do that very thing, right? It makes the most cynical moment perhaps in American history. As far as I know, there's no American president who ever tried. To hold on to power in that way.
Know, what did you hear Liz Cheney at the end of the January 6th commission? Yeah, you know, talking about Reagan quoting Reagan in 1981 about the transition of power that basically saying Trump is the first president,
History of America to not do that. Yeah, I mean I think that's where it I'm just trying to in. I'm just trying to figure out how we avoid his the charge of trump derangement syndrome in by mentioning a succinct case. I mean, I think for me either fundamentally it comes down to the man didn't know anything about anything that was relevant to Leading a big country. He's not interested in politics, he wasn't interested in finding out anything about anything about the world or geopolitics or how countries are run. He was
Interested. In reading his briefings, he wasn't actually interested in being a head of government whose interests in being a head of state because he likes the bling, but he wasn't. He's not, he's basically uninterested. And then you layer. On top of that, he doesn't give a fuck about democracy or anything. Any of the institutions that have sustained America for the past couple hundred years. So you combine those two things together. You've got a person who's who doesn't know anything about the job. He's applying for isn't interested in finding out. Anything about the job that he's applying for and doesn't respect any of the institutions that have
And like, Civilization for the past couple of hundred years. The me that's, that's
like, but the the added piece, which really, we can't lose sight of, is that all of that, all of those disqualifying characteristics are anchored to perhaps the most morbidly selfish and narcissistic personality we've ever beheld. Yeah, right. I mean, like literally I have no, I don't believe I've ever seen another human being like him. And this goes back long before.
Or he his campaign for the presidency. I mean, it's just this is a guy who would show up at a ribbon cutting to a charity, that he didn't give any money to pretending to have given money to it to lie about his association with the charity, right? I mean, this is the guy, this is a guy who's or whom Golf. And if, you know, if you know anything about Golf and they got, if, you know anything about the moral Norms of golf, how people have forfeited tournaments that they've won, because they forgot to sign their card at the end, right? Golf is the most in
Sanely, honor-based sport, you've ever heard of and golf is the center of this man's life. This is a man who has lied about winning golf tournaments. He never entered. I mean, it's unbelievable like that, that is the equivalent of murdering children and if you've golf is the center of your life, you are morally insane to behave that way. So anyway, the real Trump derangement syndrome is yes, it's cute. That they have a phrase for
This it, which is inoculated them against acknowledging, any of these problems, but the real Trump derangement syndrome was not to have seen how appalling and dangerous and arranging. It was to have a person like this, get anywhere near the Oval Office,
it is a we're not going to mortify now. I'm going to promise The Listener with a word that the syllable Trump is not going to come out of our limb. Not
gonna rest. Until I was, I was I was in mid-sentence.
You derailed me with my of you provoke me with my
trunk door window, as in the do that. I shouldn't have.
But so that was the first thing you had to keep in view. If you wanted to be politically, saying and honest in the last half decade, the other thing you have to keep in view, was how deranged the left got with, its identitarian politics, woke ISM. For lack of a better word because that was a, that was the second biggest political story of the last five years and it
Again, it was Amplified as a reaction to trumpism and it seemed in his craziness on the left. It seemed to justify much of trumpism right now. The crucial piece is that an awareness of one of these problems? However, Keen did not cover for your for your blindness of the other, right? Like, if you could only emit, so many people only had half the
Or here. So many people only focused on what was wrong with Trump and so many people only focus on what was wrong with. Whoa, Chasm. And in banging on about half the story, they were essentially carrying water for the lunatics on the other side of the Divide, right? So you had to thread this needle, you had to be able to keep both of you and very few people manage that. And I'm not quite sure why it seemed pretty simple to manage that, but that explains how so many of the people we
We have begun to name or your could name became unreachable. I mean, they're
just this is not a group of people who are connected by. I mean we are connected to that group bill you are connected to that group of people and I wonder what the there's a there's got to be a lesson here. Like if you knew back, then what you know, now about margin Brett. And you know, you can throw in Dave Rubin or whoever else might be, would you have welcomed them as conversational?
Companions, as you did.
Well they're, you know they're different again their gradations of the horror here but I can't pretend to understand what's happened with Brett. I just don't understand how you do a hundred podcasts on covid and vaccines. I mean, I got to think I just died. I just don't know. I mean is I actually don't have a theory of mind. They're all in all one. Yeah.
I mean,
It's pure speculation but it's something along the lines of the media has filed hopelessly in its job at properly. Interrogating, what's happened here? And so I probably need to start providing the other side in the interest of open debate so that people at least hear One Small Voice from The Fringe to counter the Deluge of unthinking parroting that's going on from public health bureaucrats and fauci in the mainstream press. And then once
Open that door, a crack and you start playing in that space. You start to become more convinced by the things that you hear and then you get a combination of audience capture and and ideological trajectory that gets hard to get off. And then you're like, you know what I'm doing, I'm kind of doing God's work here in the sense that nobody else gives a shit about this. And you know what? Now, I noticed this other thing that it was all, so weird, that my genius brain needs to start nibbling on. And so, like a rat with a cheese that we like, you know, you're Off to the Races. I mean, that's the best that I can do.
Well, yeah, audience captured.
Does explain a lot of this, you know, across the board. I mean, it certainly explains Ruben and it's a hard question. I mean, you know, Ruben became far
more cynical than I would have thought possible and it's very depressing, you know, maybe he definitely. He was a friend, he's not a friend anymore and it's like it's entirely the result of what I got to think taught me. Twitter's at the bottom of so much of this Twitter is where people are getting their information spreading their information, noticing the dense and their reputation trying to maintain their reputations.
It is a funhouse mirror in which everyone is seeing everyone else as this kind of grotesque and reacting on that basis and it's it is deranging and so yeah I mean II know that. I know that none of these guys are as bad as they have seemed to me on Twitter and they're not really as bad as they have become as a result of reacting to what has been promulgated about them and buy them on Twitter? I do.
II really do think Twitter runs through a lot of this
but I made it. Your analysis is interesting there but it's also not as self-reflective as I'd like it to be. And the sense that so many friends who you've had or who you publicly defended. As intellectuals have turned out to be either bad people or you know, that you can either. Well, look, let's not ascribe motives to it, but have have turned out to hold ridiculous beliefs
And many voices who you once enthusiastically engaged with a now diametrically opposed to what you stand for. Like, a, you a bad judge of character.
Well, in truth is not that many people, I mean. And and some people were are people who were often included in the same sentence with these people. But these are people who I either have never met or just hit, you know, have had dinner with once, right? I mean, I don't, you know, I never knew
who. Well, as I said, well, yes, okay,
people talk about what that one, Reuben, margit, Brett, Eric, maybe Peter bogosian, maybe Jordan Pederson. I guess that's probably it. It's still a, I mean, you know, it's still be intellectual dark web, which you always are, no sort of ridiculed.
Nonetheless, it was like and assigns, you know, somebody I never met him and it was it was never never should have been, no allied with, you know, move and she's somebody who I've kind of gone to war with on Twitter. But
No, but pointing out that there are Fringe cases that, you know, don't fit the the rule doesn't mean that the rule doesn't exist.
Yeah, no. But it's just a couple of people, really? And it's in Reubens case, it's 100% what Trump did to our politics and to his career, right? He just noticed that his audience was squarely and trumpets tan, and that admits, he's the the quintessential case of all.
Audience capture yet. I went on his podcast, you know, I helped him. I literally launched his podcast. I think I was his first. Yeah, the interview. Yeah. And, you know, it
was young, I mean, you don't really launched a podcast, you launched his career, as a quote-unquote intellectual, in the sense that, I mean, I knew the guy very, very vaguely back in New York when he was a gay television host. And I just moved to New York and 04 05 06. I guess he was friends with my roommate in Chelsea. And, you know I had him on HuffPost Live before he was
Anybody and then when he got his Like Larry King Gig and stuff like that, and he is quite clear that it was seeing you on Bill Maher, right? Would that have flag that inspired him to transition from being? Like, I don't know what he was a comedian television presenter to, you know, pursuing a life of the Arts and letters and ideas, and philosophy, and everything, which I'm quite upfront about saying, and I don't think he would disagree. He's not very good at like,
That's not is above his pay grade. It's not that is not his station in life. And so I don't think it's that surprising that he has been proven to not be terribly. Clever nonetheless. Yes, not to ascribe too much. Godlike power but in his case like you are, you are, you are a
god
Man, I don't know what to say about it. I feel like, I mean, I'm just, I was surprised at every stage along the way that he wasn't, it was like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, right? Like a certain point you're just not getting anything recognizable out of someone, on some very important topics. He literally had never would admit that. There was anything wrong. Anything wrong with Trump?
It was it was just a a cultic level of denialism again. The true. Trump derangement syndrome. Yes. I mean the old like the closest he ever got was, you know? Yes, I understand that. He's a crass businessman, and that he, you know, he offends people. Right. Hmm. Okay. But maybe we need a crass. Businessman who offends people to shake things up, right? Maybe that's how we are that. That was like the closest, you know, which is not even getting your
Toe in the water of an honest appraisal of this man and the consequences of all his line. And and yet I could admit and I could check every box he could or any of the any of these other people could against the woke - right? Like, I get what James Lindsay and Gad and Reuben and everyone else and Candice, and Ben Shapiro are all up in arms about around the crazy level of dishonesty.
Honesty and overreach and hypocrisy on the far left, right? And the way that's vitiated are our mainstream institutions. So that the far, what the far left has done has actually compromised, the Washington Post and the New York Times and nature and the Lancet and all of it, right? And I've devoted, I've devoted even more time on my podcast, to criticizing, all of that and worrying about all of that, then I have to bashing Trump, right? Because it because it's, it's more intellectually. Interesting.
Arresting, it's harder to figure out what's wrong with black lives matter than it is to figure out what's wrong with the tiki torch guys in
Charlottesville. Well, it's harder to figure out in a way that is that make sense? Yeah. And that is, it does Justice to the history of like white oppression of black people. So, yeah. And doesn't just
very good people. They're very good people who are confused. Sincerely, confused about black lives matter and talking about all of that, and unwinding all of that, is it
Anyone public service that requires some use of intelligence and some kind of ethical Compass? Yeah, there's almost nothing that you need to say about the problem of white supremacy or neo-nazis. I mean, it's just, it's what's wrong with it is right? It is. Yeah, right on its surface. I mean just the the words I'm using to describe it, you know, announce what's wrong with it. It just it's absolutely mystifying to me that the people we've named and I got to get going.
It's Injustice. It's to all of them to not be precise in including them in or excluding them in each specific sentence because definitely stressing capture Brett what I'm saying.
And I certainly doesn't have to Eric and I want them and I feel bad about having in a de facto way, included him in any way in this in this group actually. Cuz when I said earlier that, he was like, dropping bombs that were kind of so hard for me to pick up that I couldn't keep up with the pace of sort of modifications, that I had to make that. That simply a way of
Recognizing that he he is looking at a world that is much more full of threats than the world that I perceive. It's not to say that he is off down some conspiratorial rabbit hole. The way that I think a Lindsay or a margin have become. So let me
just play and and he's always he's always been allergic to Trump and he's always had exact always understood. The woke problem AIDS. So Eric Merrick is a, is a friend and we disagree about a few things, but he's and in this space we just have very different.
Factory settings, around perceiving conspiracy. Yes, he did. He has a taste for conspiracy thinking that I certainly don't have, but it's not to say that he's always wrong, obviously, and the people do conspire, and given his settings, he will detect a conspiracy before I will. And, and, you know, I'll have to admit I was wrong about that when it when it proves to be true. So, you know, there's that but it's, you know, that's, that's the difference between us. But he's, yeah, I mean II,
I don't include him in any know, it knee of
problem and I'm interested. I'm quite interested to hear you talk like this in quite in what seems to be a fairly relaxed and sort of um self-conscious way because I've felt in the past. Maybe when we've spoken you have a very admirable Instinct towards decorum and Civility and private nurse. I think you're quite a private person and I
Have struggled with the extent to which it's appropriate to just talk openly and in a bullshit freeway about friends of Mines transgressions. Like on the one hand distopia, for me, is an East German state, where everything true has to be said, behind closed doors. And the only thing that you can say in public is nice, platitudes on the other hand, it's also dystopian to live in a world of public shame.
Aiming and call out culture where everyone is throwing everybody throwing their friends under a bus because of some transgression. So, I'm loathe to SmackDown people publicly. Yeah. But when I was contacted by a journalist, a credible journalist who was writing a piece on Ruben for Quizlet and has just published like a 4000 wood piece. I was happy to be quoted a couple of times expressing about. Dave things that I would be happy to say to Dave.
And I think I should be able to say about people in public what I would say to them in private. And yeah, I wonder how you think about that. Cat, that balance.
We are the ethics of this have said something about this before. I think on my own podcast, I'm still confused about the ethics of this image. Just as you said, it would to what degree does loyalty to a friend or a past friend.
And to what degree should it obstruct your candor when you see that friend doing something in a public facing way that is that you consider reprehensible right means like it, how to what degree should you treat friends and strangers differently when you're talking about the behavior of public people and I'm just not sure what the right balance is there. And if I may I did obviously the fact that somebody was a friend or is a friend matters.
And but maybe maybe we're too quick to dunk on Strangers, right?
Yeah, right. Maybe, maybe being a friend, gives you more standing. In fact, maybe it's more appropriate for me to talk about. Dave Rubin and margit know has publicly precisely, because I would feel liberated to, to say, Dave. You're so full of shit these days. What are you doing? You know? You've become a hack. Dude, you are a hack. You're just a trumpy partisan hack. If we'd had four beers, you know, then that's
This is what I would say. So maybe I can say that and like margit, I get it that, you know, you were traumatized and thrown into an Egyptian prison by a can buy, you know, a conspiratorial takeover of government. That doesn't mean that every government in the world is trying to conduct a conspiratorial threaten takeover of you, like calm the fuck down and so may, I don't know. I think that's I think for me, that's okay. I'm comfortable with that.
Yeah, again, these are all different cases, but I think where I spoke about this before and this is a good kind of a break.
Fine for me, you know i-i've never met Canada zones, right? And it's clear and you know, I've said some fairly derogatory things about her. I mean, I think I said something like she's a ignoramus and a blowhard of mythological proportions or something like that. She threw that back. Tell us what he really thinks. I mean, it's just it's incredible when you see her being a messaging to millions of people about covid and I see, is
she like, I don't even know. I mean, why does it even need? What it, what does it even need talking about what
Authority. Does she have like what has she done? What she achieved? What like
I don't know who's, right? Yeah, but I raised a raise it raise her here, not to disparage period again. But just to point out that, I'm sure that if I had had dinner with her several times and got the best of Candace, I mean, just the face to face. He charismatic woman who I'm sure, she's fun to hang out with. Then what would I have said about her in public? When I saw her messaging in that way, on
Well, what do you think?
I think I would have been forced to recalibrate what I said. I think I would have decided, okay, maybe it's not worth going after her for this or maybe she would have to do it 10 times rather than five times before I finally blew a fuse
but that's not very credible. Is it? I mean that almost sounds corrupt
was no. I mean I think it is corrupting me if you're a journalist, you know, I think there's a norm around, not becoming friends with the people you report on, right? I mean, you tell me if that's the case, and if
you are
Friends then, you know, when you do, throw them under the bus because of your duty to the truth and to the public, you know, then you go like, sorry, dude. This is the way it goes. You know, if you knew this coming and it's almost like a gladiator fight, like I'm going to stab you in the heart and that was the game.
Many of these people are people who I really do to have called them. Friends was an exaggeration because in the case of some of these people, you know, I haven't even met them or I met them. Once in Reubens case, he just in my experience, he got inducted into a political
Call cult, right? And I couldn't get him out and it was very depressing. He was not somebody who I saw all that much, but he was, he was definitely somebody who I would occasionally have dinner with. And it was just a bummer, he decided, what his business model required. So I got derailed when I was in the process of telling you, this is the second time I went on his show, I saw what was coming back to me in the comments and that was the first time I discovered, okay, his audience is just
Three percent Trump brought and says he met he made that Discovery at some point and it's the very essence of audience capture. I mean, he just he would, he has no career outside of trumpets, Dan. I would argue that is a fate of his own making, but he has made that he's got both feet in Pizza, gate, adjacent crazy town. And it's, you know, I'm sure he and Candice and everyone who are just going to try to
Move into some respectable conservative orbit now that Trump's political fortunes seems to be unraveling if in fact they are unraveling and you know he'll be on the DeSantis train and all of that but it's just to not have been able to acknowledge that there was anything at all. Problematic about you know a sitting president not committing to a peaceful transfer of power. I mean that I just I don't know how to have a conversation after that
know. So I mean I think you're, I think you're being generous.
In a scribing more strategy to it than maybe they're even was. I mean, when people it's like a bit like people and when people ask me, do I think that Trump believed the things that he said, I almost like go into Jordan Pederson, meta, truth, like mode where I'm like, I'm not even sure. He has a relationship to what is true and what is false that maps onto like physics and ontology and the Universe? I think it's just like that. What is true is kind of what works and what functions and so I think I think of Dave a bit
That died. Just think Dave was a an enthusiastic puppy dog and he saw you and he was like, I want to, I want a bit of that and then when he grew, you know, he grew up. He just started doing the tricks that he liked. And I don't even think that he thinks that he's captured by his audience. I just think that he's a lightweight. And so he just says, you know, things that but work and they Funk they function anyway, enough about him because there's so much that I want to get to about like artificial intelligence and stuff. Like I don't want to keep you all day, but just before we get off this question of like,
Who were surrounding ourselves with and everything. I one thing that I kind of think, as well as this whole question of platforming people and, you know, I saw Lex Friedman and Kanye and then the whole, the whole era of Joe Rogan, being tried to be D platform from Spotify. And, you know, I was on Joe's show at the time, that that was all blowing up back in January. And then, I think about what, okay, I go back like, through my past podcast and your past podcasts.
And I think about people like Charles Murray who you had on the show who, now I saw tweeting about something positive about what? I don't even know what this outfit is but it's some anti-semitic like pro-western
chauvinist
property arianism. Have you heard of this the property arianism Institute. This bloke could do little allegedly has Asperger's and an IQ of 165 and he spent the past 30 years, building this sort of slightly fascist,
Eugenic, darwinists thing about restoring, Western civilization's tradition of Excellence, truth Duty Beauty sovereignty, nationalism and the natural law of reciprocity, and it's basically saying that Semitic cultures of Paris iding Western hosts. It's a very social darwinist outfit. Oh, and I didn't know anything about it until I saw Charles Murray to, you know, retweeting this guy saying, oh I think I clearly need to listen more to you. And this is very wise and and
All charm and then I'm like well hang on so we're getting stuck into Lex for platforming Kanye. How do you feel about having spoken a Charles?
Well this guilt by association game is just going to. No one will survive it, right? I mean this is something that well
some well I mean people who don't tweet favorably about eugenicists will.
Well yeah, but it's this is another symptom of what's wrong with Twitter. I mean, no one apparently can take the time.
I'm to figure out who anyone is and everyone seems to have the same stature you know especially in the in the post valid blue checkmark days. It's just you you can't figure out who anyone is and you can see
will let you also it as a hypothetical. But Charles knows who this guy is, and is and plays footsie with his ideas,
right? But immediately even Elan is signal. Boosting people, who are like pizza gate lunatics. Yeah, he's also obviously signal boosted Kanye.
Only
before I but then isn't then. Do we just have to accept that? Lex. Okay, let's talk to Kanye and that's fine
but again we do everyone a disservice by not going case-by-case. Middle X is a very specific case and I told Lex what I thought about his podcast with Connie, I and just to wind back to one thing you said, which I think is worth articulating, you know. I'm not, I'm not saying anything in public about anybody,
That I wouldn't say to their face.
Yes, right. And then I haven't seen
either guys. Yeah, I mean, I, you know, I've told, I've told Dave exactly what I thought about
him. Yeah, when I'm talking shit behind anyone's back. So I've also tweeted about Lex's podcast and I got a lot of shit for criticizing legs.
Yeah. And I've tried to and I've tried to perform private interventions with people before things have spilled out in public and you know that happened with Candace and that happened. So I'm sure Gad knows what I think about him and you know I
My fear all of this is is boring but in to be airing this kind of dirty
laundry. But I just think that kind of necessary because it's at the Forefront of everybody in mines. Like it's what I get most on Twitter whenever I, whenever your name comes up. And so I think it's worth. I'm not gonna spend more than more than one hour on this. I guarantee. So you got six and a half minutes to 15 to finish off this question about platforming.
Yeah. And that the platforming thing is a little hard to decide in the abstract because it really
Is what you do in the conversation, right? So it like Lex could have spoken with Kanye in such a way as to have produced a useful document. He didn't do that because he has a fairly naive philosophy about the The Power of Love. He seemed to think that if he just got through that Minefield to the end of the conversation, where the two of them still
Were feeling good about one another and they can hug it out. That would be by definition a success.
And I love it when he was like really offended about not being trusted by Kanye, but Samuel, all of this is, I take all of this but the criticism that people will come back at me on Twitter with about you and me is do you are you, were you holding yourself to the same standard of calling out? Charles Murray about any potential eugenic, related ideas, as you're insisting of lek that Lex do with Kanye West. Because that was the interview too.
I have no no but I have
So, if you're going to say that Charles Charles has since done something. Now, some years after I spoke with him that is objectionable well, like, I would need a time machine to have
have. Wow, I wouldn't wouldn't the claim be that he's always been dabbled in a kind of, you know, an unseemly interest in the differences between, right? That was the one
that was the one point. I raised with him where I said publicly, I felt like I didn't get a
As financier, right? Like what, why spend time on any of this stuff arrived. But if you remember, the reason why I had him on the show was not because I had this, this ambient interest in IQ and much less racial differences in IQ. It was that he had just been spectacular Leedy, platformed Middlebury, right? We do violently. So. And that was that, you know, the moment where this was becoming kind of
The Democratic, and this was just the most Salient instance of that epidemic. And so, I just decided I needed to talk to him and then I realized why I had believed everything that had been said and written about the bell curve without ever having read it and I read it and realized. OK, the most objectionable paragraph in this book isn't even objectionable, right. So, what the hell's going on here? Let me talk to the guy and there's some into the, you know, I had the conversation I had and it was not
not without reputational cost, I can assure you. But yeah, I don't, I don't see what I would have. I mean, I still think the facts are as they were when we had that conversation. The stuff that people pretend is controversial isn't. In fact, controversial, you know, that you differences in IQ across various groups. And the explanation, there is no explanation for that that anyone has offered. And Charles certainly, doesn't offer one, at least, he didn't then, and
My my basic position on all of that is that it's not worth paying attention to. I mean, it's and then
my so just to avoid the charge of hypocrisy. What's the general rule here? The general rule is, I mean, because obviously, Charles Murray did not say we need to go Defcon 3 on black people, right? So there's obviously a difference of degree and then there's a difference of conduct during the interview itself. Although I think you were you still cop criticism for your interviewing style and you know, I won't
You more Ezra Klein on Charles Murray or something, you know, why didn't you get stuck into them about the social or political or cultural context in which he's making these arguments? Which are obviously going to have inflammatory racial overtones or whatever that case maybe so is that is the general rule. You can have the the the, the warm softball interview but only with people who are intellectually serious and you don't like is that the rule
Well, it's unfair to put Charles in the same sentence with Kanye because we you have to understand Rebel Charles Charles Murray. When you talk to notable scientists anywhere in this field or adjacent to it, no one had any bad things to say about Charles Murray. Right me. He was he would truly was a true case of a canary in a coal mine where he had been basically a human sacrifice to the was it wasn't, it was
Walk nests at that point where I guess it was political correctness. He touched a topic. That was so taboo that it, you know, his reputation was annihilated on the spot. Now, you might wonder why he has kept touching that topic. We're similar topics, and that's what, you know, that's something that I asked him. I don't quite understand it. I'm, I guess, I unlike once, they once something like that is blown up on you, I guess there is a
Maybe a perverse interest in just continuing to deal with it, but maybe there's
also a Brett once not analogy to be drawn here, right? In the sense that? Yeah, you see, you open the box, you start looking inside, you rummage around things. Look interesting, they lead you to other things. You you get a lot of pushback from other people about even opening the box. Your you know you get your hackles up and you say, fuck you. I'm allowed to look in this box. You know what are you to tell me? Not to,
yeah, I mean it did but the difference with Murray is that I'm unaware of
Of legitimate criticism of the kind of General shape of what he's produced, right? It's just like a he it's his points are being treated as utterly Fringe. I mean just beyond the pale and the truth is they're absolutely mainstream when you're talking about that what people agree on in the field, you know, it's like you it's everything is upside down for political reasons and because people are drawing the wrong
Wrong political and moral lesson from his findings and it's a lesson he doesn't draw. Right? It may have never like I never got anything from him. That suggested a racist political agenda. I didn't get anything like that and if I had I would have felt very differently about speaking with
him. That's true. I mean the yeah the the critic, the the critic would say you're being overly, you know you're being a bit. Asperger's he or something to assume that people just say openly the things.
That are actually going on and so there's a little bit like this comes back to a, you know, how much do you want to read people's minds? So to speak and maybe maybe the lesson of the intellectual dark web and the trajectories of all of these people who you were friends with with maybe you do need more mind reading?
Yeah, I mean, it's again, I can do anything. Let's get observe. The fact that there are few people who I have been surprised by, but it's, yeah, I mean, I don't know what
we'll talk about. Interesting things we've done an hour talking about colleagues and free speech, and
Not only
citizens like I should wear the one point that we should close the loop on what you never really answered. It's just this. This question of platforming. Oh yes really is is is a hard one to judge because and this is something that I've I believe I've said before that there isn't there's an uncanny valley problem here which is if the person is sufficiently awful, then there's really no problem platforming them because it just becomes a pure point of journalistic or
Logical interest to talk to the guy, right? So like I could easily do a podcast with Ted Kaczynski, right? Where the or Jeffrey Dahmer or some, you know, complete, you know, if Hitler were alive, you know, it would be fine to interview them because of course you want to hear what Hitler's going to say about his whole project. I mean, it's just like, this is the most evil person who ever lived. Let's find out what's going on. But when you make someone more and more, you know, normal used to bring them back, you know, closer to the fold.
Then you get into this, this territory where you seem culpable for raising their their profile, whatever you whatever you say to them in the conversation. And you also, you have to burn a fair amount of fuel reminding your audience that you don't agree with them, right? And it's so, yeah, I mean, I've decided they're people who I wouldn't speak to who people wanted me to talk to them, and I just decided there.
Is no upside to having this conversation? Yeah. I mean they're people who can fall newly into that category based on something they do and I you know Kanye is a person like that and I think he's fairly untouchable now and it's pretty, it's pretty obvious. He doesn't have anything interesting to say about anything, apart from image it's I guess people some people find it interesting to see him self-destruct in real time if put in front of a microphone but you know there's some level of Psychopathology there and it's just
Just some obvious. Anti-Semitism, and, I mean, the most, the most obnoxious thing about him is his trumpian level of self-delusion, right? I mean, the fact that he thinks he's, you know, a genius to rival Shakespeare and then can't then can go an hour without saying anything. Interesting. I mean, it's like that's the part that is truly nauseating. But it took just to close the loop on Lex. You know, I think Lex is a really good person who is
I mean, everything on his sleeve and hoping to navigate every possible controversy by just being nice and compassionate, and loving and vulnerable. That does not give you every tool in the toolkit you need, right? I mean, it's, there are people who are colossal assholes and need to be described as such, they're people who for whom. It's
To run out of patience, you know, there's a concept of idiot compassion within Buddhism. I think this came courtesy of chögyam, trungpa rinpoche who himself had massive character, flaws, that that needed to be criticized earlier than they were. But he gave us a very useful concept here. Which is people think that compassion always needs to have as its Leading Edge, some soft and
And nurturing tone, right? Or a right angle of approach, everyone and every circumstance and it's just not true. I mean so sometimes someone is so obviously malicious and dishonest and destructive of everything that you value and a right to value that is appropriate. That the only compassionate response is to sign line them in whatever way that you can. Yeah. Right. And that's so you know, whether that's
Rhetorically or in reality I mean there are people we need to drop bombs on. I mean it's just that's just a fact. Well
what do you do? Just now you're now you're picking my curiosity about the content of Kanye's ideas and about where anti-Semitism is and like I was fascinated by Dave, Chappelle's Saturday Night, Live monologue, where he kind of you know, and I did a podcast about this like acknowledging the elephant in the room that like I do think yet again.
The interests of preventing bullshit from getting traction online. We have to do a better job in the mainstream conversation about acknowledging. The kernel of truth that exists in that gives that starts the fire of these conspiracy theories. Like there is a disproportionately large number of Jews in positions of power in finance, and that media. And we can't just keep saying no, there aren't no, there aren't. No, there are because then we sound like, we're phonies, which I suppose, we are
ER, what do you? What do you have a theory of the case?
Well, I only saw Dave. Chappelle's monologue, once raised, so I can't say that. I have done all the moral math on it and know
what I think it was fine and hilarious,
but I was definitely laughing throughout. And then, at the end, I thought I'm not quite sure yet. Landed that the way it needed to get one needed to be.
Did one of the end because just some people haven't seen that, the end lamb worked at the end, he's talking about value the people in power and then he says something like, but who are they? And that's the end of his monologue. Meaning what? So there are judges in power,
they're actually actually was a private, but also his bit about, you know, you can't blame black people for the Holocaust and, but in nobody is blaming black people for the Holocaust. Yeah, right. So, yes. There were missteps in it, but generally I thought it was very funny and brave.
Brave. But there were, there were missteps in his his special, the closer where he was hammering. The trans issue. I mean I thought I think I think I got this from Coleman Hughes I'm not believe Coleman was the first to put this meme into my head and I think he's right. I did the main problem with what happened with on The Closer was that Chappell landed on a very woke punchline. His argument in the closer was
That the whole trans issue was an invention of essentially white people, to get the moral High Ground over black people rise, like you're punching down, stop punching down on my people that may be in the black people from this new height of white trans victimology. So it was a strangely woke position. He was was endorsing at the enemy basically he was saying black identity politics.
Is totally valid trans identity politics is just white bullshit,
right? That's a
yeah, that was a weird place to have landed. Given that he's, he's capable of threading, the needle and landing in a place that recognizes that all identitarian politics is a dead
end. I mean, I didn't. Yeah, I didn't quite take it that way. I mean, I took it as being woke, nurses away for you.
To feel good about the fact that you're doing things about minorities. But it just so happens that the minorities that you always seem to give a shit about, are the ones that are convenient to you instead of the ones that actually require you to get your hands dirty and anyway and fix, you know, Public Schools or whatever it might be so I didn't. But I take that. Thank you Chris and I might have to see it again.
Yeah yeah but I know but still why do we control everything as Jews
Like and it? What do we do about that fact without fermenting
anti-semitism?
I don't think it should be taboo to recognize the representation of any population, in any specific area of culture. Right? You know, for for better or worse or, you know, there's greater representation in all kinds of places for all kinds of different people and there are historical reasons for that. And I think, I think some crazy percentage of people who run, nail salons, or from Vietnam in, are how the hell did that happen?
Korean grocery stores or, you know, whatever it might be
in the lineup line, nail salons. There's like, it's just, it's most people know this history. But yeah, do Jews for, for literally centuries were systematically excluded from certain parts of culture and given a open Lane in areas, like finance and so that explains their rights toric Lee their representation there, right?
They couldn't and he needed a license to
Be a doctor or a lawyer. So instead you bring him a money changer. Yeah. Or a traitor
but there's the more General point that the Jewish Community has always been, you know, highly literate and education focused. And so, this is, you know, there is a crazy over-representation in in science. And then, you know, then you look at Nobel prizes for pretty much anything, right? It's just, it's an order of magnitude higher than it should.
Be and you don't see them represented in professional sports as much as you might write. I'm not yeah, wait for your Jewish Olympians,
they've got their Maccabi games. That's the only thing they win.
Sure there are cultural and genetic explanations for all of these population level differences, you know, and maybe we will try to figure them out or inadvertently figure them out. My concern is that we will this goes back to Charles Murray for a brief moment of hopefully,
but my concern has always been that we will forget about focusing on these issues will just stumble upon them, right? Will begin to understand the genetics of, of intelligence say and the more we understand it, the more we, we will be able to look at the representation of the all of those genes across specific populations. And then we'll just we'll see. We we look at once. We have a genetic recipe, for intelligence will be able to ask the question. Well, do the French have more of this than
The Norwegians or vice versa and statistically there will be an answer and the answer will seem politically invidious, right? If it's something that that we care about and it's true, it will be true for everything. It'll be true for the genetics of violence or Compassion or maternal love. I mean all of it right? All of it is susceptible to analysis and again will stumble and onto it by looking into these things generically and my
The punchline for me politically is that we can't care about any of those we know in advance that it would be an absolute miracle if every group whether you know it's a valid group or or just a pseudo group right in the literally, you could take the group of all New York Knicks fans. Yeah, right.
Well, I mean, I don't rely on a country. Like, Australia is a completely random group anyway because most of the population has arrived since World War Two. So, it's come from everywhere. And yeah, you might as well. If there was some difference in Australian IQ,
Everybody else then that would be completely
arbitrary. Yeah. But it but we you and you would expect to find some difference if you just ran the comparison Every Which Way it again, it would be an absolute miracle if any and it's important to recognize that these groups can be validly drawn or spurious Lee drawn each. So you can still going to find the same thing and we're and when we're talking about race, we are talking about a kind of a hybrid of of what's valid and what's spurious writings.
Right. But largely in in the literature I think we're talking about just people how people self-identify, right? So you can imagine the amount of noise in the system, they're right. And there's a, there's an interesting conversation to be had about whether the cons, what the concept of race means and should mean. And, you know, whether it's their cases where it's it's useful or completely useless and misleading, right? But forget about all that, just let people identify however they want.
You're going to find differences for every thing you care about insofar as its measurable, right? And, and so we know that's the case. And so what the ethical goodness of our politics is completely uncoupled from an expectation of equality of that sort, right? That is not the kind of equality that we need to care about because I kind of a quality. Is a total Fiction? It's never existed.
Yeah.
But the, I mean, the anti-semite is not necessarily hung up on such questions. In fact racist, don't have to be. It can just be, there's a cabal of, you know, of people who will look after themselves and look after each other and a trying to subvert, the, you know, trying to keep everybody else down. It's
just not like it's just not true. So dementia to come back to the anti-semitic issue of Kanye's view of enemies of Kanye's is what, what's objectionable. But what he's doing is not that he has noticed
Disproportionate number of people in Hollywood and in music management are Jewish, you know, disproportionate when you compare them to whatever it is, three percent of the American population. Probably less. Now I forget what it is. What's objectionable is that he's extrapolating from his experiences with specific individuals to a group level condemnation of that entire class of people? Because I've had a couple of bad experiences with people who happen to be.
A Jewish. I'm now going to say that all Jews are terrible and that seems to have been the movies made. He also hasn't noticed that many of the people who helped him and made him money were also Jewish right? That it didn't just steal his money. They also made his career and also many of the people who did the same sorts of mercenary things in Hollywood. No Doubt weren't Jewish, right? I miss us, it's not a hundred percent Jewish, it's not even 50% Jewish, right? So it's he's not even doing the right.
Arithmetic on his own experience. Surely, but the thing he really can't do is extrapolate to a whole class of people based on the behavior of specific individuals. It just, yeah, that's that's the loreley crazy thing
to and I mean, I think we also need to be more upfront about what you were just touching on with, like, Jews having been excluded, from professions. Like, we need some theory of the case. I think about why Jews are disproportionately represented in certain industries.
As I mean, I think culture has a huge amount to do with it and the love of learning and the, you know, the discipline of of hard work when they're all kinds of things. I think it was Coleman actually who was saying like, you know, why were, why were Russians really good at chess and like Chinese really good at violin or something? Like this is not, nobody thinks these are genetic things, but there is like a, the soup that you're swimming in will guide you towards certain things. Why are all these great at swimming? Yes, it's warm and we have lots of beaches but you know,
Is also an expectation when you're young that swimming and football or the thing and Cricket at the things that you do. And as yet soccer is not the thing that you do. If we were in Argentina, it would be different. So again, like, growing up in a Jewish household, you just much likelier to be encouraged in to Pursuits and habits of behavior that are going to end you up in the positions. That Kanye West answer you're holding. Nonetheless, come. Let's go. Yeah. We
just chose to the the most provocative Point here which
it just shouldn't be provocative a. It doesn't matter that there is a genetic part of the story. If indeed, there is one right? It just in right, split it politically it can't matter. We know we know the political answer which is we are committed to political equality across the board. We want people to have all the opportunities they can use. We want people to be treated as political equals, whatever their gender, whatever their sexuality, whatever their color of their skin.
Of their religion and population. Differences matter, not at all to any of that. And that's how we're going to build a just Society, you know, locally or globally. And so we figure that out right? Like so that. So there is nothing at stake really here. When you find out that the Chinese actually do have a gene that gives them an advantage, Galore violin, whatever that good violin. Yeah. Right. And so what right is
Not if it's and know there's there's no individual whose ability to play the violin is affected by that. Finding not. Not a Chinese one and not a non-chinese one, right? You have whatever ability. What you have, whatever promise as a violinist you have genetically and you can build upon that promise culturally and you know, behaviorally and you're going to get as far as you're going to get in your case and the population facts.
Never affect that picture at all, right, so we know we need to treat people as individuals. If you found out that the Chinese really do have an advantage for violin and then you were looking to hire a violinist. And the only thing you knew about them was that they were Chinese, you still have very little information about them as a violinist, right? You need. You actually need to see them play the violin. If you're, if you were, if you care about the competence of your violinist, like the idea that we're ever going to,
To be truly Hostage, to population level differences, in a way, that's going to confound our politics and cause good people to not be able to hire people anymore with a clear conscience because it's just, it's just all too hard because these differences are between populations are so extreme. I just think it's, it's ridiculous. There's no reason to expect that and, you know, so it's something like a meritocracy is what we can fight for. But even on even
Beneath meritocracy, we can fight for political equality because we know that, that supersedes, even our concerns about meritocracy. Most people are not especially great at anything. By definition. We care about these people having very good. Look at
their grandmother's lied to them when they said, everybody has a special ability that makes them
unique. Yeah, most people shouldn't be present.
That's true. Yeah, she lied. Nana lied. Yeah.
Yeah, no, that's that's a sad fact. I think put, you should put that on your Sam, Harris, like, bumper sticker, most people are not very good at
anything. The truth is, but the truth is, it's not even that sad, right? It's like that's when you when you're trying to figure out, you know what it means to live a good life, getting into the Olympics, you know, much less winning your event at the Olympics is not on the menu for a ride. Practically
anybody and won't probably make your life any happier than just being like what am? I least badass.
Do that. Yeah yeah yeah. I
mean let me look at look at someone I mean that you're we now have the spectacle of Ilan completely misusing his opportunity to live a fulfilling life.
Oh God we already we already talked about Trump. No way. You know I got allowing other without the Woody Allen's come out of your
lips. Here's another another friend who I have been loath to talk about but it's just like here's somebody who is just the poster boy for having better things to do and yet
He's just tweeting himself into a proper Fugue State. Why is he doing it? I have no idea, but he's on, he appears to be unstoppable.
Well, we know why? It's because Twitter. I mean it's because of Twitter, isn't it? Like, I mean, I see is that this is a one-man advertisement detective and I heard someone say like, does anybody, you know, just look at this trajectory as a microcosm of what Twitter is doing to all of us in a way and social media? Well, that's anybody think that Elon is paying more.
More attention to the things that matter and and has a bigger and broader and wiser, and deeper grasp of what's really going on than he did 10 years ago.
That was frankly one of the proximate causes of my getting off just seeing how dysfunctional it was for Ilan to be as addicted as he is to Twitter. And if I leave it leaving aside entirely his buying of the platform and the kind of the changes he was making to it. I mean, all of that I really view is just a further adumbration of his of his addiction to tweeting, right? I mean, it's just that's how we
Himself into that situation of having to pay forty four billion dollars for the privilege of tweeting even crazier things. It's so, obviously dysfunctional. So obviously subverting of his every chance of having a less stressful, happier, healthier life that I had to look. I just just extrapolated back from his colossal use of the platform to my own Farm or calibrated use of it but still, you know, even
Even by that light, you know, my own use of it looked completely dysfunctional. And so I just yeah I just pull the brake on it.
Now that they loan is like doing whatever Banning of journalists he's doing. I can't just let his name come up without pursuing this. It's just, I'm like a fucking rabbit hole for my brain. But like, do you still land on the? It's a private Enterprise? Free Speech argument.
Yeah. I mean, the only people who think Twitter is the Public Square or the people who are addicted,
To Twitter. And that is pretty much every journalist on Earth and every person in politics, right? So, it's a special cohort of addicts. But
I mean, I'm not sure about that. I'm not sure that that's fair. I don't think I'm addicted to Twitter, but I always found something a little bit twe about the well, it's private platform. I mean, I like, I guess I sort of get it like, constitutionally speaking. I Get It, Free Speech doesn't apply to a private.
Form. But long before, even when it was my enemies who were being hounded from the platform,
Priya Lon I was always uncomfortable with my allies saying well Twitter can get rid of, you know, whoever they want to. They can they can ban James Lindsay and they can ban margin:0 wise if they want to because it's a private platform and there's no free speech concerns. I was like, hang on. If people are functionally using it as a place to gain prominence and exchange ideas, then I don't think we should just be handing over the keys to all of that to whoever happens to be in charge of it. So, I and then now that elon's in, I'm like, we'll see.
But you could also easily just consistently take your position of like just let whoever do whatever the fuck, but I do think there's something. It just feels like a Dodge to me to treat Twitter and Facebook as if they were, I don't know. Candy companies or like the Mars corporation on, Coca-Cola
has no, well, no, I would acknowledge that it's, it's not good to have these platforms be biased and and more importantly engines of misinformation and disinformation right there, many parts to this
This puzzle. So, it was for, to have to kind of track through this systematically, but one piece, is that algorithmically boosted speech is not normal speech, right? Right. So you whatever your freedom of speech rights are in America or anywhere else. No one has a constitutional right to algorithmically boosted speech, and to make sure clear what I'm saying. It's just you tweet something in the current system.
Item. That is not just you freely. Publishing your opinion for the world to read. That is an opinion that is getting fed into an outrage machine and Amplified or not based on a choice. A business choice to promulgate the most outrage inducing, and in many cases, misleading pieces of information because it has been
Heard algorithmically that those things, spread more, reliably, and faster than anything else, right? Right. So, it's an anti vax, conspiracy theory will always spread. It seems by some perverse informational physics faster, and better than a patient debunking of that anti-vaxxers conspiracy theory. Yes. And so we have people who are making billions of dollars on those those physics and this is the business.
Mrs. We haven't had right. So and then these people are, are tasked with the, the additional question that's going to getting bolted onto this whole Enterprise as an afterthought, the trust and safety question. What do we do about this machine that we really can't let fly freely? Because if we do, if we take our hands to completely off the, the controls is just going to spiral around decapitating. Everyone and damage are
Society. But we find that when we do put our hands on the wheel, we can't drive it all that. Well either and we do keep crashing into people and embarrassing ourselves and we're reliably convicted of bias, you know, a lot of the time because we are biased and occasionally some of this some of what we're calling this information turns out to be true. And oh yeah there was Jay bhattacharya over there at Stanford, who is a real MD and we
Throttled his account. And that's a little hard to justify in retrospect, because those school closures for covid, don't look all that good. And that's what he was banging on about. So, it may be that there's actually no way to fly This Plane safely right? Or optimally, or what's going to be, what's going to look optimal for more than 15 minutes at a stretch? So that's that's the technology we built, right? The but this is not to come back to the claim of that. We all we need to do is look at this through the lens or Free Speech. This
Isn't just free speech with this is a new technology. It's incredibly powerful that's doing obvious harm to society and we haven't figured out how to use it productively,
right. But the good thing, I mean, the Free Speech can be. I don't even like using the term Free Speech because it means that it has this whole meaning in terms of like, you know, constitutionally protected, free speech and traditions of common law and governments and so on. But let's talk about just access like the, the the
I guess the conditions under which a citizen is permitted to use this technology, like those conditions of the things that people are worried about. And so, then the question is, do you have maximally capacious conditions in which the largest possible number of, people are able to use it? Or are you throttling it for some types of speech and not others in which I mean, certainly if you're talking about if you just inventing rule, if one day you're saying, I so believe in free speech, that I'm even going to
Our people who are posting the locations of my private jet to post them on Twitter. And then the next day when you own, you know, then you change your mind and you say, actually this is endangering my family to know where my jet is. And these journalists who also, oh, by the way happened to be critical of me. And now booted off the platform and then the conservative people who were up in arms about the fact that some conservatives had been throttled under the old Twitter regime. And now cheering on the fact that lib Tardes at the New York Times are being brought under the
New regime like the, I don't know what to make of the whole thing. I'm like I would rather just yeah either shut it down or let everyone
on.
It's important to notice that all of elon's pratfalls since taking the reins at Twitter, only prove the the underlying point that there may be no good way of doing this, right? Like he's, you know, he's having to make all the same decisions that every other social media moderators had to make and he's making them badly because he's because he's making them impulsively and, and in ways that that are kind of narrowly focused on his case and then he's coming up with
Rationalizations for what he did and you know I'm just take the Elan jet piece. I completely agree with him that having the GPS coordinates of his private plane tracked in real-time by all the world raises, his security concerns just horrific lie, right? I mean it's just it's not good. I don't know why those coordinates are publicly available. Maybe, I don't know what the government's case is for publishing. All of that, but I and I probably think that none of that should
Be published, but there's no question that he has a valid security concern around that given his public profile. Especially, but I guess every other celebrity would as well. So I get what he's concerned with their but the thing that was truly ridiculous that blew up in his face was that he's single this guy out as the clearest evidence of his commitment to so-called Free Speech absolutist. Mm! He's going to keep this guy on even though he's publishing his his whereabouts.
And raising his security concerns and the only to then kick him off in an obvious show of hypocrisy and to not acknowledge any of that rhyming. That the problem with what he on does on Twitter, is that he does these incredibly ill-considered and destructive things, which is to say, he's incredibly Reckless all the time and when he does something wrong and had and thinks better of it and has to delete the Tweet. He never acknowledges what he's done, he never apologizes. He never corrects the record and maybe you know, the
first thing he did when he took over Twitter, was he, he's spread that at link to the, the article about Nancy Pelosi's husband did the, the hammer attack on him was not what it seemed. It seemed like it was just a gag, a tryst gone awry, right? And he tweeted that and then when it became clear that the source he was relying on there was, I think it was a source that had published some an opinion that you know, Hillary Clinton was
Ed and that a body, double was campaigning in her place, or something, insane like that in 2016, right? So once it became embarrassing to be linked to that Source. He just deleted it but he didn't acknowledge what he didn't clean up his mess, right? He just disassociated himself from it. And meanwhile, he had lent his credibility to a conspiracy theory that really was taking off and probably still is in good standing.
And over there in trumpets tan, which thanks, you know, nothing is as it seems. And yes, Paul Pelosi really was part of some gay, probably pedophile cabal, you know, i'mi'm, sure q and on did something spectacular with this piece of information, Ilan is directly messaging into that fever dream of misinformation all the time. Maybe in ways that that he probably doesn't even understand. I mean, you know, his, when he tweets, you know, my pronouns are prosecuted voucher
He's interacting with a topic that one could talk about responsibly right. Like, I don't know what happened in the Wuhan Institute of Neurology. I don't know what the actual origins of covid. Our it was never racist to speculate that that this could have come out of a lab. Should we investigate all of that? Sure, that would be great. It does our found cheese hands, entirely clean or is he culpable for some gain-of-function stuff that he does not want to talk about now? I have no idea that's all legitimate.
To talk about. But when you're just tweeting in front of 120 million people, my pronouns are prosecute fauci. Forget about what you're saying to the trans Community. Let's leave that aside, but that's obviously something that could be criticized. What you are saying to all of the the conspiracists over in trumpet, stand around found Chi and covid Origins is you seem to be saying as the owner of Twitter who's in the process of looking at all the files and leaking?
Many of them, you seem to be saying that you have inside information. Your This brilliant technologist, who has inside information about the origins of covid. And you know that found, she's hands are not clean and worse. Still, you are turning some number of completely crazy people in your audience. Again, you've got 120 million. People following you, some number of them are completely crazy and not merely crazy. They are focused on this issue. Especially these are the people who are
Gaston covid Origins and it's all a conspiracy and it's, although, you know, One World Government coming to infringe our freedoms. And you are telling those people that their hatred is appropriately. Focused on this. 80 year old public servant who already has more security concerns than practically anyone. We could name a don't know what fauci is life is like these days but I guarantee you he is inundated by Death.
It's fucking inundated and it is completely responsible for Ilan who understands all this stuff to be directing a deranged cult at fauci. And he did the same thing with his former head of trust and safety at Twitter. Your loyal Roth right. You know, he called him a pedophile and linked to something some misleading part of the guys doctoral thesis again, totally.
Irresponsible, because he's doing that in front of 120 million. People some subset of which are totally focused on this issue, right? The McEwan on is all about the world as being ruled by a pedophile cult and Ilan is is has a direct line to the brains of these people. So it's
you're making means a lot more sane Behavior. I mean you're making me a lot more worried than I have been.
I haven't really paid much attention to his shitposting, I've just thought he's out of his depth but you're saying is more than out of his
depth. Well I don't know where the line is between out of his depth and and truly aware of the harm he is causing or could be causing. I mean it was tragic about this is I think Elon is a truly brilliant person who is truly committed to making the world a better place. I think he really does want good things for the world. I don't think he's a
He's a malevolent person, but what Twitter has done to his brain is not at all good and there's there's a lack of intellectual and moral seriousness to how he treats issues of real societal importance on Twitter. Honestly, it's fairly trumpian, right? It's just, it's so, it's so Cavalier. It's so bull in a china shop. And who cares? What,
Eggs. Yeah, so it's totally Reckless. I mean you know for him to be tweeting that you know, Taiwan should be a protectorate of China. Right? When when he's obviously conflicted with China, right? He's got immense business interests in China and he just casually tweets something about the fate of Taiwan when you're the richest or one of the richest people on Earth and one of the and also one of the most famous
That does come with certain responsibilities, right? As he's not just any old person tweeting and now he owns the platform.
It's like I don't know how fragile like what? None of us knows how fragile.
The system is by the system. I mean, like the whole like the the sort of smartisan yeah, Status Quo of the globe, like the geopolitical balance has the relationship between our institutions. Now, branches of government, the the sort of Quorum that you have of buy-in for democracy, among the demos, like the fragile negotiations. I mean, it's like they've lost sight of the fact that for most people in most
Most places at most times life has been shitty and tribal and violent and like we've managed to erect this edifice of conciliation over the past. Couple hundred years, thanks to the Enlightenment and Democrat and democracy and they just don't think that anything that their little life is going to do is going to undermine that so they keep playing these games and yeah you're right. Is it a bull in a china shop or
It a mouse in, you know, a huge glass Temple that the mouse couldn't possibly affect. I think they think they're just leaving little mouse droppings all over the place, but we don't know.
What? Okay, part of it is the problem of Twitter itself and the people feel like they can just bullshit and talk and and promulgate their opinions. And yes, most people can most of the time. But this is, you know, this comes back to why I thought Trump and Alex Jones should have been kicked off the platform in the first place, right? And it wasn't because maybe I'm sure they've violated.
L terms of service in many ways as well. But the thing that I found most destructive about their use of the platform was they're singling out private citizens for abuse and lying about them at scale in such a way that was guaranteed to destroy these people's lives. Trump did it again and again, and Alex Jones was doing it with the Sandy Hook parents and it was just, it was so foreseeable. It was so it was, it was playing out.
Even in the case of Alex Jones was playing out for years and we just was no mystery as to what what the consequences were in the real world that he had a crazy cult of conspiracy addled, Maniacs that he was aiming at families who had suffered the worst possible loss in their lives, right? And, and, and the consequences were exactly as we've seen them and their Sandy Hook families that have had to move.
Ten times since their kids were murdered.
Yes, it reminds me a little bit of there's an anecdote from a New York Times who wasn't at the Times who interviewed Trump. Like a number of times, I kind of knew it was, but basically had a meeting with him. After Trump had been tweeting about journalists being the enemies of the people. I think, I think the editor of the times and maybe the Washington Post or Wall Street Journal, like all came together and they were like mr. President, I know this is your steak but you have to understand that in parts of the world where authoritarian regimes are constantly cracking,
Down on journalists, this kind of stuff will get people killed. This will get journalists killed, this will get them hounded, this will get them like all over the world. You Tweeting something like this has a real impact on free speech and the freedom of people everywhere. It doesn't just endanger reporters here in America when they go to, you know, rallies, this is a global phenomenon and he send the reporter who I heard being interviewed, I come over where it was said, like, it seemed like he really got it for a moment and he was like, yeah, okay. I can see that. And then, you know, they left and three hours later, he's tweeting about how
Journalist of the enemies of the, of the people. And it's like, it's like, I don't think that Trump wants people wants journalists in Namibia to be to have to be beheaded, but I just don't think he thinks it's gonna think he really believes that anything matters, whether anything is going to happen, I just don't think they think that the world is going to go on and they're just going to do their shit and then things will continue. And at some point enough, if enough people think that, then things won't go on as they were and things won't continue the whole thing or smell will
fall
apart.
Yeah. Well again this comes back to this contrarian ISM and the loss of trust in institutions and may. Their people who are in the mode of just tearing it all down and imagining that it's we can just have a great party in the rubble of of everything. It's there is the rubble of a shared epistemology where we we used to be able to converge on
On a fact-based discussion about terrestrial reality, it's the rubble of specific institutions that no longer have any Authority or perceived Authority. It's the rest of rubble of just the very concept that anyone is or can be an expert in anything. I mean, you know, the expertise is now a undignified concept, right? And yet we know there's a difference between someone who knows.
In and a true expert and we certainly know Ilan. Obviously knows this about engineering and he should know this about history and epidemiology and you know any other area where where facts can be ascertained and where they matter or might matter. Someday there's something very adolescent about this
moment psychologically I mean the
teenagers got control of the car
of yeah and Mom and Dad Asia wrong about everything.
Thing. I mean it's like it's almost Bolshevik. You know, when you talk about the rubble, it's like you know burn it all down and we'll figure out what we're going to do next and then it'll be better. They'll be a glorious future, will be a Thousand-Year Reich and everyone's going to be happy Sam. Can I pay you with some questions that that my followers have traded in for like a Rorschach? I guess, you know, I'll challenge you to answer briefly on these questions. One of the first of which are very important question. What is your favorite cookie?
I actually am a big fan of Oreos as long as there's milk involved.
Okay, what advice would you give to your 25 year old self?
Well it's I think I would have gone to graduate school sooner than I did. I thought I had more time in the wilderness than was optimal. I mean I said sometime was necessary but I was spinning. My wheels for a longer than I needed to and so I would have forced The Epiphany that I needed to go back and finish my education.
That was just a little taste of our first date questions which you'll be able to hear all of. If you subscribe to uncomfortable,
Actions, not just the questions but of course, all of our banter around them with become a subsequent little episode of themselves. If you do subscribe, you will not only hear that but you'll also hear no ads on any episode ever and you'll get additional content, including opportunities to connect directly with me. You can subscribe it, uncomfortable conversations, dotsub stack.com or follow the links in the, the podcast description. Otherwise, I'll see you next time.
