Making Sense - Sam Harris - February 02, 2021


#233 — The Groves of Misinformation


Episode Stats

Length

51 minutes

Words per Minute

164.81267

Word Count

8,455

Sentence Count

494

Misogynist Sentences

2

Hate Speech Sentences

7


Summary

Zeynep Tufekci was one of the earliest people to sound the alarm about the COVID pandemic, and as a non-medical professional, she was among the first to point out that the CDC and WHO were making obvious errors in their messaging. She s published a lot during the pandemic and has also been very incisive about political polarization and the machinations of Trump. She has an intellectual toolkit that seems perfectly designed for the moment we re living in. And in this episode, we cover many intersecting issues here, related to the problems of misinformation and groupthink, the early failures of journalists and public health professionals to make sense of it, the sociology of mask-wearing, the problem of correcting institutional errors, asymmetric information warfare, the failures of messaging around vaccines, the paradox of scientific authority, the power of incentives, the prospects of reforming social media, and other topics. We don t run ads on the podcast, and therefore, therefore, are made possible entirely through the support of our listeners.As always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can t get access to the podcast. If you can t afford a subscription, there s an option at Samharris.org to request a free account, and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. No questions asked! Thanks to the listeners who support the podcast by becoming a supporter, we re making it possible for you to enjoy what we re doing here! . Sam Harris: - The Making Sense Podcast is a podcast that makes sense of what we're doing here, and helps us all of us make sense. of the world. - Sam Harris and the podcast is making sense of it all, so you can be a good friend of the podcast Thank you for being a friend of Making Sense: the podcast? Sarah: - Thank you, Sarah, I m not sure what better place to start a podcast about it? - Thanks for listening, and I hope you re having a good time listening to this podcast. Sarah:) - Sarah, let me know what you think of this episode? , and I ll be back next week with a new episode on the next episode of the next one, coming soon! - Sarah and I will be talking about pandemic epidemiology, right here at The New York Times - - and I'm looking forward to talking about it!


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast.
00:00:08.860 This is Sam Harris.
00:00:10.900 Just a note to say that if you're hearing this,
00:00:13.120 you're not currently on our subscriber feed,
00:00:15.520 and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation.
00:00:18.460 In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast,
00:00:21.580 you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org.
00:00:24.180 There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher,
00:00:27.580 along with other subscriber-only content.
00:00:30.300 We don't run ads on the podcast,
00:00:32.400 and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers.
00:00:35.920 So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.
00:00:39.420 As always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't get access to the podcast.
00:00:43.880 So if you can't afford a subscription,
00:00:45.800 there's an option at samharris.org to request a free account.
00:00:49.060 And we grant 100% of those requests.
00:00:51.480 No questions asked.
00:00:52.280 Okay, today I'm speaking with Zeynep Tufekci.
00:01:03.940 Zeynep is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina,
00:01:07.240 and an opinion writer for the New York Times,
00:01:11.160 and a contributing writer for the Atlantic.
00:01:12.860 She has a background in computer science,
00:01:16.760 but she's since become a sociologist,
00:01:19.420 and has focused on the interaction between digital technology,
00:01:23.600 artificial intelligence, and changes in society.
00:01:27.200 And she was one of the earliest people to sound the alarm about the COVID pandemic.
00:01:32.820 And as a non-medical professional,
00:01:35.320 was one of the first people to point out that the CDC and the WHO
00:01:39.040 were making obvious errors in their messaging,
00:01:43.220 around wearing masks in particular.
00:01:45.000 But she's published a lot during the pandemic,
00:01:48.580 and has also been very incisive about political polarization,
00:01:53.220 and the machinations of Trump.
00:01:56.220 She has an intellectual toolkit that seems really perfectly designed
00:01:59.920 for the moment we're living in.
00:02:02.260 And in this episode, we cover many intersecting issues here,
00:02:05.840 related to the problems of misinformation and groupthink.
00:02:10.160 We discuss the COVID-19 pandemic,
00:02:12.320 the early failures of journalists and public health professionals
00:02:15.980 to make sense of it,
00:02:17.760 the sociology of mask wearing,
00:02:20.120 the problem of correcting institutional errors,
00:02:23.360 COVID as a dress rehearsal for something far worse,
00:02:26.740 asymmetric information warfare,
00:02:29.020 the failures of messaging around vaccines,
00:02:32.340 the paradox of scientific authority,
00:02:34.820 the power of incentives,
00:02:36.720 the prospects of reforming social media,
00:02:39.240 and other topics.
00:02:40.540 And now, without further delay,
00:02:43.260 I bring you Zeynep Tufekci.
00:02:51.480 I am here with Zeynep Tufekci.
00:02:54.060 Zeynep, thanks for joining me again.
00:02:56.420 Thank you for inviting me.
00:02:58.380 So, Zeynep,
00:02:59.700 when I think of people who have really hit their stride
00:03:04.560 during the last year of global derangement,
00:03:08.800 you are, if not at the top of the list,
00:03:11.480 I mean, I can't think of anyone who's higher on the list than you are.
00:03:14.700 I mean, you're somebody who has an amazingly relevant collection of talents and interests.
00:03:23.120 You've just been this incredibly prescient student of all of these trends that are now intersecting.
00:03:30.040 I mean, we have all of these trends of conspiracy thinking and social contagion and misinformation
00:03:37.480 and all of it being brought to scale by social media.
00:03:41.040 And then, this has now coincided with a global health crisis wherein you have become essentially an amateur epidemiologist among many,
00:03:53.840 but you've distinguished yourself as someone who really has produced good information.
00:03:59.140 And where you've been contrarian, it's been extraordinarily useful.
00:04:02.960 So, it's really great to see.
00:04:05.460 I mean, you and I had a great conversation last time,
00:04:08.280 but while all of these problems were humming along,
00:04:12.980 the last 12 months has really been the apotheosis of everything you've been worrying about.
00:04:18.080 So, congratulations on being a woman who's met the moment.
00:04:21.400 Well, I'm not sure.
00:04:23.540 Thank you so much.
00:04:24.760 But I'm not sure it's congratulations as much as,
00:04:28.740 oh, you know, this is not a great moment.
00:04:31.620 But, yeah, it's kind of like pretty much everything I've ever been interested in
00:04:37.500 has kind of merged into a pandemic year.
00:04:41.800 So, here we are.
00:04:43.620 So, how would you describe your career or your intellectual academic perch in general now?
00:04:53.500 So, that's, I mean, obviously, as we've discussed before,
00:04:56.780 the thing I study professionally as an academic is the public sphere, misinformation,
00:05:03.020 digital technologies, how they all interact.
00:05:05.720 In fact, just a couple days ago was the first year anniversary of a tweet I had sent in January,
00:05:13.740 I think, 26th or 27th, where I said,
00:05:16.780 ooh, you know, I essentially was realizing a pandemic was coming.
00:05:21.660 And I said, this is going to take place under conditions of,
00:05:25.280 you know, well-oiled machines of misinformation.
00:05:27.640 What a challenge.
00:05:28.900 And I was just sort of looking at it and thinking, yep, that's what happened.
00:05:32.480 It's been a year like that.
00:05:33.800 So, that's what I professionally study and what I have written on.
00:05:37.920 So, the pandemic side is that I teach,
00:05:41.920 I used to teach more introduction to sociology in that kind of classes.
00:05:45.620 And one of the things I try to do a lot with both my students in my own writing,
00:05:50.560 I've written about this before,
00:05:52.200 is to try to talk about interdependent systems, complex systems,
00:05:57.860 risk in sort of places where things are kind of interacting with another,
00:06:04.160 like there's a technical component,
00:06:05.940 there's a network component,
00:06:07.900 there's a sociological component.
00:06:09.560 And one of the best examples I had found to try to teach this stuff
00:06:15.460 and to write about and to read about had been pandemics.
00:06:18.420 So, I mean, because they're a perfect example of so many things, right?
00:06:23.620 If you want to explain globalization,
00:06:27.260 interconnectedness of the planet,
00:06:29.880 if you want to explain how things like justice and logistics
00:06:36.840 and sort of the technical scientific side,
00:06:40.480 you know, what kind of a pathogen did you get,
00:06:42.440 matter and how exponential growth occurs and all those things,
00:06:45.860 I would teach about SARS.
00:06:48.640 I would explain SARS.
00:06:50.200 I would explain the virus.
00:06:51.780 I would explain how we almost had a pandemic.
00:06:54.700 I would explain how we got away from having it
00:06:58.020 because the infectious period coincided with having a fever.
00:07:04.180 So we could put a fever gun to people's heads and say,
00:07:07.240 okay, now you're infectious and trying to find a way to isolate them.
00:07:11.580 So I wasn't like completely new to the topic.
00:07:15.140 But as you point out, of course, I'm not a virologist.
00:07:17.400 I'm not an epidemiologist, none of those things.
00:07:19.460 But I had a lot of familiarity because I use these things to teach about
00:07:23.640 and just very deep personal interest
00:07:25.980 because there's such an interesting, regular human phenomenon.
00:07:30.060 And they kind of have every layer of complexity you want.
00:07:34.740 You know, you have the science and the virology.
00:07:36.880 You have the human behavior.
00:07:38.380 Plus, there's a lot of things that are kind of misunderstood
00:07:41.200 in the fictional versions of it,
00:07:44.540 like the movie Contagion or Outbreak, all of those.
00:07:47.620 It was a very good topic for me for years.
00:07:51.400 So when in January, oh, there's one more twist.
00:07:54.900 I was researching in Hong Kong pretty much all of 2019.
00:07:59.120 I was going back and forth.
00:08:00.640 I was studying the social movement there
00:08:02.080 because it's an interesting sort of question to think about.
00:08:05.280 We have our own particular digital version here.
00:08:08.580 China has its own and Hong Kong was an interface
00:08:11.080 and there's a social movement.
00:08:12.740 So when the pandemic hit, I was closely connected to Hong Kong.
00:08:17.260 And Hong Kong, of course, had been through SARS
00:08:19.960 and had lost a lot of people.
00:08:22.360 So they were on guard.
00:08:23.340 Plus, they're close to, you know, mainland China.
00:08:26.080 So they kind of were very quick to interpret
00:08:30.460 the news coming out of China.
00:08:33.120 Like they immediately knew what was up, like Taiwan.
00:08:36.860 They had experience.
00:08:38.340 So I had the sort of early window into it in January.
00:08:42.080 And since I study sort of authoritarian governments
00:08:44.820 and things like that too.
00:08:46.380 So as soon as like mid-January, end of January,
00:08:50.840 when we started seeing cases outside of China
00:08:54.140 that had not been to the Wuhan seafood market,
00:08:57.040 there was a lady in Thailand, I think January 14th,
00:09:00.400 she'd never been to the Wuhan market.
00:09:02.080 And you kind of knew, yeah, you know what?
00:09:03.520 This is sustained human-to-human transmission.
00:09:07.280 You kind of were seeing the Taiwan and Hong Kong.
00:09:12.360 Those people, they're close to the ground.
00:09:15.200 They were masking up and getting ready.
00:09:17.140 And then on January 20th, when China shut down Wuhan,
00:09:21.140 like with authoritarians, you want to sort of look at what they do,
00:09:24.040 not what they say.
00:09:25.140 And you're like, this is big.
00:09:26.320 And then we started seeing the early news that this was spreading
00:09:30.540 before people were symptomatic.
00:09:32.940 And I knew like at the end of January, I was completely certain
00:09:35.780 we were going to get hit and it was going to be some sort of pandemic.
00:09:41.080 We didn't really know how bad.
00:09:42.420 And I had like started, you know, changing my own schedule and travel.
00:09:47.700 So that's kind of how it started for me.
00:09:50.380 And in January, to be honest, my first concern was I wanted to go back to Hong Kong.
00:09:57.120 So I remember like the first week of January, I started buying masks
00:10:01.620 because I was already seeing like January 7th, I was already ordering masks
00:10:06.580 because I knew like we were seeing all this.
00:10:09.040 You see viral pneumonia, unexplained viral pneumonia in China.
00:10:12.740 And you're kind of like, okay, what's going on?
00:10:14.360 And my first concern was I wanted to go back and do more research.
00:10:17.160 And I thought, you know what, I probably won't be able to go back
00:10:20.160 because Hong Kong will be badly hit because they're so close to Wuhan.
00:10:24.940 A year later, little did I know they would not take me back
00:10:29.900 because I'm from a country that's just mismanaged so badly.
00:10:35.180 You're from a banana republic.
00:10:36.800 Correct.
00:10:37.240 So I can't go back, not because they're badly hit,
00:10:40.160 but because they're doing so much better than us.
00:10:44.360 So I still can't go back.
00:10:45.740 So that was kind of how January happened for me.
00:10:49.960 And then I spent February in this out-of-body experience, I like to call it,
00:10:57.740 when like if you knew anything about infectious diseases or pandemics
00:11:03.320 and if you're following the news, you knew we were going to get hit.
00:11:07.480 And also like before January 20th, China, the government was not telling the truth.
00:11:12.460 But after that, they unmuzzled their scientists and there was this outpouring of information.
00:11:18.420 And I think at that point, partly because they knew like this was terrible
00:11:22.980 and a pandemic is bad for them too because it's their early cover-up that contributed to this.
00:11:29.340 And so they were actually giving us a lot of information.
00:11:31.360 So you could kind of learn about, you know, the pre-symptomatic transmission, all of those things.
00:11:36.380 And plus, you know, the Chinese scientists, they could start communicating and they were like warning us.
00:11:41.780 And then you were seeing all the papers and Taiwan was giving us information.
00:11:46.380 You know, you were getting information from Hong Kong, other places.
00:11:49.420 HKU, the medical school there is excellent.
00:11:51.760 So I was sure we were going to get hit.
00:11:55.080 We were seeing Wuhan.
00:11:56.440 We started seeing what was happening in Italy.
00:11:59.080 And then I would look at the news.
00:12:01.260 I would look at newspapers.
00:12:03.380 Like, and I don't mean just the administration.
00:12:05.260 Like the administration's failings are so obvious and so in front of everybody's face
00:12:10.800 that I think like almost doesn't bear repeating they were terrible.
00:12:14.800 But also in February, I was reading like op-eds and pieces in outlets like the New York Times
00:12:23.900 and the Washington Post and other places that had titles like Beware of the Pandemic Panic,
00:12:32.420 kind of implying the panic over pandemic was the problem.
00:12:36.180 I read an op-ed or a piece in the Washington Post saying the Asians were just superstitious.
00:12:42.200 That's why they wore masks.
00:12:43.380 And this was somebody like an academic.
00:12:45.820 It wasn't some random person.
00:12:48.120 I read a Bloomberg piece saying that it was our irrational brain that was making us think
00:12:52.920 about the pandemic.
00:12:54.120 And I'm just sort of looking and thinking, you realize we have to do this thing called
00:12:58.540 flatten the curve.
00:12:59.400 Our hospitals are about to get hit.
00:13:01.200 And you're telling us not to panic, that masks are irrational and there's nothing to do.
00:13:06.060 And don't fear.
00:13:07.320 There was an op-ed in the New York Times from somebody who's like a travel agent saying,
00:13:13.500 don't demonize travel.
00:13:15.320 It's okay to go to China.
00:13:16.620 I'm like, what are these people on?
00:13:18.320 Just sort of like, what planet are these people on?
00:13:21.040 We're about like, you feel that tsunami coming at you and you're like, we're going to get to high
00:13:26.120 ground and everybody's acting like you're crazy.
00:13:28.280 That's how I lived through February.
00:13:30.900 And I wasn't planning to write anything about the pandemic because I, you know, I would have
00:13:35.480 written about the misinformation part.
00:13:37.280 I would have done all of that.
00:13:38.480 But I was seeing people around me plan conferences, like try to, they were asking like on local
00:13:47.900 Facebook groups, they'd be like, my elderly parents want to go on this cruise ship.
00:13:52.000 And we're hearing about this pandemic.
00:13:53.440 Should they go?
00:13:54.260 And I would be like, no, they should not go because we already see the age data.
00:13:58.020 Like, this is not good.
00:13:59.000 This is, they should not.
00:13:59.880 And they would send me this New York Times or Washington Post article saying, you're just
00:14:03.480 panicking.
00:14:04.520 They would tell me to worry about the flu.
00:14:07.000 I'm like, yes, yes, please do get your flu shot.
00:14:09.000 But you don't understand.
00:14:10.080 We have a novel coronavirus.
00:14:11.940 You got to stop.
00:14:13.060 You got to get ready.
00:14:13.980 You got to start getting ready to maybe stay home a little bit, you know, fill your prescription
00:14:19.020 medication.
00:14:21.080 So I couldn't find an article to send to these people.
00:14:25.680 So I wrote one.
00:14:26.700 Like, that's literally how I just like, I was like, all right, I'm not an epidemiologist.
00:14:31.920 You know what?
00:14:32.540 There needs to be an article that's practical, that just explains people all these basic concepts
00:14:39.600 like flattening the curve, which it wasn't around at the time.
00:14:43.500 So at the end of February, I wrote an article that basically said, look, if we're going to
00:14:48.860 get hit, you got to get ready.
00:14:51.020 Things like the case fatality rate are not fixed numbers because if our hospitals are overloaded,
00:14:56.700 more people will die, the best way is to sort of stay away from other people, try to stay
00:15:02.240 home if you can, which means you have to kind of get ready for it.
00:15:06.200 So I just like it was seen as a prepper doomer-y thing.
00:15:11.000 And I was like, and, you know, we'll probably talk about this.
00:15:14.400 It was one of the most striking years of groupthink that I lived through in 2020, like topic
00:15:21.840 after topic.
00:15:23.280 And I thought, you know what?
00:15:24.520 Okay.
00:15:24.700 I, we need to have an article so that I can tell people it's not a crazy thing to prepare
00:15:29.700 for what is a regular occurrence in human history.
00:15:35.540 And since this is a virus, we're not going to be able to like pull an antibiotic out of
00:15:39.360 our pocket.
00:15:40.480 We got to get ready.
00:15:41.400 So I wrote one just to have something to send to the people who were around me, who were
00:15:49.460 like sending their parents, elderly parents on trips and still, and I just wanted to tell
00:15:54.800 the conference organizers, no, you've got to, you're not going to be able to hold a conference
00:15:58.720 in May, you know, just start planning for it.
00:16:01.600 So I wrote one.
00:16:02.700 And to my kind of surprise, I just really went viral because people were looking for
00:16:10.680 a kind of level-headed advice.
00:16:13.300 And I didn't have anything complicated in it.
00:16:15.920 Like if you read it now, it's the kind of stuff you read a million times, you know, just
00:16:19.720 like explains flattening the curve.
00:16:22.120 Where was it?
00:16:22.640 The Atlantic or the New York Times?
00:16:24.340 Scientific American.
00:16:25.340 I owed them a blog post.
00:16:27.040 I mean, to be honest, nobody else really was interested in it.
00:16:29.720 And my editor there just had his first grandchild.
00:16:36.360 So I was like, do you want an article on getting ready?
00:16:39.620 It's like, oh, sure.
00:16:40.540 And then I sent it and I thought like he'd give me some feedback or something, but he
00:16:45.340 had like the cute baby bundle that was occupied.
00:16:48.620 We just put it up.
00:16:49.660 So there were typos and I was like, wait, we're supposed to anyway, just like, then we
00:16:53.320 fixed a few typos and it went really, really like I saw it shared all over.
00:16:58.820 It had millions of views.
00:17:00.460 It had all this sort of big share.
00:17:03.440 So I got a lot of sort of feedback from people saying thank you, because I was starting to
00:17:07.860 think I'm crazy because, you know, I'm worried about this.
00:17:11.920 I don't know what to do.
00:17:13.140 Nobody's telling me what to do.
00:17:14.760 And I was kind of like, yeah, just get some food, store some, you know, get your prescription
00:17:20.660 medication, just maybe plan for a home office or, you know, maybe your kids won't be able
00:17:26.460 to go to school, just this basic stuff.
00:17:28.480 So I wrote that and I thought, all right, you know, I've done what I need to do.
00:17:35.420 And I thought that would be the first and last thing I kind of wrote because, you know, you
00:17:40.160 don't really expect to be doing this.
00:17:42.060 But what happened there was I needed to sort of send people to a list of things to buy.
00:17:48.200 That wasn't crazy, like just simple stuff, like how do you stay home for a couple of
00:17:53.680 weeks, avoid grocery stores, things like that.
00:17:56.260 And it linked to a site that was more focused on like preppy stuff, which it was fine.
00:18:01.680 Like the list, the list wasn't bad.
00:18:03.440 So I found buy gold.
00:18:04.980 Well, it wasn't that.
00:18:06.220 So that's why like there wasn't a list.
00:18:08.120 So I was like wading through all the lists and they were like crazy.
00:18:12.640 Yeah.
00:18:13.080 Buy gold, do this, do that.
00:18:14.640 And I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no.
00:18:16.160 So I finally found one that was sensible because I thought I also don't want to like
00:18:20.400 drop my own list.
00:18:21.700 So it was a sensible list, but being quite sensible, it had said you should also buy some
00:18:28.260 masks.
00:18:30.120 And as I said, like I had bought some January 7th.
00:18:34.060 That's what the infectious disease specialists who'd been through SARS advise.
00:18:38.960 It's kind of straightforward thing.
00:18:40.720 And then I started hearing from health professionals who got mad at me for linking to a list that
00:18:48.740 said buy masks.
00:18:50.120 In my piece, I'd even said, you know, they're kind of out of masks.
00:18:53.120 Don't worry about it.
00:18:54.500 But yeah, the list was like buy masks if you can find them.
00:18:59.200 And then I started this amazing amount of feedback that was mad at me from health professionals
00:19:06.040 who were making claims that masks were harmful, right?
00:19:12.460 That it wasn't that there's a shortage because I knew there was a shortage.
00:19:16.600 So I had said there's a shortage.
00:19:18.240 And, you know, so you kind of can't worry about it because it is what it is.
00:19:21.540 There's a shortage.
00:19:22.780 But I was being told that I was endangering people by, you know, letting them think that
00:19:31.080 masks were OK, that they weren't harmful.
00:19:33.060 And I was like, I had another like second out of body month there.
00:19:39.880 I'm like, what are we talking about?
00:19:41.020 Like, how are they harmful?
00:19:42.300 Like, I thought maybe there's some weird trick.
00:19:46.180 I don't know about all this.
00:19:47.460 Like, maybe there's some, you know, detailed virology about something, something about masks
00:19:54.160 and harm that everybody in Hong Kong and Japan and Taiwan missed.
00:19:58.320 And I said, OK, you know, let me see.
00:20:00.600 Like, what are you telling me?
00:20:01.740 Like, I want to understand what you guys are saying.
00:20:04.680 So it was really startling.
00:20:07.200 It was I was told and this was like by health professionals.
00:20:11.940 There were like journalists, health journalists writing these articles, doctors making these
00:20:17.680 claims.
00:20:18.560 So this was not some rare fringe claim to make.
00:20:21.420 So they were saying things like that wearing a mask would cause a false sense of security
00:20:28.120 that people would become very reckless just because they were wearing a mask and do more
00:20:34.620 dangerous things.
00:20:35.740 Now, I may not be a virologist, but I am a sociologist.
00:20:40.740 And false sense of security is something that's been researched a lot.
00:20:44.860 And it sounds really clever.
00:20:47.200 It's a little Gladwellian, like it's the sort of smart contrariany kind of thing.
00:20:53.200 You think you'll be more safe, but you're actually less safe.
00:20:56.080 It's been researched to death.
00:20:57.740 And it's kind of like a second order effect, like you've got a safety device and then you're
00:21:03.480 just more reckless.
00:21:04.320 And it's just incredibly hard for a second order effect like that to overcome the benefit
00:21:11.920 of the actual safety, the first order effect.
00:21:15.400 And in fact, in the research, you don't see it.
00:21:17.860 You don't see it for things like hell guns.
00:21:19.960 You don't see it for seatbelts.
00:21:21.640 Yeah, seatbelts.
00:21:23.360 I mean, it's plausible.
00:21:24.500 There's the occasional person who is more reckless, but like maybe I saw like one little
00:21:30.220 study among alpine skiers, but even there, like the benefit of the helmet was so great
00:21:36.380 that it just didn't overwhelm if to the degree you can find examples.
00:21:42.740 And plus, you know, from the sociology of it, I knew that people who wore the masks would
00:21:49.340 actually almost certainly be more careful because you're just, it's a sign something's
00:21:55.720 wrong.
00:21:56.740 So instead of being reckless, you would expect them to be more careful and more cautious,
00:22:01.520 like rather than being reckless.
00:22:04.500 And also you would see there was a lot of evidence then that we were having pre-symptomatic
00:22:11.720 transmission that people without symptoms were transmitting.
00:22:15.060 And the World Health Organization and the CDC were then saying that people should wear
00:22:20.460 a mask if they are sick.
00:22:23.120 And again, sociologically speaking, there is no way for only the sick to wear masks because
00:22:30.080 of the stigma.
00:22:31.000 And we knew this from tuberculosis research, like tuberculosis is also airborne and people
00:22:35.780 are supposed to wear masks, but they can't wear masks only if they're sick because that's
00:22:40.460 kind of singling you out as sick.
00:22:43.760 And this is at a time where like Asian Americans who wore masks were being attacked and there's
00:22:48.160 just no way.
00:22:48.780 So if you do believe sick people are supposed to wear masks, you have to say everybody's
00:22:53.500 got to wear masks.
00:22:54.600 Plus, you know, there's pre-symptomatic transmission.
00:22:57.220 So people who don't know they're sick are transmitting.
00:23:00.480 So you've got to say everybody's got to wear masks.
00:23:02.160 Also, more importantly, you can't bemoan the lack of PPE for health professionals based
00:23:11.040 on the argument that masks don't work, right?
00:23:14.020 Yeah, that was another thing.
00:23:15.480 So that was a whole other thing.
00:23:16.880 So that part didn't work.
00:23:18.180 So I was like, no, this article, this argument doesn't make.
00:23:20.780 So the second argument they made, which is when I lost it, I thought with the sociological
00:23:26.620 part, I thought, all right, you know what?
00:23:28.340 Doctors don't know a lot of sociology.
00:23:30.120 They have a lot of assumptions about people, like they're just wrong.
00:23:34.900 So I was kind of like thinking they were like, we can just correct this misunderstanding,
00:23:40.660 right?
00:23:40.860 I was thinking that they're just missing this false sense of security.
00:23:44.220 This contrarian thing is alluring them intellectually and we'll just correct this.
00:23:48.960 The other thing they told me was that what if you touch the outside of your mask?
00:23:54.540 And I was at that point, like, as opposed to touching your face without a mask, like, what
00:24:01.280 are we talking about it?
00:24:02.600 So what was happening was they were looking at studies of healthcare people self-infecting
00:24:09.840 because of improper mask use.
00:24:12.040 But that is compared to less self-infection because of proper use.
00:24:18.500 Like, there's no comparison to not wearing a mask, right?
00:24:21.840 I mean, obviously, if I'm going to touch my face or if, like, if they would say stuff like,
00:24:27.380 what if the outside of your mask is contaminated and you touch it?
00:24:30.740 I'm kind of like, if the outside of my mask is contaminated, that's a win.
00:24:34.540 Like, there's just no way you can make me buy this.
00:24:38.240 This is so illogical.
00:24:38.960 And if you're touching your mask, you're not touching the mucous membranes that are
00:24:42.560 beneath your mask.
00:24:43.580 Correct.
00:24:44.020 And if the outside of your mask is getting infected, that means you're not breathing
00:24:47.400 that thing in.
00:24:48.200 Right.
00:24:48.900 Right?
00:24:49.380 And plus, there was a lot of...
00:24:51.540 So at that point, I thought, this is crazy.
00:24:53.540 There's something else going on here.
00:24:55.540 And further, of course, as the...
00:24:58.200 I started, like, looking at the...
00:25:00.660 Like, getting in touch with my friends in Hong Kong,
00:25:03.380 getting in touch with infectious disease specialists there.
00:25:07.020 And what I also learned was that for them, masks were really being used to stop transmission
00:25:14.360 to others, not just, like, protecting the wearer, which is like a medical thing, which is kind
00:25:20.300 of higher standard.
00:25:22.160 It's kind of a little harder to keep something out.
00:25:24.660 But it is easier, just with a cloth mask even, to sort of...
00:25:29.980 It's respiratory etiquette, right?
00:25:31.620 That's why you sneeze into your elbow rather than just sort of spread it around.
00:25:35.620 So that was really straightforward.
00:25:36.960 And I got this really strong sense.
00:25:39.800 There was a lot of these threads on social media from really well-meaning doctors saying,
00:25:43.880 well, you can't really wear them right because, you know, they need to be blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:25:48.580 And there was all this talk about the shortages, but people were being told there's a shortage.
00:25:52.460 It's harmful.
00:25:53.520 You'll increase your risk.
00:25:54.760 Like, there were, like, these thousands and thousands of retweets.
00:25:57.140 And I kind of got the sense that it was a combination of not being logical with the outside
00:26:03.980 of your mask, not being up with the infectious disease specialists who knew what they were
00:26:09.340 doing, the ones in Japan and Hong Kong and Taiwan who'd been through this.
00:26:13.100 And partly it was not trusting the public, right?
00:26:16.120 There was this fear of having a run on masks, which that was legit.
00:26:22.360 Like, you had a shortage, but then you just have to level with the public and say, it sucks.
00:26:27.640 We have a shortage and here's what we got to do.
00:26:29.820 We're going to do, you know, cloth masks as a stopgap.
00:26:32.160 You just have to kind of...
00:26:33.500 You can't tell people.
00:26:34.980 And I thought this is going to start biting us because we're eventually going to have to
00:26:38.620 tell people that we need to wear masks.
00:26:40.040 So I started tweeting about this.
00:26:42.140 I basically tweeted out the whole argument saying, this doesn't make sense.
00:26:46.480 This doesn't make sense.
00:26:47.740 This part is illogical.
00:26:49.740 False sense of security is baseless.
00:26:52.320 It's not...
00:26:52.760 There's no plausible way it can be harmful to wear one as opposed to not wearing any at
00:26:58.420 all.
00:26:58.660 So I made all these arguments and I said, this is going to, like, this kind of messaging
00:27:02.920 against masks is going to come back and bite us badly in a couple of months.
00:27:08.660 And I waited because what I was hoping was that I started, like, just putting the whole
00:27:15.140 argument there, I think early March.
00:27:17.240 I was waiting for somebody else with the right PhD or the right MD or infectious disease sort
00:27:23.660 of specialization to write a piece saying, would the Western nations, you know, U.S.
00:27:31.760 and Europe, please come to their senses and, like, look at all the expertise.
00:27:36.640 And, like, the idea that the Japanese are just superstitious to Hong Kong, infectious
00:27:41.920 disease experts are just superstitious was so stupid.
00:27:45.460 So I just waited because I do already have a platform on Twitter.
00:27:49.640 People already see it.
00:27:50.680 And I'm kind of like, look here, here's the whole argument.
00:27:52.840 And I hope somebody writes this.
00:27:55.940 I didn't say that, but I was really, like, genuinely thinking somebody with the gravitas
00:28:01.580 to make this argument needs to make this argument because you're essentially saying the CDC and
00:28:07.520 the World Health Organization need to change their guidelines.
00:28:09.880 And then I waited two weeks with not, I start, I'm still seeing, like, articles go viral saying,
00:28:18.160 don't wear a mask, you know, you'll increase your chance of infection.
00:28:21.880 And these things are being published and, you know, from traditional mainstream health journalists.
00:28:27.980 It wasn't like they were quoting doctors and they were quoting CDC guidelines saying it's
00:28:34.400 actually bad for you.
00:28:36.040 So after waiting two weeks for anyone with the right gravitas and the sort of standing
00:28:44.540 to make this argument, and I had, like, this perch at the New York Times, I just went and
00:28:50.780 said, you guys want a piece on this?
00:28:52.660 Like, that we're just, this is not, this messaging is wrong and it doesn't make sense and we should
00:28:59.440 change these guidelines.
00:29:00.460 And I really wasn't sure if I wanted them to publish it because I thought this is crazy.
00:29:06.140 Like, I'm, I am on the side of science and CDC and WHO and I'm gonna, like, I'm pondering
00:29:13.500 writing an op-ed saying that one of the most important recommendations they're making in
00:29:19.040 a pandemic is wrong.
00:29:20.260 So it's not the kind of thing I thought I wanted to do, but, you know, nobody else was doing
00:29:27.420 it and it is a pandemic.
00:29:29.080 So I thought, all right, you know, caution to the wind.
00:29:31.980 And partly it's not just caution.
00:29:33.940 I really wanted someone who would be more believable than me, right?
00:29:38.840 Because I don't have the correct credential set.
00:29:44.060 I wanted it to come from someone like the ex-head of CDC or something like that to come and
00:29:50.180 say, look, we got a mask up, there's a shortage, we'll do cloth masks for now, false sense of
00:29:57.560 security doesn't make sense, but of course, don't be reckless and, you know, don't forget
00:30:03.440 to wash your hands in distance.
00:30:05.180 And that's it.
00:30:05.880 Like, it's not very complicated.
00:30:07.420 So I, I, it just wasn't happening.
00:30:09.360 So I said, all right, you know what?
00:30:10.460 It's a pandemic.
00:30:11.820 If nobody else is doing it, I might as well do it because why not?
00:30:16.040 It'll, it'll go where it goes.
00:30:17.300 And I, it just came out pretty much as I said it, like, if you read back now, it's so
00:30:24.160 straightforward, like there's no big controversy over it, but it, of course, um, and I thought
00:30:31.160 maybe this is the end of my public writing career, you know, I'll, I'll be seen like
00:30:34.760 an anti-vaxxer because, you know, CDC is saying it might be harmful or health journals
00:30:40.300 are writing articles like that.
00:30:41.680 And I'm coming out and saying, you know, World Health Organization or CDC wrong in a pandemic.
00:30:47.400 So that's kind of a big deal.
00:30:48.520 And I thought, all right, maybe that's the end of my public writing career.
00:30:51.780 But like, if you really believe something is true and the stakes are so high and you
00:30:58.000 have a chance to publish, you know, and what is still called a paper, a record.
00:31:02.740 So it will be read.
00:31:03.720 Like you got to do it.
00:31:05.440 So I was like, all right, I do it.
00:31:07.020 I, I wrote, I wrote it.
00:31:08.400 Uh, and I had a great editor who just kind of let me write it the way I wanted to write
00:31:13.560 it.
00:31:13.840 Like we didn't do the hemming and hawing.
00:31:17.140 I was able to like link to things like pre-symptomatic transmissions occurring and, you know, just sort
00:31:23.500 of these things that were still being treated like controversial as late as March when in
00:31:29.160 fact, there was so much data that was showing that that's the preponderance of evidence,
00:31:34.200 right?
00:31:34.380 Even if you're not a hundred percent certain, so clear that it's almost certainly that's
00:31:38.720 what's happening.
00:31:39.720 So I was able to write it the way I wanted to write it, just saying, this is what we should
00:31:43.900 be doing.
00:31:45.260 And then I thought, all right, okay, let's see what happens.
00:31:47.740 You know, maybe as I said, my career is over or maybe not, but you know, if it is, it is.
00:31:55.340 So then what happened was sociologically fascinating to me is that I got inundated with medical
00:32:03.140 professionals and other infectious disease people who contacted me and said, thank you.
00:32:10.880 Thank you for writing this.
00:32:12.400 Thank you for saying this.
00:32:13.600 And I later learned that it caused a firestorm within the CDC too, and like helped tip their
00:32:19.720 recommendations to, you know, recommending masks.
00:32:23.780 So there was this, so instead of getting canceled, which I thought, you know, maybe that's what's
00:32:28.440 going to happen.
00:32:29.440 I got all these people like immediately sort of this flood of, thank you for saying this.
00:32:35.280 Thank you for saying this.
00:32:36.400 And part of me was like, you're very welcome.
00:32:39.160 And the other part of me was like, why didn't you write this?
00:32:42.440 All these people who were really highly sort of placed that it, it made me feel good because
00:32:48.720 I, I don't want to sort of stick my neck out if it's wrong, right?
00:32:53.960 I don't mind the pushback, but if it was wrong, I wouldn't want to endanger people.
00:32:58.280 So my first thought was like, great, I didn't do something wrong.
00:33:01.520 I didn't put people in danger.
00:33:02.880 I did say the right things.
00:33:04.420 My second thought was like, wait, if you all knew this, like, if you all suspected this,
00:33:10.900 why was it, you know, like a sociology professor to be writing this?
00:33:17.980 That part is genuinely strange.
00:33:19.980 And we should step back for a second and acknowledge that this problem is much bigger than the pandemic.
00:33:27.340 I want us to discuss whatever is useful to discuss at this moment about COVID, but there's much more to this moment than that.
00:33:37.380 I mean, we have, it seems like we've been living through a dress rehearsal for something far worse on, on at least two fronts.
00:33:46.020 There's the global health front, and so we have a pandemic here, which just by sheer accident, isn't 10 times worse than it is, right?
00:33:55.680 I mean, you know, COVID could be killing 10% of people, and we would, we now know how we would perform under those conditions.
00:34:03.860 And it would be, you know, to watch our society unravel.
00:34:07.820 I would love your take on why we have failed so catastrophically to actually get a handle on what is compared to the real possibilities out there, you know, both man-made and natural, a fairly benign disease, right?
00:34:24.740 So there's the global health challenge that we have not exactly risen to.
00:34:28.620 But then there's this, you know, riding alongside it or on top of it or beneath it, there's the political instability that we've lived through and the rise of Trumpism and that, you know, complete derangement of our politics, which you also have weighed in on quite usefully.
00:34:46.260 And many of your intuitions here have been informed by your experience being Turkish and knowing what it's like to live through coups and coup attempts.
00:34:55.760 And so you've seen the writing on the wall in that sense, too.
00:35:00.820 And so the bigger problem is one of misinformation and information siloing.
00:35:06.920 And just the fact that there's, given that we're, largely this is a story of what the Internet is doing to the human mind.
00:35:14.120 I mean, we have access to so much information, but simultaneously we have, the gatekeepers of information have lost the trust.
00:35:24.960 Much of, you know, much of society, in many cases for good reason.
00:35:28.600 I mean, you just pointed to the case where it took you, a non-expert, to push back against, you know, CDC guidance.
00:35:37.600 And so, you know, we find out we can't trust the CDC on so basic a point as whether or not people should be wearing masks in the middle of an airborne pandemic.
00:35:47.780 So trust in public institutions has eroded.
00:35:52.280 And so now we're left with a situation where everyone's got a supercomputer in their pocket with access to the totality of human information, which is probably doubling at this point, I don't know, every year.
00:36:05.800 And we have this kind of stalemate where, you know, one person's groupthink is another person's expert consensus.
00:36:17.580 There's no place to stand where you have authority or perceived authority to rectify the obvious reasoning errors of vast segments of our population.
00:36:29.860 Take your pick. We could talk about QAnon or the anti-vax movement or prominent people in our society likening COVID to the flu or the craziness is everywhere.
00:36:42.060 And it's very hard when you have a breakdown of authority and even integrity in major institutions, whether it's the CDC or scientific journals like Nature and Science and the New England Journal of Medicine.
00:36:55.300 I mean, it's just all of this has gotten so contaminated by politics on both the left and the right that it is really quite deranging.
00:37:02.640 So I think we should step back for a second and talk about the role that misinformation and social media and any other variable here bringing this confusion to scale is playing on multiple fronts here.
00:37:18.300 Then we can sort of dive back into anything that you think is useful to say about COVID at this moment.
00:37:23.220 Sure. So, um, so you hit upon like, that's exactly what we mean when everything I've been interested in kind of came to be at this year.
00:37:33.900 So to begin with, I, I, I'm on the record calling this a starter pandemic.
00:37:39.060 That's not to like make light of the existing tragedy, but like it could have had the fatality rate of something much worse.
00:37:48.940 Right. And, uh, there's no reason that it couldn't have been terrible in ways that, that we can't even imagine right now.
00:37:57.540 It could have been killing a lot more people.
00:38:00.020 It is.
00:38:02.800 Mercifully, largely sparing children from severe illness or deaths.
00:38:07.260 The outcomes are like, so it could have been just sort of devastating all the children.
00:38:11.060 And, uh, I mean, every death is tragic, but it could have been in something like that is a different kind of situation.
00:38:18.060 Uh, it could have been killing 30% of the victims.
00:38:21.360 We might not have had vaccines in nine months.
00:38:24.560 There's so many things that could be so much worse about this, you know, the starter pandemic we have.
00:38:31.240 And I mean, this part, it's already tragic, but.
00:38:35.060 So that's something that I think about a lot.
00:38:37.660 And the other thing is, I mean, then this is something I think about all the time is that,
00:38:43.200 you know, yes, I've criticized the CDC and the World Health Organization on this basic point.
00:38:48.540 But on the other hand, of course, like overall, they are right.
00:38:52.980 Like if you are just sort of thinking about, like, who do I believe?
00:38:56.960 You're always going to choose the CDC.
00:38:58.800 You're always going to choose the World Health Organization compared to the, you know, rampant misinformation out there.
00:39:05.560 So even if they have hiccups and get something wrong, they're like, you know, they're full of actual experts and, you know, they're did whatever their failings.
00:39:13.740 They're so much better.
00:39:14.860 And look at like the vaccines and the scientific edifice that can deliver this kind of vaccine with this speed.
00:39:22.680 And yet, and yet, and yet, we're losing the argument to QAnon, right?
00:39:28.520 I mean, we have all this, like I was just sort of talking, I think, in another interview.
00:39:34.900 And I'm just kind of like amazed at how little we're doing with what we have because we haven't figured out how to make these institutions earn public trust the right way.
00:39:47.500 Like, because all the, you know, mistakes they make and the sort of communication errors kind of weaken them.
00:39:53.660 But in reality, I'm just thinking like, you know, clinical medicine has all sorts of things I can criticize about everything from the equity to the way they listen to the, they don't listen to the patients to, they are still in a mind body dualism.
00:40:08.600 As far as like, I'm concerned, they have these.
00:40:11.000 So I have all these criticisms.
00:40:12.260 On the other hand, if my 11-year-old gets strep throat, the only thing I'm thinking, well, not this year, but previously would have been, oh, he can't go to school for a day.
00:40:25.720 Whereas like just, you know, if it was 1930s, I'd be thinking, am I planning a funeral, right?
00:40:32.260 Like within basically a couple of generations, we've made so much amazing progress.
00:40:38.720 And as you point out, and we have supercomputers in our pockets and all of that, and yet we're failing and we're losing the arguments to, like people we should not be losing these arguments to because we're mismanaging it.
00:40:53.880 We're losing trust.
00:40:55.300 You know, people like Donald Trump are managing to convince enough people and get elected.
00:40:59.740 And then also managed to convince enough people that the election was stolen from them and, you know, all the things that came from that lie.
00:41:07.780 We're like, I met a, I volunteer at a vaccine clinic and the, it's amazing.
00:41:16.080 Like we're giving all these elderly people the first shots, but there's no phone capacity to call them for reminders in three to four weeks because the phones are overloaded and over, you know, they're just no.
00:41:30.320 And I, and some of these people were, they're just, we're just sending them on with a piece of paper.
00:41:34.880 I, you know, 80 year old, 90 year old people and just hoping they show back up.
00:41:41.300 And I'm thinking, how could this be?
00:41:43.480 Like, how could we have these amazing vaccines with these results and not have the phone capacity to make sure that we give them a call back to remind them, you know, your appointments tomorrow.
00:41:57.080 Right.
00:41:57.400 That kind of simple stuff.
00:41:58.580 So this is this really weird age, this mismatch age, like achievements of science are on the one hand, amazing.
00:42:08.020 Like we got the vaccine so fast, but we're not putting money into distribution.
00:42:12.280 We have medicine.
00:42:13.420 That's amazing, but it doesn't listen to patients all the time and loses trust.
00:42:17.120 We have, you know, a democracy and we're electing Donald Trump and then nobody's standing up.
00:42:23.820 So I, I'm not like, it's a transition and even though the technology that's feeling this, the social media technology is kind of amazing in some ways.
00:42:36.420 And this is something like, this was our last conversation.
00:42:39.140 I long thought about this.
00:42:40.600 The printing press was amazing, but we didn't just get the printing press.
00:42:45.620 And then the Encyclopedia Britannica.
00:42:49.240 Yeah.
00:42:49.340 Right.
00:42:49.800 Like there was, there was like, there was a couple of, you know, the 30 year wars and this and that, and then two global wars and World War I and World War II and near annihilation.
00:43:01.140 And we came to our senses a little late on that.
00:43:04.460 On the other hand, like I'm sort of going to go from, like, it didn't just, yeah, go from printing press to Encyclopedia Britannica.
00:43:11.260 It was a lot of upheaval, but on the other, other hand, like after 1945, after World War II, if you wanted to sort of, if you're taking bets, you'd be like in 20 years, Germany is going to attack somebody again, probably France, because that had, that was pretty much what had happened for hundreds of years.
00:43:30.800 But for a bunch of complicated, lengthy reasons, Europe was scared enough and U.S. was scared enough to build institutions to make sure that never happened.
00:43:44.460 And in 20, 30 years, instead of having, you know, one more Germany attacks France story, which is like, if you were a Bayesian, that's what you would have said was about to happen again.
00:43:54.420 We got, you know, a single currency there as soon thereafter, we got borderless travel.
00:43:59.400 I mean, I'm not saying the European Union is the perfect, but we haven't had another Germany, France war.
00:44:06.740 Like the continent is not in pieces again.
00:44:10.200 So it's like we can fix things when and if we fix the institutional part of it.
00:44:17.460 Part of the problem here, though, is that because there's been such a breakdown in trust and institutions, many people doubt whether we need institutions.
00:44:27.800 Institutions themselves are in disrepute.
00:44:30.100 And I mean, even, I mean, you and I are visibly part of this trend.
00:44:34.780 I mean, I mean, you probably less so than that I am.
00:44:38.000 But, you know, I'm you and I are speaking on my podcast, which I have taken great pains to divorce from any kind of institutional pressure because of the kind of intellectual freedom I want to have here.
00:44:50.780 You know, I have actually consciously worked now for years to make myself uncancellable.
00:44:57.360 And, you know, you you write for The Atlantic and The New York Times, but you also have a Substack email, which I certainly recommend people subscribe to.
00:45:06.800 You're part of a trend there that many very celebrated journalists have jumped entirely to Substack because the institutions have proved to be so vulnerable to bizarrely.
00:45:18.680 So I mean, this shouldn't be the case, but, you know, you can get something with a few hundred retweets on Twitter, which brings The New York Times to its knees, at least, you know, behind closed doors.
00:45:30.040 They're treating it like it's an absolute emergency and looking for who to fire next.
00:45:36.580 And so standing outside of all this, you know, we have obviously the people who have been taken in by one or another crazy confabulation like QAnon and, you know, the larger subset of Trumpist preoccupation around that.
00:45:50.320 But on the far left, there are analogs of this.
00:45:54.140 And if there's a consensus about anything right now, it seems to be that the experts can't be trusted to the point where expertise itself isn't even a thing anymore.
00:46:05.340 Right. It's like we don't we don't need experts for anything.
00:46:08.200 They've all discredited themselves.
00:46:09.800 The people most worth listening to are simply the people who will say the most provocative thing that proves to be most shareable.
00:46:18.200 And, you know, unhelpfully for any kind of course correction back to normalcy here, we have one vivid example after the next of people like yourself.
00:46:27.500 And, you know, and there are many other people I could name in this mode who obviously have one foot in institutions and the normal culture of expertise or even both feet there, but occasionally have to step outside of all of that and point out that the institutions, you know, are most prestigious institutions are failing to a degree that is actually just jaw dropping.
00:46:54.460 Right. And this is I mean, I'll just add to you one other data point here on the kind of the other side of this, which is I'm sure you saw this at one point.
00:47:04.380 I forget what month this landed in.
00:47:06.360 But when we were having all of the the social protests around the murder of George Floyd and the BLM protests that in certain cases devolved into riots and all of that happening on the left,
00:47:19.420 you know, there were open letters signed by literally thousands of doctors and public health professionals in support of these protests as though they posed absolutely no epidemiological concern.
00:47:35.120 Right. Like this is necessary. This is good. All of the right wing protests against lockdown were murderously irresponsible.
00:47:42.760 Right. They had castigated the right over, you know, gathering on mass in public.
00:47:48.160 But then we had protests from the left that were aligned with, you know, the political priors of, you know, most people in journalism and most people in academia,
00:47:57.840 which were an order of magnitude larger. And from a, you know, apart from, you know, some more mask wearing definitely looked riskier than anything that was happening on the right.
00:48:09.460 And yet there was not only silence around this, there was absolute support from public health people.
00:48:16.420 And, you know, obviously this got noticed by everyone right of center as not just an instance of black comedy level hypocrisy,
00:48:24.980 but it was just a complete breakdown of a commitment to spreading valid public health information, which.
00:48:32.820 And so people, you know, the people who were, who were, who were resisting wearing masks at that point took notice and said,
00:48:39.780 all right, we can't trust anything you people say. It's all about politics. You've just proved that yet again.
00:48:46.120 And it's, you can almost hold your breath until the next moment where the worst fears and the most cynical assumptions of any one of these siloed groups of confabulists get confirmed by our institutions at this point.
00:49:02.280 I mean, the most responsible people behave absolutely irresponsibly, seemingly on command.
00:49:09.560 It's very hard to find a place from which to reboot and to, to acknowledge all of these past missteps and to say,
00:49:17.280 okay, now we're going to move forward with, you know, professionals in their right seats and with a, you know,
00:49:24.400 renewed commitment to institutional integrity and intellectual honesty and everything else that's going to become a reliable engine of progress here.
00:49:32.280 It's amazing to see, I literally, I see billionaires who are as basically as cynical about anything ever getting done ever again as QAnon lunatics.
00:49:44.760 So it's, it's just a, it's a very dark picture of, you know, if we have a consensus about anything,
00:49:51.240 it's that nobody knows how to move forward here.
00:49:54.760 So anyway, I just vomited all of my worries on you and do with that what you will.
00:50:01.480 Interesting thing is that the experts are the ones that are kneecapping themselves despite,
00:50:07.700 I, I mean, every argument should be on their side.
00:50:12.200 Like as we just discussed, it's like medicine has done amazing things.
00:50:16.140 These vaccines are amazing.
00:50:17.780 We know like sorts of guidelines.
00:50:19.300 So you don't like being able to do this.
00:50:22.460 If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org.
00:50:28.600 Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast,
00:50:32.960 along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app.
00:50:40.820 The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support.
00:50:45.180 And you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org.
00:50:48.060 And you can subscribe to SamHarris.org.