#468 — More From Sam： Gratitude, Bad Conversations, Conspiracy Addiction, Waffle House Teleportation, and More
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Summary
In this episode of Making Sense with Sam Harris, the show's host, Sam, sits down with writer and essayist Alex Blumberg to discuss Iran, AI, and what it means to be grateful for what we do have.
Transcript
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You're listening to Making Sense with Sam Harris.
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This is the free version of the podcast, so you'll only hear the first part of today's
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If you want the full episode and every episode, you can subscribe at samharris.org.
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If you enjoy what we're doing here and find it valuable, please consider subscribing today.
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Welcome back to another episode of More from Sam.
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Once again, we are taping this live in front of subscribers where anything goes.
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We've had them submit questions in advance of the show, and I will try to get to as many
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And then we've asked them to provide any follow-ups using the chat feature so that Sam can address
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This worked really well last week or last episode, I should say.
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And it's very helpful to have a bunch of smart people feeding me lines.
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Before we get to our first topic, I just want to give a quick rundown of the guests you'll
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be recording with on the podcast over the next few weeks.
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we have Tristan Harris, Lloyd Blankfein, Rahm Emanuel, Francis Fukuyama, Ben Shapiro,
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Michael Pollan, and Siddhartha Mukherjee. And that's just April.
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Yeah. So if anyone wanted more content from you, got a lot coming up. And I'm hopeful that
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you'll have another essay for us soon. Nobody does them quite like you do. And I'm certain
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the audience agrees with me. All right, let's get to our first topic. We're going to get your
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updated thoughts on Iran, AI, and other concerns. But first, a lot of people feel overwhelmed
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by many things these days, including the pace of change and the fear of being left behind in an
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increasingly AI-driven world. Yet, even with some legitimate fears, there's still so much to be
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grateful for, but it feels like no matter how much better things get, things feel worse. Maybe
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you could remind us what we still have to be grateful for and how to best navigate this moment.
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Well, I think it's just useful to ask yourself the question. Even if your job in some sense is
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to pay attention to risk or the downside of things or to criticize bad. I'm just thinking
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personally how I navigate this. I spend a lot of time thinking about what's wrong and the needless
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own goals we score on ourselves as a society. All of that can be depressing, but the filter I use
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to do that is to ask myself, how unhappy do I have to be in the meantime? Is my being unhappy
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contributing anything useful you know on the side of my own motivation to do any of this work or
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my ability to communicate well about it or i mean just is it useful and you know almost always the
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answer is no right so like there really is a potentially a radical disjunction between even
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paying attention to scary and depressing things and being scared and depressed in one's life
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moment to moment i mean i just i just think that second piece isn't actually necessary i'm not i'm
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not saying there's there's never bleed through but it's um there can be surprisingly little when
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you reflect on just how lucky you are moment to moment even with all the things you might be
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concerned about so and obviously there are many people whose jobs are nothing like mine and they
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they can withdraw their attention from current events and from you know things like existential
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risk and they can do it knowing that for the most part they can't do anything about those
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things right they're not they don't have a job that requires them to be up to the minute on
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whatever it is you know pandemic risk or you know or nuclear proliferation or any other sort of
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damocles that's hanging over our heads there is no good reason to um simply become morbid in the
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way you pay attention to the world right i mean it's just not it's not useful right and so i really
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think only mindfulness gives you the capacity to make these choices moment to moment i mean if you
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really and if you don't know what i mean by mindfulness then there's really nothing there's
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no um there's no foothold to grab there i mean you really just have to learn something about it
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but if you can notice the moment to moment consequences of paying attention to things and
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and and how you use your attention being consequential it allows you to decide you know
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to kind of wisely curate the contents of your own consciousness and withdraw your attention
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from things when that when your attention on them serves no good purpose and i don't know
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just kind of break the addiction of being unhappy in the usual ways right i mean many of us get sort
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of stuck in the rut of conforming to various patterns of attention and you you can just
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decide to break break those habits so yeah obviously you can think in the stoical vein of
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all the people in the world whose prayers would be answered if they could simply be in your exact
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situation right now. I mean, think of all the bad things that haven't happened to you that if they
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had, you know, what you'd pay just to get back to where you are right now. I mean, those are useful
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reflections. But, you know, it is just in fact true that life is very, very good for so many of
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us. And it's very easy not to be aware of that moment to moment. So how do you help people
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navigate the anxiety around their jobs if they think that their job's going to be going away?
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I mean, so many people are talking about right now, is it going to be months?
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Maybe a little bit longer before I lose my job.
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And if you're looking out there looking for a job right now, if you're a young kid out
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of college, it's great if you have expertise in good taste because AI sort of plays like
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But if you don't have the experience and the higher skilled people aren't going to hire
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I mean, how does mindfulness help those people who are looking to...
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Well, so specifically on that point, I mean, I think, I don't think you can, you can boycott
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I mean, I just, I think the right thing to do is figure out how to use it in beneficial
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ways, you know, for your career and for your personal life.
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I just think it's, I mean, some people can ignore it, but for the most part, certainly
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if you're in any kind of job or hoping to be in a job that focuses on information, I
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mean, if it's a job you can do sitting behind a desk, I think AI needs to become your friend
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leaving aside all of the other issues we might have about it and the other concerns about
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alignment and all of that. I think in the limit, when we start to see the real evaporation of
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jobs because of how good AI is getting, we as a society are going to have to figure out how
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to navigate that. And that I think is probably coming sooner than many people expect. I think
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it is definitely coming. Many people expect that it's not coming. AI is just going to create a
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bunch of new jobs that we don't have names for yet. And really, there will be no radical
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displacement. I think that's just happy talk. But there are people who, there are smart people who
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believe that by analogy to previous breakthroughs in technology. But I do think, I think we as a
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society are going to have to figure out how to absorb productivity gains that don't ultimately
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entail people becoming more productive, right? I mean, so that the AI starts doing work that
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people are doing now and um there's job cancellation i think that's coming people can't solve that by
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themselves though really i mean once it comes at any kind of scale society has to solve it
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well i get that but i'm talking about the delta between where the shit gets bad and before it
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gets better and so for people like you say make ai your friend that's great because you have good
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taste and expertise so you can tell ai what you want but if you're somebody on the other's other
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into that and you're somebody whose job it is to do admin or coordination or some of the other
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tasks, if you're a paralegal or even a junior lawyer or any of the other examples, again,
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the anxiety is real. How does mindfulness help here? How do people navigate it? Because I mean,
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again, I understand what you're saying is so much of it, it's in our heads, but there is a reality
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that this is different. Mindfulness helps with everything because in each moment, there's either
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There's something for you to do or there isn't, right?
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So if there's something for you to do, well, then you just do that thing, right?
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I mean, again, this applies even in emergencies, right?
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The house is on fire, and you now need to get your kids out to safety, and so you have
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So action's required, and you don't need to suffer over performing that action.
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Now, if there's nothing you can do to change your situation or to change the risk you're
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confronting, well, then your misery is adding nothing to that occasion either. Now, in either
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case, your misery is extra, right? Now, this can be a high bar to clear for people who don't have
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a mindfulness practice, but once you do, you can actually differentiate these components to your
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engagement, you know, with your life, moment to moment. I mean, you can have a highly energized,
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you know, motivated, even adrenalized experience that isn't a miserable one, right? You can be
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responding to an emergency and not be miserable. You can be making decisions over a longer time
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horizon that entail a lot, that are, you know, kind of scary decisions, right? It's like you
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could say, okay, now I need a surgery and it's, you know, in two weeks I'm going to have a surgery
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which I'm, you know, anxious about, right? But, you know, all things considered, it is just the
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right decision and now I've got, now the surgery's on the calendar and now I've got this thing looming
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and so, okay, so now, but now the question is, over the next 14 days, how much time are you going
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to spend being miserable because you're anxious about the surgery. All of those moments are
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discretionary once you know how to be mindful. Once you've decided what you have to do, there
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really is no more to think about, really, right? Now, you will helplessly be knocked around by
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your thoughts, but that's where mindfulness comes in. And again, if you don't have a mindfulness
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practice, you are going to be the mere hostage of those thoughts, right? So you'll be as anxious
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and as fearful and as worried and as sleepless as you'll be because your mind is completely out of
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control for the next two weeks. But there simply is no alternative to mental training once you
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get into a situation like that. I mean, the time to develop a mindfulness practice is before you
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really need it, not when you're in the middle of that maelstrom. But it really, I mean, it is there
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this is a capacity you can develop and it really does provide relief. I mean, every time you find
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yourself suffering, you can recognize that you're thinking without noticing that you're thinking
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and then wake up from that dream. And it doesn't change the fact that you still might have to have
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surgery in two weeks, right? But again, all of the suffering that precedes it is unnecessary
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and the same will be true afterwards, right? I mean, again, you're just going to be in the
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company of your thoughts 99% of the time. Well, speaking of relief, the New York Times reports
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that after decades of religious decline, people have stopped leaving churches. Now, it doesn't
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point to a revival necessarily, but maybe people like the feeling of something familiar in uncertain
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times. How does that sit with you? That might be, yeah. I just don't know how durable that
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change is. I mean, the larger trend is of kind of a massively secularizing change in our culture
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over the last you know quarter century but um no i could well imagine people want community and they
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want you know real world experiences and it's comforting to be inside a church and i love
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churches right you know i love sitting in churches so i get it but yeah i don't know i don't know what
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to draw from that headline well i want to play a video for you and get your thoughts on this can
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we play the um rubio clip speaking of religion here we were all created every single one of us
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before the beginning of time by the hands of the god of the universe an all-powerful god did you
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see this no and created us for the purpose of living with him in eternity god this is rubio
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the atheists don't make content anywhere near this inspiring
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took on the form of a man and came down and lived among us i don't find this inspiring this is oh
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that music died like a man all right i think we'll see enough yeah okay yeah i i mean i haven't
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really tracked uh rubio's level of religious fanaticism i mean you know i want to when i
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think of someone like pete hegseth i get quite worried because he clearly is someone who's
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making decisions based on his bible thumping but well i was going to ask you that because i thought
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like if you had to pick one Republican to take over in 2028, if you had to do that, I would have
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assumed it would have been someone like a Rubio. And then seeing this video, I thought, wait a
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second, where did this come from? But even with this video, I'd still think. I mean, who knows
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what this guy believes, right? This is very few people have shown themselves to be this malleable
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in the face of, you know, political imperatives. You know, he is someone who rightly identified
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had Trump as a con man who was destroying conservatism, and now he's secretary of state
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and just a odious lickspittle. I mean, so I think the only reason why I view him differently
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from someone like Pete Hegseth is that he was a sort of normal politician with a normal degree
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of qualifications for his role, right? So he's not egregiously unqualified to be secretary of
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state or president or any other. I mean, he's just, he's a normal, normal candidate for these
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kinds of roles. Whereas, you know, Pete Hegseth is mostly a Fox News personality, though he can
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bench press 300 plus pounds, which is genuinely impressive and just a proper religious maniac
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by all appearances. So he seems quite a bit scarier to me, but yeah, maybe this is sincere
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from Rubio. I don't know. I mean, he's just, he's just a shape-shifting opportunist as far as I can
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help speaking of people sound like religious maniacs did you see that um video i want to play
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this for you of greg phillips from fema who claimed that he had time traveled to a waffle house
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i forgot who it was yeah i know the story yeah can we play that clip real fast we had a teleport
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incident two of them um which uh which transported me about uh 40 miles from
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from where I was in near Albany, Georgia, to the ditch of a church. I ended up at a
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Waffle House like 50 miles away from where I was. It was an incredibly frightening moment
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to experience yourself in your car flying through the air. It was possible. It was real.
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i want to be hanging out with her after that interview ended jesus he's at fema yeah we can
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all sleep peacefully at night knowing that that our emergencies will be responded to by
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a man who's convinced of the physics of teleportation who among us hasn't teleported
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at some point to a waffle house jesus i think 50 miles is reasonable yeah he would have claimed
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500 i thought he was shit yes to be unconscious while driving 50 miles that seems normal i think
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you've had ambient ambient experiences like that i don't think it's been that far unbelievable
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uh the last time we went to the moon you were a kid how do you feel about this latest mission to
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the moon i'm amazed at how little bandwidth it's taken up for anybody i mean i i haven't seen
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me in a different time we would see a lot of press coverage of this i haven't seen
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nearly as much as you know it's sort of at the level of this guy teleporting to a waffle house
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in my algorithm i mean i think it's great i you know i i think it's amazing that we do this
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this sort of thing but it's amazing how little bandwidth we have for nice news stories like that
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yeah we had a very uniting if short-lived moment when the u.s hockey team won the gold medal earlier
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this year do you do you think this mission will do anything for us on that level uh maybe when
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they have a parade when they get home or no one's going to care? No, I think we're pretty jaded at
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this moment and distracted for obvious reasons. I'd be surprised if the ticker tape parade got
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much coverage. There'll be 100,000 old people on CNN watching it. Right, like the Rose Parade?
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Yeah. What do you think we could do as a society to bring us closer together? Is there anything
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we could do right now? Get off social media. I think that would be to uncouple us from all the
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maniacs from the you know the 10 percent of us that are that are trolls and lunatics and bots
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and grifters and uh just dial down some of that noise so that we can get a little more signal i
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think that would that would be good if all the social media people pulled the plug on social
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media i think they would all deserve i told jack dorsey this you know when he was running twitter
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if he just pulled the plug on twitter saying sorry this just this didn't work out guys he
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would deserve the noble peace prize and and uh i think that's still true it's probably even more
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true now. I'm going to shift topics here. It's a great question from a Substack subscriber.
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You said conversations with people you strongly disagree with can be unproductive, hard to fact
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check in real time, prone to confusion. But you've also argued that conversations are only
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alternative to violence. And your early debates on religion showed you engaging calmly and
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rigorously across deep disagreement. In recent years, many of your guests seem to largely share
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your views with differences mostly in emphasis. There's a real value in surfacing expertise,
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reinforcing important ideas, but do you worry it comes at the cost of one of your genuine strengths,
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modeling how to engage thoughtfully with opposition? Most real-world disagreements
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are messy and emotionally charged. Isn't there still value in demonstrating how to navigate
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those well, even if the conversation isn't perfectly clean? Yeah, up to a point. I mean,
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I think some of those conversations are useful, and I keep looking for the ones that I think will
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be useful. I mean, I think there's generally greater utility in when there's something to
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learn about an issue or something to figure out, bringing on someone who really knows their stuff
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and just, you know, helping me learn more in real time in front of my audience. So I'm thinking
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about, you know, the consequences of Trumpism and having Trump for a second term, you know,
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and just the way the rest of the world perceives us and, you know, the loss of American leadership
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If I bring on someone who I know I'm going to agree with, but who just knows much more
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about certain details than I do, I bring on someone like Anne Applebaum, right, who can
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just give me the view from the other side of the world with much more historical context
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and who's just deep in the weeds on the way propaganda works and the way democracies unravel
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and all the relevant historical analogies, right?
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I'm not going to disagree with Ann about much, if anything, but that's not the point.
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The point is to hear what she has to say and to learn a little bit more each time I do
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I think that's usually more useful than me getting some person on who stridently disagrees
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with a position I already have, and I just know going into it that it's just going to
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be an exercise in my attempting to showcase their errors, which I already understand to
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right? So someone who doesn't really understand jihadism at all and doesn't believe in it and
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thinks it's all economics and politics and bluffing, okay, I can get that person on for
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another two-hour round of, you know, brain damage. But it really is just brain damage, right? Now,
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it's not to say that it's not going to be useful for some people in the audience to see me hit
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those pitches again and again. But I've done it so many times, I'm not sure about the value of
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continuing to do it and and it also runs the risk of being confusing to some people anyway because
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certain moves are reliably confusing right well i think people like the conversations you're having
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i think it's just it feels as though you've been just avoiding the chance at having a bad conversation
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and they feel that many of them can learn from a bad conversation i just don't see like i like
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who are we talking about i mean like i'm going to talk to someone like hassan piker would that be
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fun no not really i mean it just i i don't think i don't think anyone should be listening to this
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guy right so it's like it just seems like well that's a different point i think what they're
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saying is there are bad conversations that they're constantly having and they can still learn how to
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have a good conversation in a bad conversation or how to navigate a bad conversation and with you
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lately just saying fuck it i'm not going to have bad conversations anymore because this is not
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the best use of my time or i'm not going to spend two hours on this i think that a lot of people
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are saying, well, even from those bad conversations, I don't think they mean the
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Omar Z's conversation examples. Well, I mean, so I'm going to talk to Ben Shapiro. I anticipate
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that being a potentially bad conversation, at least for half of it. I mean, half of it will
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agree about certain things, but part of it will be exposing a fair amount of daylight between us
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around Trump and current American politics. So I'm going to go into that thinking we both might
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get somewhat uptight in this conversation, at least for part of it. And I'm not avoiding it.
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I think it's useful because Ben is a serious enough person with a big enough audience that
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it's useful to try to kind of make some sense in his direction. Would I talk to Candace Owens? I
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don't think so. I mean, she's got an even larger audience, but she's a total lunatic. And I'm not
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sure, I mean, apart from, I mean, I could approach it the way I approached the conversation with
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Doug Wilson, the pastor who I knew just how far out he was as a fundamentalist, but I
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I was looking, I trust, in that case, I trusted my audience to understand what's wrong with
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a pastor who will sign off on maybe one day bringing chattel slavery back because it's
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So that's obvious enough that I can, I don't have to dunk on that point.
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i don't have to say oh well like i just hope it's clear that i'm against chattel slavery i mean so
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it's just you can just be more of an anthropologist there rather than a you know somebody who's going
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to dig in and really have a debate you know my conversation with ross doubt that right like we
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did not agree that was had the quality of a debate about religion i think he's more of a
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religious extremist than people appreciate and i i feel some of that came out in our conversation
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i mean he's surprisingly extreme in his claims to to you know his faith claims given that he's
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also trying to function as a normal journalist at the new york times so those are not totally
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those are somewhat adversarial conversations but they're not to talk to someone like i don't know
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again i just brought up hassan piker at random someone like him i mean he's just kind of a
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performance artist. I mean, he's a deeply confused, I think, fairly amoral, fairly juvenile person in
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his ethics, right? I mean, he's just a, and he's just a bit of a nutcase and dishonest. And so
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it's just, it's such a mess. I mean, there's so much bad faith that you have to anticipate going
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into a conversation like that. My first question is why do it? Because it can stand the chance of
00:22:40.380
being genuinely confusing, certainly to anyone who's sort of in his audience, right? Because
00:22:46.720
there's just so much, it's asymmetric warfare. It's so much easier to make a mess than to clean
00:22:51.140
it up, right? That's why I wouldn't talk to someone like RFK Jr. I mean, RFK Jr. is basically
00:22:55.560
a nutcase, right? I mean, there's something wrong with the guy. He's a liar, absolutely a liar,
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but he's also a kind of a confabulator. He's a bullshit artist. And also I just think a little
1.00
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crazy, right? So he's, you're dealing with all of that. It's very hard to do in real time. Again,
00:23:12.480
for the kinds of things he's crazy about, what you want is someone who's deep in the weeds on
00:23:19.040
the science of vaccines and immunology and just, you know, virology and all of it, right? So I'm
00:23:25.220
the wrong guy to have that conversation. I've always said that. It's not to say I couldn't
00:23:28.840
take a month of my life and get up to speed on some of that, but it's just not worth a month
00:23:32.500
of my life to do that. So all of it is just, at this point, you have to have a life is too short
00:23:39.280
module in your brain and consult it occasionally. And for many of these conversations that people
00:23:44.980
seem to want me to have, I have to say life is too short for many of them. It's not to say, I mean,
00:23:50.360
given the right candidate, you know, I might jump at the chance. Again, I mean, you know,
00:23:55.200
the monk debates, I think, they asked me to debate Tucker Carlson, and I was surprised
00:24:00.640
to find myself saying yes without any reservation, really, because Tucker has become such a fixture
00:24:07.500
in our politics. But that seems to have evaporated. So I don't know what happened there. I'm sure he
00:24:12.780
said no. But so I would do that. I would do something like that. But again, it really has
00:24:18.140
to be worth it. Well, Rogan has said he doesn't want to talk to you publicly until you've debated
00:24:22.460
Brett Weinstein. Is that something you consider doing?
00:24:25.500
Oh, well, no. I mean, for the same reasons, I wouldn't debate RFK Jr. I mean, it's just
00:24:30.640
It's very disconcerting not to know whether someone has lost their mind, right?
00:24:37.160
Because when you look at someone like Brett Speak, he just seems to be the picture of
00:24:43.980
He's not getting blown around by his emotional life, certainly not in any obvious way when
00:24:52.480
So he's not an Alex Jones-like character where you look at the way he's delivering the lines
00:24:58.620
and you think, okay, this is kind of a case study in, in, you know, chemical imbalance or something,
00:25:04.720
right? Like what we need is a psychopharmacologist before anything else happens here so that we can,
00:25:09.020
we can try to get this guy back to some physiological baseline. That's not happening
00:25:12.760
with Brett at all. And yet the things he says are equivalently crazy and the certitude with which he
00:25:18.940
says them, it's totally indefensible, right? So you take his recent appearance on Rogan and you
00:25:25.040
stick his claims into any LLM and what you get is just a litany of obvious errors. And I did that
00:25:32.640
for Joe. I sent him a link to my chat GPT session. Like, Joe, just here's a sanity check. Listen to
00:25:39.340
what the robots say about what Brett was giving you on this most recent podcast. And he didn't
00:25:43.900
seem to want to do that. So he's still convinced that Brett was right about everything, though
00:25:47.500
Brett thinks that 17 million people were killed outright by the vaccines and that ivermectin is
00:25:52.280
still worth taking. I don't know how to interact with that, but what it requires is if it were
00:25:58.040
going to be done at all. I mean, Brett is just the right, you know, Brett is not someone to take
00:26:01.420
seriously on this topic, but you know, if you were forced to take him seriously because he's
00:26:05.140
made so much noise about it, what you want is someone who's deeper in the weeds on the relevant
00:26:10.540
science than either of us are and let that guy or gal have the debate. And that's what I urged
00:26:17.740
joe to do i mean joe was wrong there i wasn't urging that i do a post-mortem on covid about
00:26:23.320
you know rfk jr or or brett or anyone else any other lunatic he's had on his podcast i was urging
00:26:29.160
that he have the relevant experts do it right i mean is that it's not my wheelhouse right it
00:26:34.600
shouldn't you know i'm not going to unlike many of these guys i'm not going to pretend it's my
00:26:39.060
wheelhouse uh knowing that i can be a quick study and and uh sound like i know what i'm talking
00:26:45.060
about. I'm not an immunologist. I'm not a virologist. I'm not an epidemiologist. You want
00:26:51.340
to be all three of those things. Like everyone else on the internet? Yeah, yeah, to have this
00:26:55.220
conversation responsibly. But I know enough of what mainstream science thinks about what happened
00:27:01.340
during COVID to know that Brett doesn't make any sense on this topic. Yeah, another question while
00:27:06.000
we're on Rogan. You've been critical of Rogan's irresponsibility in the spread of misinformation,
00:27:09.980
but he's taken basically the same approach since he was bullshitting stoned in his living room with
00:27:14.360
an audience of a few thousand. Not his fault. His audience has become huge. Isn't the real problem
00:27:18.980
that the epistemic institutions have trashed their credibility and the audience is lacking
00:27:23.200
discernment? Well, it's both, but I think I sent you this clip of, um, that the algorithm served
00:27:28.440
me of, of Joe talking to Theo Vaughn and Theo was, you know, just kind of melting down around his
00:27:34.040
anxiety about everything. It seemed, um, super worried about the war in Iran and, and, um,
00:27:39.460
worried about Israel, I guess. I mean, I forget about some of the specifics of the clip, but
00:27:45.560
they went on for like 10 minutes, kind of casting doubt on everything. And then they had seemed to
00:27:49.820
have a lot of time for some, I think it was CIA conspiracy theory, which was getting delivered
00:27:55.060
to them on what looked like a short YouTube clip or a TikTok video by someone they liked. And it
00:28:00.680
was probably a rehash of MKUltra or some old story about the CIA putting LSD in the water,
00:28:11.620
Yeah, but it was a completely paranoid story
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it's relevant how large the audience is for this. It's relevant just how much cultural damage is
00:28:39.960
being done every time these guys basically play the just asking questions routine on socially
00:28:48.220
combustible topics with tens of millions of people listening, right? It's just, it's completely
00:28:54.440
irresponsible. It is genuinely dangerous. It's genuinely corrosive of our culture. It's genuinely
00:28:59.960
misleading of their audience. And because they're not journalists, they feel no responsibility to
00:29:05.860
get their facts straight. They certainly don't correct their errors. And I mean, they don't
00:29:10.000
have the mechanism by which to correct their errors. It's just not...
00:29:12.860
They'll even admit that this might be some tinfoil...
00:29:16.860
I think Theo said that in the middle of this clip. Yeah, like this might be tinfoil hat time.
00:29:20.640
But still, they're still just flicking matches at everything, right? And the worst thing about
00:29:26.180
all of this, is there addiction to a conspiratorial framing of everything? That is, if you can
00:29:33.360
extract any lesson from what's happened to our politics in the last decade and the role that
00:29:40.060
people like Rogan have played in the unraveling of everything and the way in which social media
00:29:46.400
has weaponized all this and the rise of people like Tucker and Candace and Nick Fuentes and
00:29:51.860
And the fact that we've got Trump a second time around and central to all of it is this
00:29:57.280
addiction to conspiracy thinking and contrarianism and, you know, what I've called the pornography
00:30:05.660
And Joe has been as addicted as anyone and has brought it to scale perhaps more than
00:30:15.980
It is genuinely confusing to millions of people.
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00:30:18.380
I mean, you've got young people getting raised on a diet of this bullshit.
1.00
00:30:26.560
And it's undermining of, you know, yes, our institutions have done something to lose credibility,
00:30:33.140
They have become politicized in ways that they shouldn't have become politicized.
00:30:37.620
The remedy for that is not a torrent of bullshit from podcasts and the platforming of proper
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lunatics and people who think they were denied the Nobel Prize when they have almost no scientific
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reputations to protect. No, the remedy is more good science and good journalism and real
00:30:56.260
intellectual integrity and holding institutions to account in serious ways, not spreading lies
00:31:02.780
and half-truths and cockamamie conspiracy theories. And I mean, really, you'd look at that
00:31:08.820
clip of uh joe and theo who are both good guys i mean i mean that what the paradox here for me
00:31:15.220
ethically is that this what i'm talking about is a species of evil right given its consequences
00:31:20.480
it's a species of evil right it's it is like at the top of the list of what ails us in our society
00:31:27.080
it is the thing that is preventing us from solving real problems in this world there's no question
00:31:32.720
it is getting people killed and will continue to get people killed it is absolutely toxic and yet
00:31:38.020
many of the people participating in this are just good guys who are just having fun, who are just
00:31:42.460
entertaining. They think there's no stakes, right? They're just like athletes, right? They're just
00:31:48.220
having fun. They're just playing a game. Joe's just playing a game. But it's a game with real
00:31:52.580
consequences, right? It's like, how would you play tennis if you knew that every time you lost a
00:31:58.880
point, people would die, right? I mean, that's the kind of game that's being played with information
00:32:04.520
now. And so people like Joe and Elon and people who have audiences in the tens and even hundreds
00:32:11.140
of millions have a real responsibility to get their heads out of their asses. And they're not
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showing any aptitude for doing that. I'm going to move to another question. I don't like that
00:32:21.940
you seem to use the term woke in the same pejorative way that those on the right do.