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00:03:01.140But the argument, I think, might be, sorry to interrupt, that A, Trump was seen as tougher, perhaps more irrational, which is not unhelpful in this sort of situation.
00:03:13.120And also, he worked very hard on the Abraham Accords.
00:03:38.540The details of its happening were profoundly surprising, given what we thought the IDF was capable of and what was unlikely to, you know, the specifics were surprising.
00:03:50.020But this will be a recurring story of our lives until, frankly, until the Muslim world has a civil war with itself, with its own extremists.
00:04:02.340It's not a problem we're going to solve.
00:04:05.320We need two billion Muslims to figure out how to deal with their problem of homegrown extremism in 100 countries.
00:04:14.180I think the source—sorry to needle this, but I think it's important to flesh out.
00:04:18.600I think the source of this question, I may be hallucinating, is you were vehemently anti-Trump.
00:04:26.020And I guess what I think people are asking is, were you not wrong about that?
00:04:32.240Because there's so many other liabilities with Trump.
00:04:34.900I mean, in fact, it's the similarity to Trump and Trumpism that shed—that did much to shatter Israeli society and seemingly soften it up for this attack, right?
00:04:49.700It's insofar as Netanyahu, who's a hell of a lot smarter than Trump and more sophisticated than Trump, insofar as he resembles Trump, insofar as he was engineering a similarly populist eruption of bullshittery in his own society.
00:05:03.760The divisiveness of all of that, the divisiveness of all of that, the untenability of all of that, the lack of pragmatism, the taking the eye off the ball of the real threats to Israel.
00:05:17.500You know, the similarities there are awful, and insofar as we have—Trump and Trumpism has a similar effect on our own society, it represents the same kind of opportunity cost.
00:05:33.960I mean, you think of all the things we didn't get done and will not get done for every moment we spend dealing with the divisiveness of Trumpism and the counterreaction from the left.
00:05:45.820I mean, it's just—it's just a massive opportunity cost.
00:05:48.220So, no, I think it's—there's nothing good—even if you can find some local instance where Trump was right about something and the Democrats were wrong, I mean, he's totally right about the southern border, right?
00:06:00.760I mean, so that's a—there's no—in my view, there's absolutely no defense of having an indefensible border.
00:06:08.200We should know who's coming into the country.
00:06:09.820We should let the people in we want in.
00:06:11.640We should keep the people out we want to keep out.
00:06:13.580We should have, obviously, a sane and compassionate policy with respect to refugees.
00:06:19.100I mean, yes, if the wall is the best way to secure that border, then build that wall, right?
00:06:22.780So Trump's right about that, but he's such an awful human being, and his effect on our politics is so toxic that we can't even—that half of our society has to treat that completely sane project as a form of racism because they're reacting to the golem of Trump.
00:06:42.760So we need other people—even where Trump is right, we need other people quarterbacking those specific decisions.
00:06:52.340So what you're saying is you're pro-Trump.
00:06:57.740Linz1, we've touched on this, but they ask, what is Eric's take on the deluge of pro-Hamas protests after the most recent attack in Western countries?
00:07:13.460Well, I tried to talk about, I think when I was on Rogan recently, maybe on your show, I don't remember.
00:07:19.200There's been a huge uptick in open anti-Semitism, and it's right on schedule.
00:07:25.220I mean, I think that if you are monitoring what I'm monitoring, you're not that surprised by it.
00:07:32.280You just—you know, what we knew is that it's to the bone.
00:07:38.080And so when people talk about, you know, black and brown bodies or, you know, I don't feel safe, like there was a spate of postings, but I don't feel safe as a Muslim.
00:07:51.180But it's a radical anti-Semitic ideology of revolution, and it's on schedule, and it's terrible that we've gotten here.
00:08:07.520But in part, a lot of the well-meaning left did not understand that they'd gotten into the ocean with a revolutionary current pulling them along the beach, and they end up getting out of the water very far away from their beach towel.
00:08:25.820They're not anywhere close to being liberal tolerant because in their attempts to say, well, Black Lives Matter and we care about this, they didn't notice who they were affiliating themselves with.
00:08:40.780And hopefully, if you've seen a charred body or severed limbs or shot up porta-potties, you're making an intelligent decision about what really matters to you.
00:08:51.420And if you think, you know, end the occupation, free Palestine, go paragliders, you're probably really deep in it.
00:09:03.080You know, I hope that deprogramming exists for you.
00:09:07.100I hope that you really think about whether you want to sanction rape, torture, and message killing.
00:09:16.420And if that's your thing, then I guess, well, you know where you are.
00:09:21.420John Watson says, could the lads ask Sam what he thinks his old friend Christopher Hitchens would make of the current political landscape, particularly with regards to gender identity, which has essentially become a new religion?
00:09:37.060I mean, I think he would make exactly what we have all made of it.
00:09:44.260And it would be a lot of fun to hear him talk about it.
00:09:47.080But I don't think there'd be any daylight between him and us on that point.
00:09:57.260World by Wolf asks, Eric, pick your dream president and VP for our times.
00:10:11.340Well, it's really hard because I think that the current political landscape deforms everyone who enters this.
00:10:19.120I've watched this with the pressures put on Tulsi, Bernie, and RFK Jr.
00:10:28.900We keep getting a fugu sort of situation where there are lots of parts of the fish that you like, and there's some portion of the fish that's deadly.
00:10:39.720But I'm going to have to cheat on the answer to this, which is the optics of the first Obama candidacy is the substance we need in the White House.
00:10:49.080But I haven't seen anyone with the ability to run this gauntlet who's viable.
00:10:55.040And so I just don't think that we have a situation in which anyone is speaking in real terms.
00:11:05.660I'm sorry to say that I can't see a single voice on the viable political landscape that excites me.
00:11:13.020And the last thing I was excited about was Obama won.
00:11:15.400And clearly I ended up buying a campaign that governed in a very different form than the one I expected.
00:13:52.420It could be that different people, because of many, many different things, genetics, cultural values,
00:14:02.660their material circumstances, their locus of control over their own lives, right?
00:14:08.020Which, as you get wealthier and more powerful and influential, changes.
00:14:11.640Some people are able to deal with the things that religion traditionally has fulfilled, fear of death, meaning, purpose, etc.
00:14:21.640That you, and to some extent I and Richard Dawkins, I put the same question to him when we had him on the show about this.
00:14:27.680Some people are able to get it from things other than religion.
00:14:31.340But if you take it away from other people who are not wired the way that you are, who do not have the resources that you do,
00:14:37.680who, for whatever reason, they're not predisposed to that way of thinking, who have a greater fear of death than you do.
00:14:43.600For those people, a set of traditional beliefs that center around something that you and I might agree isn't entirely true,
00:14:50.840or is entirely untrue, you might say, is valuable in a way that it is not for you and your friends.
00:14:56.420Well, so what I will admit is that there are certain cases where irrational dogmas cause people to behave better than they otherwise would.
00:15:07.480There are certainly those cases, and that's good except for the fact that there are other ways to get people to behave in those same ways
00:15:17.020that are more valid and scalable and have more integrity, right?
00:15:21.620So, yeah, it's possible to go to sub-Saharan Africa and work in a refugee camp
00:15:26.620because you believe the creator of the universe wants you to do it and you're saving souls for Christ.
00:15:31.260But it's also possible to realize that you just actually care about a famine in Somalia or Ethiopia,
00:15:36.280and you want to work with doctors without borders or whatever,
00:15:39.220and you're doing that actually based on caring about human suffering in a global sense, right?
00:15:44.620So one code is much better to be running on your brain than the other
00:15:48.620and doesn't come with the attendant downside of suddenly throwing this moral error of like,
00:15:56.080now we're Catholics in sub-Saharan Africa and we're teaching the sinfulness of condom use
00:16:01.740even when people are dying from AIDS and condoms is the only way to prevent them from dying from AIDS, etc.
00:16:08.740So there are better reasons to be good than religion tends to provide,
00:16:14.880but I would grant you that religion does provide those reasons for some people some of the time.
00:16:19.540My problem with religion is that it gets so much wrong that leads to unnecessary conflict and division
00:16:28.600and opportunity cost in our society, certainly in the 21st century, with all the opportunities in front of us.
00:16:36.460And it doesn't get the core parts right that I would agree is still our core,
00:16:41.120like what are our real spiritual opportunities?
00:16:45.580Just how good could human consciousness be moment to moment?
00:16:50.420How good could human life be moment to moment?
00:16:52.960And for that, I do think there are these core experiences at the heart of religion
00:17:00.340that gave rise to our religions, perhaps some more than others.
00:17:04.420I mean, again, our religions are different,
00:17:06.000but I do think we need something like a modern Mysteries of Eleusis where,
00:17:14.440I mean, I'm very mindful of the errors we made in the 60s around psychedelics,
00:17:20.720but I'm very hopeful that a renaissance in research and interest in psychedelics
00:17:27.000could allow us to put certain transformative experiences and states of consciousness
00:20:14.900What are the fields away from quantum gravity that you feel are the most important paths for physicists to pursue?
00:20:21.960The standard model of particle theory was revealed to be geometric in the mid-1970s
00:20:33.660and has been made almost perfectly geometric by the end of the 80s.
00:20:37.940The right thing to do is to ask why we have three generations of fundamental fermions with 16 particles per generation with a crazy Higgs sector with a quartic potential.
00:20:50.700The accidents, that is, of why this particular set of objects is, without question in my mind, the most potent question in all of physics.
00:21:02.460And we abandoned it more or less in 1983 when we switched to saying we're not looking for a unified theory.
00:22:03.080I would defer to the experts who have really been watching this on that.
00:22:16.140I think it's still, I mean, you know, last week, notwithstanding,
00:22:21.140I think it's still the opinion of most qualified people that the Cuban Missile Crisis was the closest moment.
00:22:30.240But I'm not saying we're in a good spot either.
00:22:33.080It's, it's, I think it's our number, it should be our number one existential concern,
00:22:38.600followed closely by a pandemic, engineered or otherwise.
00:22:49.200So Joe asks, Eric, are there any fundamental questions in physics which AI could help resolve?
00:22:55.300Sure, you could search for all renormalizable field theories and try to do an exhaustive search.
00:23:11.820I'm just going to make a cautionary point.
00:23:14.020I think that the idea of asking AI to solve your problems with physics, which probably contains more leverage than any other discipline has ever had in terms of the power that can be wielded from simply understanding something.
00:23:30.100It's as if you haven't seen a single science fiction movie to prepare you.
00:23:35.060This is probably the dumbest consult I've ever heard in my life.
00:27:20.620Certainly in the middle of a public health emergency, right?
00:27:26.320And certain styles of conversation, certain participants that I thought was just never going to converge on a useful document to export to millions of people.
00:27:36.360So I felt it was irresponsible to have certain conversations, certain ways during the pandemic.
00:27:43.320There are certain other people who totally disagree with me on lots of controversial points who I will talk to just because I, you know, it's, there, there hasn't been any breach of ethics.
00:27:59.720No matter how much we disagree, they've always dealt with my side fairly or my beliefs fairly.
00:28:03.900Then there are people who have gratuitously misrepresented my beliefs, thinking they were going to be scoring some kind of points against me.
00:28:14.240And they were scoring points against me for their audience, right?
00:28:17.380And those are people I'm not inclined to talk to because I just don't, I don't want to reward that kind of behavior.
00:28:22.340I mean, it's certainly behavior that I have been fairly careful not to engage in myself.
00:28:28.780And whenever I, whenever I've done it inadvertently, I've apologized for it.
00:28:34.300You know, I never, I never feel like I need to straw man my opponent or much less lie about their views in order to argue against them.
00:28:42.340So, but there's been a lot of incoming of that sort toward me.
00:28:47.260So there's, there's some people who used to be friends who, yeah, I would not be inclined to talk to, but there are other people who, again, I'm not, I don't know what I don't know.
00:28:59.640But like there's, there are people who I disagree with a lot, but I'll talk to them.
00:29:05.480I mean, like, you know, Megyn Kelly is somebody who like our politics are not aligned, but she's, to my eye, she's always treated me fairly to a point that has been uncomfortable for her in front of her own audience, knowing what her audience wants.
00:29:20.740Certainly in the aftermath of the podcast we did and the clip that got exported to, you know, every, every mind in Trumpistan, you know, the way she dealt with that seemed totally fair and honest.
00:29:34.680And so, yeah, there's no, I've got no hesitation talking to her.
00:29:37.280And there's a lot of people on that list.
00:29:39.000And there's a short list of people who consciously created clickbait for their audience, very often with my name in the title.
00:29:47.880You know, Sam Harris just said something crazy.
00:29:50.940And then they've used that clip or some other clip, you know, even more ridiculous clips.
00:29:57.000There was one clip made by the same person who, where it seemed I was saying, or, you know, the audience was led to believe I was saying that I wished more kids died during COVID.
00:30:08.740So I could have been proven right in my, in my paranoid views about COVID.
00:30:14.100So if you're going to do that, of course, I'm not going to talk to you.
00:30:17.060And if you're going to, if you're going to dunk on, if you're going to amplify that and dunk on that, I'm not, I'm not inclined to talk to you.
00:30:22.120Sam, one question I have about that is, could you not, I didn't understand why you didn't try to do something with Brett that was closer to correspondence chess, where you had a right to consult with experts, given that you're not a biologist.
00:30:38.700And, or medical doctors, and the idea is that you don't have it live so that you're, you know, you get broadsided, but just decide we're going to have a go back and forth of, you know, 15 or 20 go rounds.
00:30:52.320And I'll be consulting people and I'll be consulting people and you can be consulting people.
00:30:58.700It seems to me that you didn't opt for an, a non-standard debate.
00:31:04.780Well, largely because of the opportunity cost, because of how much, you know, I would have viewed that probably as a, a month of work to do responsibly.
00:31:14.940And I see no reason to do it because your brother's disappearance down the, this particular rabbit hole is, is just, it's not something that I felt I needed to interact with.
00:31:29.580I mean, I was, it was, it was getting thrust in my face so much that I had to, I had to interact with it enough to just say, I had to kind of disavow it.
00:31:36.220But the fact that he was going to spend a hundred podcasts in a row worth of his energy on that topic didn't, shouldn't have meant that I needed to set in to be whatever you wanted.
00:31:48.420I mean, in other words, even if you didn't end up having a debate, at least if you did that, people would understand that you wanted to have the top line issues adjudicated.
00:32:02.440And I very much agree that you don't get into a fight or a debate with somebody who's totally unethical, right?
00:32:10.600Well, I just think, I mean, for me, I recently released a podcast, which I think you probably heard on this, like my post-mortem on COVID, you know, solo podcast.
00:32:22.140And for me, the, you know, the, the airplane analogy I use there covers the sort of the, the framing that works for me, which is, you know, there are moments where you want to really drill down.
00:32:36.880You want everyone to do their own research and sunlight is the best disinfectant and let's just talk about everything for as long as it takes.
00:32:42.960And there are moments when you really don't want to do that, where it's dysfunctional to do that, where other harms follow upon doing that.
00:32:52.420And, you know, the analogy for me that covers it is that it's like when you're getting on an airplane, you know, or much less when you're, when you're at 30,000 feet on an airplane, there are lots of things you don't want to talk about and debate.
00:33:05.040You don't want, you don't want someone to take a poll of the passengers and, you know, ask questions like, do we still trust the pilots or, or, you know, how do we know those, those engines were engineered correctly?
00:33:16.480And you don't want, you don't want someone pulling up an episode of the Joe Rogan podcast, which said, which has a engineer who says that he designed the engines on the plane that you're now on.
00:33:26.060And it was always just, it's supposed to be a concept engine and it's irresponsible that they're being flown and, and, and it's like, just how much energy do you want to give that when the reality of your situation is you have to actually land this plane safely, right?
00:33:41.500There's no alternative, but to do that, right?
00:33:44.900And so this engine, you actually have to rely on this engine right now.
00:33:48.700And what I, what I thought at the time, and I still think is that we were all essentially in a plane at 30,000 feet together.
00:34:00.020And we, we, we were having to figure out how to land that particular plane, given the engines we had.
00:34:05.720And we need, so we, you know, we needed a, we needed a CDC that we could trust.
00:34:22.120I agree with you that we needed a CDC, et cetera, but we didn't have one.
00:34:26.420Insofar as we didn't have that, that is something we need to deal with.
00:34:32.180What I, what I feared and fear is that what has happened is there's been such an erosion of trust in, in institutions and the layer of conversation we're having about, about this in the aftermath on social media is so dysfunctional.
00:34:51.020And so, and so, and so amplifying of mistrust, right.
00:34:54.600And misinformation and disinformation that we're just, we're in a very bad spot to reboot from.
00:35:15.980So I think he is a, you know, he's just running a conspiratorial operation that I think is, is producing a lot of errors of thinking on his part.
00:35:28.020Um, and that's why I felt like I didn't have to interact with it much, but is, is there a problem?
00:35:36.980Is he going to, is he going to detect real conspiracies and, and perverse incentives, uh, sooner than, than I will maybe because he's constantly looking for those things.
00:35:48.920Um, but I would agree that, you know, yeah, stepping back from the precipice of, of, you know, it's all bullshit all the time.
00:35:56.920All conspiracies are true all the time.
00:36:19.980And I didn't see us hashing it out in the middle of an emergency on podcasts with obviously weird people, like some of the people, your brother and, and, and Joe platformed.
00:37:05.200Uh, so, but so they, just to drill down on this, the reason why I'm sitting with you here is because I perceived you guys to be totally ethical in how you handle that moment.
00:37:44.940But Brett amplified, I forget this guy's name, but whoever, the guy who made that clip, and I think he made the other clip I was talking about.
00:37:54.720I don't even want to give this guy attention.
00:37:56.880He is a pure, I mean, whoever he is in reality, Twitter has made him a psychopath, right?
00:38:03.620And your brother locked arms with him just without caveat and amplified him as just this, just citizen journalist who has gone to school on all the important topics and found all the errors in my podcast.
00:38:19.780And those clips were just, it was just, it was a pure smear campaign, which your brother energized.
00:38:27.640I completely agree with you about this person.
00:38:29.500And so that's, I mean, that's where we, that's where I am, you know, there's no, I never did the analogous thing to your brother, and I wouldn't.
00:38:37.160And I'm not sure where your brother's head is now where he can rationalize what happened there.
00:38:42.080But he's buddies with a complete lunatic.
00:38:45.240And what was amazing, I mean, this is a much longer conversation about how weird social media has made everything, but, like, when that 20 megaton, you know, faux pas was going off in, you know, in your, very much in your world and blowing up your podcast, in my, like, literally nothing was happening in my world.
00:39:09.320And in the places I care about, nothing was happening.
00:39:12.060And yet, that was the first moment I could see how my interaction with Twitter was just giving me, you know, pure noise that was pretending to be signal, right?
00:39:24.100Now, this, and I, it's not that there was no signal there, and this is something you and I have talked about a lot, you know, offline, which is, you know, there's, I, I basically, based on how I've designed my life and how I've designed my,
00:39:37.400my business, I have the luxury of being, of not caring about certain things happening to me online.
00:39:45.020But this was a case where it was just, like, I was, my life was, like, air-gapped from just, like, a mushroom cloud, you know, and it was, it was just so enormous and so non-existent where I live that I just thought, okay, this is a, this is a hallucination machine, you know?
00:40:06.780And I've spent 12 years staring into it, and it's, it's not worth it.
00:40:14.580So it's, like, so the, the outcome, you know, the proximate cause of my getting off Twitter was the aftermath of, you know, having gone on your podcast.
00:40:21.240And it's been, you know, apart from the occasional feeling of, like, in this last week, being on the sidelines of a, of a necessary conversation, which when I look 15 minutes later, I realize, okay, this is still just a digital sewer that I don't need to be contributing to.
00:40:42.780I have other places to, to make noise, like, you know, on this podcast.
00:40:48.900It has been, like, I mean, as, you know, we were talking before we, we started rolling.
00:40:54.120It has just been, I'm embarrassed at what a upgrade of my life it's been not to be on Twitter for the last 10 months or whatever it's been.
00:41:02.740I mean, no, I mean, it's, it's completely inadvertent, but it's, it's like, it's, it's been such a gift to not be segmenting my life.
00:41:12.580If in, you know, dozens of times a day looking at, at the, at completely, I mean, it's, I mean, like, it's, it's like waking, it's like waking up from a dream where you just can't even figure out how you got that confused, you know, and, um, it's so, yeah, uh, yeah, thank you.
00:41:59.620I understand you have your concerns about the way Brett communicated about COVID.
00:42:04.000He's also a great person as a human being.
00:42:07.420He's, and I can tell you from personal experience because I've, I gave Brett a piece of very unhelpful information to him that I gave to lots of other people that would require him to take an ethical, but very difficult decision.
00:42:21.660And he was the only person out of dozens that did.
00:42:25.240So, I hope that one day there is a world where you're sitting around a table, you're sitting on a show, like, or wherever it is, that there is understanding and reconciliation.
00:42:38.320It may never happen and it's entirely up to you and Brett.
00:42:40.280Well, to be clear, I think, I think Brett is, I've always thought Brett was an extremely ethical person.
00:42:49.140I don't know how he got so turned around as to think that this jackass he's aligned with is a, that his ethics are well served by amplifying that kind of contribution to this conversation.
00:43:03.320I think that you're not, if I may, because I have the same problem you have with this person.
00:43:08.140But, but your brother, but strangely, your brother doesn't have the same problem with that, with that person.
00:43:13.420Well, I wasn't going to get to that, which is, I think that Brett went through a catastrophe over COVID where he tried to make simple points, things like vaccines change adaptive landscapes with respect to fitness computations.
00:43:33.300And to become, I watched the system say, oh, we have a problem.
00:43:40.360Somebody's disagreeing with the narrative.
00:43:43.360Our beautiful public health narrative is above your pay grade.
00:43:48.420The only way to get you out of this is to go after you as a human, to say you're, you're promoting junk science.
00:43:55.480You're a Charlotte and you're a grifter, et cetera, et cetera.
00:43:58.780And Brett found himself suddenly, you know, because he misstructured the point, in my opinion, like whatever his actual scientific points were, they were misstructured as medical advice over the internet at the time that there was a public health narrative.
00:44:13.720And even if he was exactly correct on every point, which I don't think he was, I knew that that was going to end in disaster by his structuring of it.
00:44:24.460And what you're watching is somebody trying to claw back their reputation after having the full force of the U.S. federal government find its way, you know, into the public sphere, as we saw in the Twitter files, that, you know, government is very keen that its master narratives not be taken down.
00:44:46.220And so when you see, you know, I don't know, is it the CDC talking about horse, you know, come on, you're not a horse, don't take horse paste.
00:44:57.460He probably felt that he had very few friends and allies who would fight shoulder to shoulder.
00:45:02.940And so in part, as the guy who popularized audience capture as something we all need to worry about, I can also tell you that isolation and lack of friendship is a huge problem.
00:45:15.560And one of the things that I've been really upset about is we have a very small number of people who are strong enough to try to think in public at the moment.
00:45:43.340And, you know, now you've got this super important thing that you should figure out a way of offering something so that if and when Brett declines to do your form of a structured debate, you're not the one who's denying them the opportunity.
00:46:21.580But it wasn't her song necessarily to do with as she saw fit because it was part of too many people's lives.
00:46:28.480And I believe that in part one of the things that we owe our world is that we work this shit out if we have the opportunity to work this shit out.
00:46:38.460And, you know, quite honestly, Brett has gone down a hole, in my opinion, because he's been forced to go down a hole.
00:46:46.560So if that's the question that you're asking, I think that the issue is isolation.
00:46:51.120And just to close it out, I made this very clear statement that if I find that any of my friends are guilty of murder, mayhem, rape, who knows what, as bad as it can be, I'm not going to be abandoning my friends.
00:47:06.900One, because isolated people are dangerous.
00:47:10.240It's not safe to have isolated people.
00:47:12.660So you need to have friends who keep showing up even when you're in prison.
00:47:16.560The other thing about it is that then it becomes very easy to get us to move away from each other.
00:47:22.200And, you know, the one thing, Sam, that I can tell you is that a lot of your friends on the sort of the right-hand side of whatever this milieu that we're a part of, it's pretty clear everybody wants to be in contact with you.
00:48:09.140It's just the quality of information we've been lied to from too many different sources.
00:48:13.100We don't have any institutions into which we can retreat.
00:48:15.500And I just, I think it would be a good idea for what's coming, given what we've just seen in the last week, to try to figure out how to get back.
00:48:26.580Yeah, I mean, not to air all of our dirty laundry in public, but to air some of it in public.
00:48:33.600I mean, all of the, there's not a general algorithm for this.
00:48:37.480It's just that this is dependent on the specifics of a relationship and the specifics of a person's behavior.
00:48:46.520And there are people who I still don't understand where their heads are at.
00:48:54.140And I can't follow them down the rabbit hole, but there's no, I don't perceive any interpersonal problem between me and that person.
00:49:04.020And, again, I don't know what I don't know.
00:49:07.560People are, again, they're captured by their own audience.
00:49:09.680They've got thousands of hours of audio that they're putting out there.
00:49:12.440And I don't know what they've said about me.
00:49:13.800But, for instance, I said something about our friend Majid on Josh Zepsis' podcast that I regretted because I sort of got walked into it.
00:49:25.880And I said, you know, like he was telling me how crazy Majid was.
00:49:28.500And, you know, I haven't, I mean, Majid's gotten very conspiratorial and it's all plandemic.
00:49:33.120And it's like I don't agree with any of it.
00:49:35.820But I said something, you know, however subtly disparaging of Majid's whole project.
00:49:43.920And the problem, the ethical problem was I had never personally reached, I had never had a personal communication with Majid trying to figure out where his head was at.
00:49:57.160I went on Majid's podcast and apologized to him, talked to him for an hour about a lot of stuff that I still don't agree with.
00:50:03.500You know, I can't explain where Majid's gone and it's kind of similar to where your brother went.
00:50:07.600But I do perceive a difference between people who, like they're, listen, if I have misrepresented anyone's position about anything to their reputational detriment, I am just, I apologize for it.
00:50:32.080I mean, like Glenn Greenwald, who's just, you know, does not have an ethical bone in his body, though every bone is in fact sanctimonious and pretending to be ethical.
00:50:41.940This is a guy who, when I was 10% wrong about whatever his stated view was, I apologized publicly on my podcast, right, where every word out of his mouth about me from him is a lie or a half-truth calculated to paint me as a dangerous maniac.
00:50:57.860So it's like, you know, it's something that all I can do is be careful and honest on my side.
00:51:07.380But I have to notice when people, even some former friends, are treating me with zero integrity and they see absolutely nothing, either they think it's a symmetrical relationship, like we both got this sort of bad and let's just bury the hatchet, but they're not seeing what they did.
00:51:27.120So in the absence of Brett's attack poodle, like if the attack poodle went away?
00:51:34.000His endorsement of the attack poodle went away, right?