TRIGGERnometry - Trump & The Intellectual Dark Web - Sam Harris X Eric Weinstein

Episode Date: November 4, 2023

As you may have seen, we were recently joined by Sam and Eric for a discussion about current events in the Middle East. This video 👆 was initially only available as bonus content, however, our community believed that it should be made freely available to all. Sam Harris is an American neuroscientist, author, and podcast host. A central voice in the New Atheism movement, he is a well-known critic of religious ideology. Eric Weinstein is a mathematical physicist, public thinker and host of the podcast ‘The Portal’. SPONSORED BY GiveSendGo - Go to https://www.GiveSendGo.com/ to check out a better alternative to crowdfunding. Support the people who support freedom! Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube:  @xentricapc   Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Adelante. So what you're saying is you're pro-Trump's. Yeah, exactly. Build the wall. Build the wall. Exactly. You have recently made the decision not to speak to some people who disagree with you.

Why is that? I think Brett is one. Not because they disagree with me, but because I think they've behaved unethically. I've always thought Brett was an extremely ethical person. I don't know how he got so turned around. Hey guys, Trigonometry needs your help. We took a big risk creating the show, and for us to keep doing the incredible work that you all love, we need your support. That's the only way we're going to stay independent.

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We'll take the measure of your audience's mind here. Would Hamas have attacked Israel if Trump had been in power? Uh, I have no reason to think not. I mean, in some ways, Trump looked like a more reliable ally, maybe. But look at the speeches Biden and Trump gave in the aftermath of this thing. I mean, there's... I haven't seen them. Oh, I mean, Biden's, I mean, correcting for, you know, the evidence of, you know,

geriatric neurological problems, Biden's speech was just a full... embrace of our allyship with Israel. And Trump's was this kind of deranged, self-focused criticism of Netanyahu. And, I mean, it was just, it was all about Trump. I mean, it's, I mean, that is on brand. Yeah, no, but 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. And also, he worked very hard on the Abraham.

Accords, which were taking the Middle East, some people would argue, towards a healthier place. Yeah. And I would agree with that part, the Abraham Accords. I think it's just a non-factor for me. I think this is going to happen anyway. This will continue to happen. It was unsurprising that it happened. The details of its happening were profoundly surprising given what we thought the IDF was capable of.

what was unlikely to, you know, the specifics were surprising. But 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. It's not a problem we're going to solve. We need two billion Muslims to figure out how to deal with their problem of homegrown extremism in 100 countries. Yes, I hear you. I think the source, sorry to needle this, but I think it's important to flesh out. I think the source of this question,

I may be hallucinating, is you were vehemently anti-Trump. And I guess what I think people are asking is, were you not wrong about that? Because there's so many other liabilities with Trump. I mean, in fact, it's the similarity to Trump and Trumpism that did much to shatter

Israeli society and seemingly soften it up for this attack, right? 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, 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. You know, the similarities there are awful. And insofar as we have a Trump and Trumpism has a similar effect on our own society, it represents the same kind of opportunity cost. I 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 Trump. and the counter reaction from the left. I mean, it's just a massive opportunity cost.

So, no, I think 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? I mean, so that's a, there's no, in my view, there's absolutely no defense of having an indefensible border. We should know who's coming into the country.

We should let the people in, we want in. We should keep the people out. we want to keep out. We should have obviously a sane and compassionate policy with respect to refugees. Build the wall. If the wall is the best way to secure that border, then build that wall, right? So 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. So we need other people, even where Trump is right, we need other people quarterbacking those specific decisions.

So what you're saying is you're pro-Trump's. Yeah, exactly. Bill the wall. Bill the wall, exactly. Linz 1, we've touched on this, but they ask, what is Eric's take on the deluge, on the deluge of pro Hamas protests after the most recent attack in Western countries? Well, I tried to talk about, I think, when I was on Rogan recently, maybe on your show, I don't remember. There's been a huge uptick in open anti-Semitism, and it's right on schedule. I mean, I think that if you are monitoring what I'm monitoring, you're not that surprised by it.

You just, you know, what we knew is that it's to the bone. And so when people talk about, you know, black and brown bodies or, you know, I don't feel safe. There was a spate of postings, but I don't feel safe as a Muslim. You're like, oh, cut it out. It's a radical anti-Semitic ideology of revolution, and it's on schedule. And it's terrible that we've gotten here. But 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. They'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 filiating themselves with. And hopefully, if you've seen a charred body or severed limbs or shot up Porta Potty's, you're making an intelligent decision about what really matters to you and if you think

you know in the occupation free Palestine go paragliders you're probably really deep in it I you know I hope that deprogramming exists for you I hope that you really think about whether you want to sanction rape torture and message killing and And if that's your thing, then I guess, well, you know where you are. John 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? I think he would make exactly what we have all made of it, and it would be a lot of fun to hear him talk about it.

But I don't think it would be any daylight between him and us on that point. I don't imagine. But he'd be funnier and more cutting at the same time. It would be a lot of fun, yeah. Yeah. World by Wolf asks Eric, pick your dream president and VP for our times. Well, it's really hard because I think that the current political landscape deforms everyone who enters this. I've watched this with the pressures put on Tulsi, Bernie, and, uh, the pressure.

RFK Jr. We 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. And so we haven't had that. 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. But I haven't seen anyone with the ability to run this gauntlet who's viable. And so I just don't think that we have a situation in which anyone is speaking in real terms.

I'm sorry to say it. I can't see a single voice on the viable political landscape that excites me. And the last thing I was excited about was Obama won. And clearly I ended up buying a campaign that governed in a very different form than the one I expected. Big Bob 86 says, first of all, Sam, I'd like to be. I'd like to thank you, as I've been quite a fan of yours over the years. I watched many of your discussions and debates and read and listened to a number of your books and audiobooks. My question is this.

Has the change from religious values underpinning our society to more secular values actually panned out the way you thought or hoped I would? No, although I'm not sure the loss of religious subscription is the reason. I'm sorry, what I hear in that question is that the moment you lose religious belief, something, some religion-shaped object is going to fill that void. And I don't actually think that's true, but... You don't? No.

You don't see whokenness as a kind of replacement religion? No, I mean, I think that's, it's... So it has religious characteristics, right? So it is, but first of all, some of the people who are woke are also religious, obviously. I mean, it's not a perfect substitute. But I think, I mean, it's hard to know what to make of the data, and I just know that I'm the existence proof,

and many people I know are the existence proof that is possible to lose your belief in Santa Claus and not replace it with something that does all the work Santa Claus did the day before. So you can find your meaning, and your aspiration and your motivation in other ways that run by a different logic. You can, but as we were talking about, people are the same. But basically everyone I spend a lot of time with Ken, right?

Okay. Would you agree with me that your experience and the experience of your highly selected friendship group, I imagine, is not necessarily representative of the average person? It's true, but so then we just have to admit what we're saying, which is, which is, which rarely gets done, which is, I don't need these crazy ideas. You don't need these crazy ideas, but the morons over there are not going to figure out how to have meaningful lines. So you've deliberately loaded it with emotion. So let's take the emotion out.

But that's the subtext that's being claimed. No, not necessarily. It could be that different people because of many, many different things. genetics, cultural values, their material circumstances, the locus of control over their own lives, right, which as you get wealthier and more powerful and influential changes, some people are able to deal with the things that religion traditionally has fulfilled, fear of death, meaning, purpose, etc.

That 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. some people are able to get it from things other than religion but 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 who for whatever reason they're not predisposed to that way of thinking who have a greater fear of death than you do

for those people a set of traditional beliefs that center around something that you and I might agree isn't entirely true or is entirely untrue you might say is valuable in a way that it is not for you and your friends Well, so what I will admit is that there are certain cases where irrational dogmas cause people to behave better than they otherwise would. There 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 that are more valid and scalable and have more integrity. Right? So it's possible to go to sub-Saharan Africa and work. work in a refugee camp because you believe the creator of the universe wants you to do it and you're saving souls for Christ. But it's also possible to realize that you just actually care about a famine in Somalia or Ethiopia and you want to work with doctors without borders or whatever and you're doing that actually based on caring about human suffering in a global sense. So

one code is much better to be running on your brain than the other and doesn't come with the attendant downside of suddenly throwing this moral error of like Now we're Catholics in sub-Saharan Africa, and we're teaching the sinfulness of condom use, even when people are dying from AIDS, and condoms is the only way to prevent them from dying from AIDS, etc. So there are better reasons to be good than religion tends to provide, but I would grant you that religion does provide those reasons for some people some of the time.

My problem with religion is it gets so much wrong that leads to unnecessary conflict and division and an opportunity cost in our society, is certainly in the 21st century, with all the opportunities in front of us. And it doesn't get the core parts right that I would agree still our core, like what are our real spiritual opportunities?

How just how good could human consciousness be moment to moment? How good could human life be moment to moment? And for that, I do think there is there are these core experiences at the heart of religion that gave rise to our religions, perhaps some more than others. I mean, again, our religions are different. But I do think we need something like

modern mysteries of elusis where, I mean, I'm very mindful of the errors we made in the 60s around psychedelics, but I'm very hopeful that a renaissance of, in research and interest in psychedelics could allow us to make, to put certain experiences, certain transformative experiences and states of consciousness in reach for virtually everyone.

And we need a cultural context in which to absorb those epiphanies and talk about them that doesn't make reference to our religious sectarianism or at least doesn't make sectarian reference to our legacy religions. If you want to make eclectic, you know, small-sea Catholic reference to, you know, just the storehouse of religious literature,

that's great. You know, there's no problem taking the good parts, even from the Quran, to make sense of those experiences. But we just, real religious sectarianism, I think, has to be a deal-breaker at this point. I mean, just can't, it's just too costly. So I think it's good to get rid of it

insofar as we are getting rid of it in the West. That's good. And the fact that these minor monstrosities of things like wokeness and social justice, moral panics, even if they're drawing energy from the advent of more atheism and more secularism, I think it's a price we should. pay and we need to combat those forms of irrationality as well.

So I spent a lot, in recent years I've spent a lot more time complaining about wokeness than I've, and, you know, leftist moral panics than I have organized religion. And it's because it's really, in my immediate purview, it's been more costly, you know. I mean, it's been vitiating our institutions. Eric, what would you prefer? Physics or music? I have two questions. Well, geez, there's a tiny amount of physics that's more beautiful than all music.

Okay. So I'm going to go with that. Okay, so Mark Greg Sputnik asks, what are the fields away from quantum gravity that you feel are the most important paths for physicists to pursue? The standard model of particle theory was revealed to be geometric. in the mid-1970s and has been made almost perfectly geometric by the end of the 80s.

The right thing to do is to ask why we have three generations of fundamental fermions with 16 particles per generation with the crazy Higgs sector with a quardic potential. The accidents, that is, of why this particular set of objects

is, without question in my mind, the most potent question in all of physics, and we abandoned it more or less in 1983 when we switched to saying we're not looking for a unified theory, we're looking to quantize gravity. And so we reinterpreted, and in my opinion, clearly misinterpreted what the charge of physics was, and the correct thing to do is to ask why this particular universe that we see ourselves confronting, rather than following the path to say, what is the general nature of quantum field theory? Because quantum field theory was recently revealed, like linear algebra and calculus before it, to not have anything particularly

to do with physics. You can't do physics without it, but it turns out that it's a general framework that governs many more things that have nothing to do with the physical world in which we live. And so getting out of that quantum field theory monomania and getting out of quantum gravity monomania and substituting it with a question of why this particular beautiful universe is the one in which we live. Charles C. Verbal says, does Sam feel the world is at its closest to World War III? It has been since World War II. I would defer to the experts who have really been watching this on that.

I think it's still, I mean, you know, last week, notwithstanding, I think it's still the opinion of most qualified people that the Cuban missile crisis was the closest moment. But I'm not saying we're in a good spot. either. It's, I think it's our number, it should be our number one existential concern, followed closely by a pandemic, engineered or otherwise. So, Joe asks, Eric, are there any fundamental questions in physics which AI could help resolve? Sure. You could search for all renormalizable field theories and try to do an exhaustive search.

I'm just going to make a cautionary point. I 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, it's as if you haven't seen a single science fiction movie to prepare you. This is probably the dumbest console I've ever heard in my life. I cannot figure out what we're doing. I actually don't understand that last point.

You're saying asking AI to do discoveries in physics is so dangerous we shouldn't be doing that? Yes. I think that these are the last AIs that you could consider, you know, the difference between chat GPT and one of the chain GPT or where you have it create the prompts to give you the next, you're playing around with,

things that you don't understand. Before the attention is all you need paper, you could make the case that maybe AI is very, very distant. I was listening to Sam in my first meeting. The first day I met Sam, we did a podcast. And Sam's talking about AI and you can tell where this is going. He didn't have a time frame. I don't think anybody really understood the large language model revolution and the transformer architecture. And I think you're now so close to something that could totally surprise you, particularly with emergent behavior where an AI will learn Bengali because it needs to without being told you should learn Bengali now. I would be very careful about the idea that we're going to rely on AI to advance our knowledge of physics. We'll be back with Sam and Eric in a minute,

but first, we want to take a moment to talk about our partners, GivesendGo. Givesendgo. Givesendgo is a leading crowdfunding website where thousands of people around the world raise funds for business ventures, medical expenses, personal needs, non-profits, churches and funeral costs. On GiveSend Go, you can raise money for whatever you need. We've met the people at GiveSend Go and we can tell you that they're absolutely aligned with trigonometry on our approach to free speech. They don't just talk the talk, they walk the walk, unlike other big tech companies. They like us, believe that with openness and honesty will create more understanding and ultimately more harmony in the world. GiveSandGo is absolutely free to use. With other crowdfunding sites, you'll pay between 5% and 10% of the

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alluding to the very same point I'll fight you naked says you have recently made the decision not to speak to some people who disagree with you why is that I'm not sure who

he might be thinking of so there are people who I would not be inclined to talk to I think Brett is one of them let's not because they disagree with me but because I think they've behaved unethically It's like there's

No, that if you're thinking of your brother, that's conflating two things. There are topics, there are topics that I think it was irresponsible to debate via podcast. Certainly in the middle of a public health emergency, right?

And certain styles of conversation, certain participants that I thought was just never going to converge on use, useful document to export to millions of people. So I felt it was irresponsible to have certain conversations, certain ways during the pandemic. There 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 hasn't been any breach of ethics. No matter how much we disagree, they've always dealt with my side

fairly or my beliefs fairly. Then there are people who have gratuitously misrepresented my beliefs, thinking they were going to be scoring some kind of points against me. And they were scoring points against me for their audience, right? And 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. I mean, it's certainly behavior that I have been fairly careful not to engage in myself. And whenever I've done it inadvertently, I've apologized for it. You know, I never feel like I need to straw man my opponent or much less lie about their views in order to argue against them.

So, but there's been a lot of incoming of that sort toward me. So 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, but like there's people who I disagree with a lot, but I'll talk to them. I mean, like, you know, Megan 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, certainly in the aftermath of the podcast we did and the clip that got exported to, you know, every mind in Trumpistan. You know, the way she dealt with that seemed totally fair and honest.

And so, yeah, I've got no hesitation talking to her. And there's a lot of people on that list. And there's a short list of people who consciously created clickbait for their audience, very often with my name in the title. You know, Sam Harris just said something crazy. And then they've used that clip or some other clip, you know, even more ridiculous clips.

There was one clip made by the same person where it seemed I was saying, or the audience was led to believe I was saying that I wished more kids died during COVID, so I could have been proven right in my paranoid views about COVID. So if you're going to do that, of course I'm not going to talk to you. And if you're going to dunk on, if you're going to amplify that and dunk on that, I'm not inclined to talk to you. 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 chest,

where you had a right to consult with experts given that you're not a biologist 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. And I'll be consulting people and you can be consulting people. let's have the best version of that. It seems to me that you didn't opt for a non-standard debate. Well, largely because of the opportunity cost, because of how much, you know,

I would have viewed that probably as a month of work to do responsibly. And I see no reason to do it because your brother's disappearance down this particular rabbit hole is just, It's not something that I felt I needed to interact with. I mean, it was getting thrust in my face so much that I had to interact with it enough to just say, I had to kind of disavow it. But the fact that he was going to spend a hundred podcasts

in a row worth of his energy on that topic shouldn't have meant that I needed to spend. Could have set in to be whatever you wanted. I 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. And I very much agree that you don't get into a fight or a debate with somebody who's totally unethical, right, because it's too dangerous.

Well, I just think, I mean, for me, I recently released a podcast, which I think you probably heard, like my post-mortem on COVID, you know, a solo podcast. And for me, the airplane analogy I use there covers the sort of the framing that works for me, which is, you know, there are moments where you want to really drill down. You 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. And 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. And, 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 at 30,000 feet on an airplane, there are lots of things you don't want to talk about and debate. You 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 engines were engineered correctly?

And you don't want, you don't want someone pulling up an episode of the Joe Rogan podcast, which had, which has. as an engineer who says that he designed the engines on the plane that you're now on, and it was always just supposed to be a concept engine, and it's irresponsible that they're being flown. 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? There's no alternative but to do that, right? And so this engine, you actually have to rely on this engine right now.

And what I thought at the time, and I still think, is that we were all essentially in a plane at 30,000 feet together. And we were having to figure out how to land that particular plane, given the engines we had. And we need, so we needed a CDC that we could trust. We needed an FDA that we could trust. We needed to trust the government messaging with respect to what was actually happening in the world. Well, Sam, those are two very different points. No, no. I agree with you that we needed a CDC and et cetera, but we didn't have one.

Insofar as we didn't have that, that is something we need to deal with. What I feared and fear is that what has happened is there's been such an erosion of trust in institutions. and the layer of conversation we're having about this in the aftermath on social media is so dysfunctional and so amplifying of mistrust and misinformation and disinformation that we're just, we're in a very bad spot to reboot from. So, yes, I mean, absolutely we have to fix our institutions. Are they as bad as your brother thinks so? they are? No way. Absolutely not. Right? So I think he is a, you know, he's just running a

conspiratorial operation that I think is producing a lot of errors of thinking on his part. And that's why I felt like I didn't have to interact with it much. But is there a problem? Is he right about some things? Of course. Is he going to, is he going to detect real conspiracies and perverse incentives sooner than I will, maybe, because he's constantly looking for those things. But I would agree that, you know,

stepping back from the precipice of, you know, it's all bullshit all the time. All conspiracies are true all the time. Everyone's evil. Everyone's diversely incentivizing. No, no, I'm just, that's the cartoon version. Stepping way back from there, yes, we have to, we have to

align incentives. We need a drug discovery regime that actually discovers good drugs and doesn't release bad ones. We need all that. And 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 Joe platformed. I didn't see that as the method. I understand. And we actually said we would finish now.

So we'll finish. All I'll say from my perspective is that I think that heated moment is now over. And I always hate good people disagreeing and falling out. I hated what happened. I'll say this in front. This is true of both me and Francis. We hated what happened with you after the interview with us. And I said this to you in an email.

The person who clipped that is not a good person. Right. But so 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.

And it was a conflict... I mean, that moment worked the massive advantage of your podcast. I mean, it brought immense attention to your podcast at the absolute reputational cost of me right of center.

So like a right of center that was a complete just witch burning of me but I saw the way you guys handled it and I have no problem with you guys. and have never had a problem with you guys.

So that's why we're talking. But 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. Is it Jack Posobico? No. No, it's... I don't even want to give this guy attention.

He's a pure, I mean, whoever he is in reality, Twitter has made him a psychopath, right? And your brother locked arms with him just without caviarism. 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. And those clips were just, it was a pure smear campaign. Which your brother energized. I completely agree with you about this person.

So that's, I mean, that's where we, that's where I'm, you know, there's no, I never did the analogous thing to your brother and I wouldn't. and I'm not sure where your brother's head is now where he can rationalize what happened there. But he's buddies with a complete lunatic. And what was amazing, I mean, this is a much longer conversation about how weird social media has made everything. But when that 20 megaton, you know, faux pa

was going off in, you know, very much in your world and blowing up your podcast, in my, like literally nothing was happening in my world and in the places I care about nothing was happening and yet that was the first moment I could see how

my interaction with Twitter was just giving me pure noise that was pretending to be signal right now this and I it's not that there was no signal there and this is something you and I have talked about a lot offline which is

you know there's I basically based on how I've designed my life and how I've designed my business, I have the luxury of not caring about certain things happening to me online. But this was a case where it was just like, my life was air-gapped from just like a mushroom cloud.

And it was just so enormous and so non-existent where I live that I just thought, okay, this is a hallucination machine. And I've spent 12 years staring into it. And it's not worth it. So the outcome, the proximate cause of my getting off Twitter was the aftermath of having gone on your podcast. And it's been, you know, apart from the occasional feeling of,

like in this last week, being on the sidelines of a necessary conversation, which when I look 15 minutes later, I realized, This is still just a digital sewer that I don't need to be contributing to. I have other places to make noise like, you know, on this podcast. It has been like, I mean, as, you know, we were talking before we started rolling. It 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. You're welcome. I mean, no, I mean, it's completely inadvertent, but it's like it's been such a gift.

to not be segmenting my life in, you know, dozens of times a day looking at the, at completely, I mean, it's, I mean, like, it's like waking, it's like waking up from a dream where you just can't even figure out how you've got that confused, you know, and it's so, yeah, yeah, thank you. You gave me meditation. Thank you. Thank you for the absolute chaos you dropped into my life. You gave me meditation. and now I got you off Twitter. Yeah.

Yeah. And it remains to be seen, which is a bigger influence because it was enormous. All I wanted to say, Sam, is I think it was a very heated moment. The way people talk, especially online,

encourages fighting, encourages misunderstanding, miscommunication, etc. I think you're a great person. I understand you have your concerns about the way Brett communicated about COVID. He's also a great person as a human being.

And I can tell you from personal experience because 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 and he was the only person out of dozens that did. So I hope that one day there is a world where you're sitting around a table, you're sitting on a show like wherever it is, that there is understanding and reconciliation.

I really hope for that. That's all I'm saying. I may never happen and it's entirely up to you. Well, to be clear, I think Brett is, I've always thought Brett was an extremely ethical person. I 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. I think that you're not, if I may, because I have the same problem you have with this person. But strangely your brother doesn't have the same problem with that person.

Well, I was 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. That is a non-controversial point. and to become, I watched the system say, oh, we have a problem, somebody's disagreeing with the narrative. Our beautiful public health narrative is above your pay grade. The only way to get you out of this is to go after you as a human,

to say you're promoting junk science, you're a Charlotte and you're a grifter, et cetera, et cetera. And Brett found himself suddenly, you know, Because he mistructured 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. And 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. It did end in disaster. And 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 it's master narratives not be taken down. And 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.

He probably felt that he had very few friends and allies who would fight shoulder to shoulder. And so, in part, as the guy who popularized audience capture as is something we all need to worry about, I can also tell you that isolation and lack of friendship is a huge problem. And 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. And we can't afford this infighting. And I personally think that, you know, I've said to Brett, Heather should never have gone after you for Trump derangements syndrome.

Brett should never have joined in. You shouldn't have returned fire, but you did. He did, whatever. That's the beginning of this thing. And, 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. opportunity. I'll just be very clear about it. There was a point where Cher re-recorded the song,

I've got you, babe, with Beavis and Butthead. And she was so angry at Sunny Bono that she stuck it to Sonny Bono in the re-recording of that song. The only problem is that that song was many people's wedding songs. That was people's song where they got together and they got engaged. Who knows what. It wasn't her song necessarily to do with as she saw fit because it was part of too many people's lives. And 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. And, you know, quite honestly, Brett has gone down a hole, in my opinion, because he's been forced to go down a hole. So if that's the question that you're asking, I think that the issue is isolation. And 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. And why do I make that statement? One, because isolated people are dangerous. We don't, it's not safe to have isolated people. So you need to have friends who keep showing up even when you're in prison. The other thing about it is, is that then it becomes very easy to get us to move away from each other. And, you know, the one thing, Sam, that I can tell you is, is that a lot of your friends on the sort of the right-hand side of whatever the milieu that we're a part of, it's pretty clear everybody wants to be in contact with you. They want a better relationship.

Everybody says, I miss Sam. And whatever confusions they have, you can probably find that people want to figure this out. I mean, I think people view you as a very singular and important voice. And I think it's a mistake to have all this integrity where we stop speaking to friends because they're all now beyond the pale. This time has been so confusing that everybody has made terrible, terrible mistakes. And the best of us have made fewer mistakes than others. But nobody has gotten away, Scott Free. It's just the quality of information we've been lied to from too many different sources. We don't have any institutions into which we can retreat.

And 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. Yeah, I mean, not to air all of our dirty laundry in public, but to air some of it in public. I mean, there's not a general algorithm for this. It's just that this is dependent on the specifics of a relationship and the specifics of a person's behavior. And there are people who,

I still don't understand where their heads are at, and 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. And again, I don't know what I don't know. People are, again, they're captured by their own audience. They've got thousands of hours of audio that they're putting out there, and I don't know what they've said about me.

But, for instance, I said something about our friend, on Josh Depp's podcast that I regretted because I just sort of got walked into it and I said you know like he was telling me how crazy Majid was and you know I haven't fun I mean Majid's gotten very conspiratorial and it's all plannedemic and it's all like I I don't agree with any of it but I said something you know however subtly disparaging of Majid's whole project and the problem the ethical problem was I had never personally reach, I had never had a personal communication with Majid trying to figure out where his head was at. So yeah, so I apologized to Majit. I went on Majd's podcast and apologized to him, talked to him for an hour about a lot of stuff that I still don't agree with. You know, I can't explain where Majd's gone and it's kind of similar to where your brother went. But I do perceive a difference between people who like they're, listen, if I have, if I, if I have misrepresented anyone's position about anything to their reputational detriment, I am just,

I apologize for it. And I do it with truly bad actors. I 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. This is a guy who went, when I was 10% wrong about whatever his stated view was, I apologize 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. So it's like, you know, it's something that all I can do is be careful and honest on my side,

but I have to notice when people, even some former friends, are treating me with, you know, 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.

So in the absence of Brett's attack poodle, like the attack poodle went away? His endorsement of the attack poodle went away. I don't care about the poodle. I care about what he did with that. Totally different situation. Interesting. Totally different.

Okay. I'm glad we had this conversation. I respect you both immensely and Brett. I don't agree with everything any of you say a lot of the time. Right, that's how we are. We're human beings. So I really hope there's a world in which that particular thing gets patched up and lots of other things get patched up. The pandemic was it sent everybody fucking mental.

It just did. We have to accept that. Everybody in some way or another. I hope we can get through it. I thank you both for coming, for having this conversation. We appreciate you both. Yeah, thank you, guys. And let's hope this one goes viral for the right reasons.

Yeah, yeah. Inshallah. Wait for the clips. Yeah. Thanks, guys. Thank you, guys.