#468 — More From Sam: Gratitude, Bad Conversations, Conspiracy Addiction, Waffle House Teleportation, and More

You're listening to Making Sense With Sam Harris. This is the free version of the podcast, so you'll only hear the first part of today's conversation. If you want the full episode and every episode, you can subscribe at samherris.org. There are no ads on this show, it runs entirely on subscriber support. If you enjoy what we're doing here and find it valuable, please consider subscribing today. Welcome back to another episode of More From Sam. Once again, we are taping this live in front of subscribers where anything goes. We've had them submit questions in advance of the show and I will try to get to as many of those as possible. And then we've asked them to provide any follow-ups using the chat feature so that Sam can address their feedback in real time. This worked really well last week or last episode I should say and it's very helpful to have a bunch of smart people feeding me lines. So please keep those comments coming. Alright, before we get to our first topic, I just want to give a quick rundown of the guests. You'll be recording with on the podcast over the next few weeks. We have Tristan Harris, Lloyd Blankfine, Rahm Emanuel, Francis Spooka Yamma, Ben Shapiro, Michael Polin, and Siddharth Immokrji. That's just April. So we're a lot coming up. Yes, so for anyone who want more content from you, get a lot coming up. So, and I'm hopeful that you'll have another essay for us soon. Nobody does them quite like you do and I'm certain the audience agrees with me. Alright, let's get to our first topic. We're going to get your updated thoughts on Iran, AI and other concerns. The first, a lot of people feel overwhelmed by many things these days, including the pace of change and the fear of being left behind in an increasingly AI-driven world. Yet, even with some legitimate fears, there's still so much to be grateful for, but it feels like no matter how much better things get, things feel worse, maybe you could remind us what we still have to be grateful for and how to best navigate this moment. Hmm. Well, I think it's just useful to ask yourself the question. But even if your job in some sense is to pay attention to risk or the downside of things or to criticize bad, I mean, I'm just thinking, you know, personally, how I navigate this. I spend a lot of time thinking about what's wrong and sort of the needless own goals we score on ourselves as a society. All of that can be depressing, but the filter I use to do that is to ask myself, is it, how unhappy do I have to be in the meantime? Is it, is my being unhappy contributing anything useful? You know, on the side of my own motivation to do any of this work or my ability to communicate well about it or I mean, is it useful? And almost always the answer is no, right? So like, there really is potentially a radical disjunction between even paying attention to scary and depressing things and being scared and depressed in one's life moment to moment. I mean, I just think that that second piece isn't actually necessary. I'm not saying there's never bleed through, but it's, there can be surprisingly little when you reflect on just how lucky you are moment to moment even with all the things you might be concerned about. So, and obviously there are many people whose jobs are nothing like mine and they, they can withdraw their attention from current events and from, you know, things like existential risk and they can do it knowing that for the most part, they can't do anything about those things, right? They don't have a job that requires them to be up to the minute on whatever it is, you know, pandemic risk, you know, or nuclear proliferation or any other sort of tamically as it's hanging over our heads. There is no good reason to simply become morbid in the way you pay attention to the world, right? I mean, it's just not, it's not useful, right? And so, I really think all only mindfulness gives you the capacity to make these choices moment to moment. I mean, if you really, and if you don't know what I mean by mindfulness, then there's really nothing, there's no, there's no foothold to grab there. I mean, you really just have to learn something about it. But if you can notice the moment to moment consequences of paying attention to things and and just how you use your attention being consequential, it allows you to decide, you know, to kind of wisely curate the contents of your own consciousness and withdraw your attention from things when that, when your attention on them serves no good purpose. And I don't know, just kind of break the addiction of being unhappy in the usual ways, right? And many of us get sort of stuck in the rut of conforming to various patterns of attention. And you can just decide to break those habits. So yeah, obviously you can think in the stoical vein of all the people in the world whose prayers would be answered if they could simply be in your exact situation right now. I mean, think of all the bad things that haven't happened to you that if they had, you know, what you'd pay just to get back to where you are right now. I mean, those are useful reflections, but, you know, it is just in fact true that life is very, very good for so many of us. And it's very easy not to be aware of that moment to moment. So how do you help people navigate the anxiety around their jobs if they think that their jobs are going to be going away? I mean, so many people are talking about right now. Is it going to be months? Is it going to be weeks? Maybe a little bit longer before there was my job. And if you're looking out there looking for a job right now, if you're a young kid out of college, it's great if you have expertise and good taste because AI sort of plays like this infinite board room for you of experts. But if you don't have the experience and the higher skilled people aren't going to hire you, the anxiety is real. I mean, how does mindfulness help those people who are looking to. Well, so specifically on that point, I mean, I think I don't think you can boycott AI at this point. I mean, I just, I think the right thing to do is figure out how to use it in beneficial ways, you know, for your career and for your personal life. I just think it's. I mean, some people can ignore it, but for the most part, certainly if you're in any kind of job or hoping to be in a job that focuses on information. And I mean, if it's a job, you can do this at any point of desk. I think AI needs to become your friend, leaving aside all of the other issues we might have about it and all the other concerns about alignment and all of that. I think in the limit, when we start to see real. The real evaporation of jobs because of how good AI is getting, we as a society are going to have to figure out how to navigate that. And that's. That I think is probably coming sooner than many people expect. I think it is definitely coming. Many people expect that it's not coming. It's just going to make. You know, AI is just going to create a bunch of new jobs that we don't have names for yet. And really, there will be no radical displacement. I think that's just happy talk. But there are people who. There are smart people who believe that by analogy to previous breakthroughs and technology. But I do think. I think we as a society are going to have to figure out how to absorb productivity gains that don't ultimately entail people becoming more productive. Right? I mean, so that the AI starts doing work that people are doing now and there's job cancellation. I think that's coming. People can't solve that by themselves, though, really. I mean, once it comes to any kind of scale, the society has to solve it. I get that, but I'm talking about the delta between where the shit gets bad and before it gets better. When people like you say, "Make AI your friend," that's great because you have good taste and expertise, so you can tell AI what you want. But if you're somebody on the other end of that and you're somebody whose job it is to do admin or coordination or some of the other tasks if you're a paralegal or even a junior lawyer or any of the other examples, again, the anxiety is real. How does mindfulness help here? How do people navigate it? Because, I mean, again, I understand what you're saying is so much of it. It's in our heads. But there is a reality that this is. Mindfulness helps with everything because in each moment, there's either something for you to do or there isn't. If there is something for you to do, well, then you just do that thing. I mean, again, this applies even in emergencies. The house is on fire and you now need to get your kids out to safety. You have to escape. So, actions required and you don't need to suffer over performing that action. You just have to do the thing. If there's nothing you can do to change your situation or to change the risk you're confronting, well, then your misery is adding nothing to that occasion either. In either case, your misery is extra. Now, this can be a high bar to clear for people who don't have a mindfulness practice. But once you do, you can actually differentiate these components to your engagement with your life moment to moment. You can have a highly energized, motivated, even a drenalized experience that isn't a miserable one. You can be responding to an emergency and not be miserable. You can be making decisions over a longer time horizon that entail a lot that are scary decisions. It's like you could say, "Okay, now I need a surgery." It's in two weeks. I'm going to have a surgery, which I'm anxious about. All things considered, it is just the right decision. Now, the surgery is on the calendar and now I've got this thing looming. Now, the question is, over the next 14 days, how much time are you going to spend being miserable because you're anxious about the surgery? All of those moments are discretionary once you know how to be mindful. Once you've decided what you have to do, there really is no more to think about. Really, right? Now, you will helplessly be knocked around by your thoughts, but that's where mindfulness comes in. If you don't have a mindfulness practice, you are going to be the mere hostage of those thoughts. You'll be as anxious and as fearful and as worried and as sleepless as you'll be because your mind is completely out of control for the next two weeks. There simply is no alternative to mental training once you get into a situation like that. The time to develop a mindfulness practice is before you really need it, not when you're in the middle of that mail stream. But it really, I mean, it is there that this is a capacity you can develop and it really does provide relief. Every time you find yourself suffering, you can recognize that you're thinking, "What without noticing that you're thinking and then wake up from that dream. And it doesn't change the fact that you still might have to have a surgery in two weeks, right? But again, all of the suffering that precedes it is unnecessary and the same will be true afterwards, right? Again, you're just gonna be in the company of your thoughts, 99% of the time. - Well, speaking of relief, the New York Times reports that after decades of religious decline, people have stopped leaving churches. Now, it doesn't point to a revival necessarily, but maybe people like the feeling of something familiar in uncertain times, how does that sit with you? - That might be, yeah, I just don't know how durable that changes. I mean, the larger trend is of a massively secularizing change in our culture over the last quarter century. But no, I could well imagine people want community and they want real world experiences and it's comforting to be inside a church. And I love churches, right? I love setting churches. So I get it, but yeah, I don't know what to draw from that headline. - Well, I wanna play a video for you and get your thoughts on this. Can we play the Rubio clip speaking of religion here? - We were all created. Every single one of us before the beginning of time by the hands of the God of the universe and all powerful God. - Did you see this? - Yeah. - Who loved and created us for the purpose of living with him in eternity? - God, this is Rubio. - He entered the world in separate of the world. - The atheists don't make content anywhere near this inspire him. - He's found the form of a man and came down and lived among us. - I don't find this inspiring. - This is so much fun. - Oh, yeah, music. - He died like a man. - All right, I think we see enough. - Okay, yeah, I mean, I haven't really tracked Rubio's level of religious fanaticism. I mean, I think someone like Pete Haguezath, I get quite worried because he clearly, someone who's making decisions based on his Bible thumping. - Well, I was gonna ask you that because I thought, like, if you had to pick one Republican to take over in 2028, if you had to do that, I would have assumed it would have been someone like a Rubio. And then seeing this video, I thought, wait a second, where did this come from? But even with this video, I still think. - I mean, who knows what this guy believes, right? This is very few people have shown themselves to be this malleable in the face of political imperatives. He is someone who rightly identified Trump as a con man, who was destroying conservatism. And now he's Secretary of State and just a podium's licks battle. - Well, I mean, so I think the only reason why I view him differently from someone like Pete Haguezath is that he was a sort of normal politician with a normal degree of qualifications for his role, right? So he's not, he's not egregiously unqualified to be Secretary of State or President or any other. It means he's a normal candidate for these kinds of roles, whereas Pete Haguezath is mostly a Fox News personality, though he can bench press 300 plus pounds, which is genuinely impressive. And just a proper religious maniac by all appearances. So he seems quite a bit scarier to me, but yeah, maybe this is sincere from Rubio. I don't know. He's just a shape-shifting opportunist as far as I can tell. - Speaking of people selling religious maniacs, did you see that video when I played this for you of Greg Phillips from FEMA who claimed that he had time traveled to a waffle house? - I forgot who it was. - Yeah, I know the story. - Could we play that clip real fast? - We had a teleport incident two of them, which transported me about 40 miles from where I was in near Albany, Georgia to the ditch of a church and up at a waffle house like 50 miles away from where I was. - It was an incredibly frightening moment to experience yourself in your car flying through the air. It was possible. It was real. (laughing) - I wanna be hanging out with her after that interview ended. Jesus, is it FEMA? - Yeah, man, we can all sleep peacefully at night knowing that our emergencies will be responded to by a man who's convinced of the physics of teleportation. Who among us hasn't teleported at some point to a waffle house? Jesus. - I think 50 miles is reasonable. - Yeah. - I think we're in 500. - I just don't know, he was shit. - Yes, to be unconscious while driving 50 miles, that seems normal. - I think you've had ambient experiences like that. - I don't know, but it's been that fun. - Unvolvable. The last time we went to the moon, you were a kid. How do you feel about this latest mission to the moon? - I'm amazed at how little bandwidth it's taken up for anybody. I haven't seen, you know, different time, we would see a lot of press coverage of this. I haven't seen nearly as much as, you know, it's sort of at this level of this guy teleporting to a waffle house in my algorithm. I mean, I think it's great. You know, I think it's amazing that we do this sort of thing, but it's amazing how little bandwidth we have for nice news stories like that. - Yeah, we had a very uniting, if short lived moment when the US hockey team won the gold medal earlier this year. Do you think this mission will do anything for us on that level, maybe when they have a parade, when they get home or no one's gonna care? - No, I think we're pretty jaded at this moment and distracted for obvious reasons. I'd be surprised if the, if the ticker tape parade got much coverage, you know, there'll be 100,000 old people on CNN watching it. But, like the Rose for it. - Yeah. - What do you think we could do as a society to bring us closer together? So anything we could do right now? - Get off social media. I think that would be to uncouple us from all the maniacs, from the, you know, the 10% of us that are trolls and lunatics and bots and grifters and just dial down some of that noise so that we can get a little more signal. I think that would, that would be good. If all the social media people pulled the plug on social media, I think they would all deserve, I told Jack Dorsey this, you know, when he was running Twitter, if he just pulled the plug on Twitter saying, "Sorry, this just didn't work out, guys." He would deserve the Nobel Peace Prize and I think that's still true. It's probably even more true now. - I'm gonna shift topics here. It's a great question from a sub-stack subscriber. You said conversations with people you strongly disagree with can be unproductive. Hard to fact check in real time prone to confusion, but you've also argued that conversation is our only alternative to violence and your early debates on religion showed you engaging calmly and rigorously across deep disagreement. In recent years, many of your guests seem to largely share your views with differences mostly in emphasis. There's a real value in surfacing expertise, reinforcing important ideas, but do you worry it comes at the cost of one of your genuine strengths, modeling how to engage thoughtfully with opposition? Most real world disagreements are messy and emotionally charged. Isn't there still value in just demonstrating how to navigate those well, even if the conversation isn't perfectly clean? - Yeah, up to a point. I think some of those conversations are useful. I keep looking for the ones that I think will be useful. I think there's generally greater utility in when there's something to learn about an issue or something to figure out, bringing on someone who really knows their stuff and just helping me learn more in real time in front of my audience. So I'm thinking about the consequences of Trumpism and having Trump for a second term and just the way the rest of the world perceives us and the loss of American leadership and et cetera, all of that. If I bring on someone who I know I'm gonna agree with, but who just knows much more about certain details than I do, I bring on someone like Ann Appelbaum, who can just give me the view from the other side of the world with much more historical context and it's just deep in the weeds on the way propaganda works and the way democracy is unravel and all the relevant historical analogies. So I'm not gonna disagree with that about much if anything, but that's not the point. The point is to hear what she has to say and to learn a little bit more each time I do that. I think that's usually more useful than me getting some person on who stridently disagrees with the position I already have and I just know going into it that it's just going to be an exercise in my attempt into showcase their errors, which I already understand to be errors. So someone who doesn't really understand jihadism at all and doesn't believe in it and thinks it's all economics and politics and bluffing, okay, I can get that person on for another two hour round of brain damage, but it really is just brain damage, right? Now it's not to say that it's not gonna be useful or for some people in the audience to see me hit those pitches again and again, but I've done it so many times. I'm not sure about the value of continuing to do it and it also runs a risk of being confusing to some people anyway because certain moves are reliably confusing, right? - Well, I think people like the conversations you're having. I think it's just, it feels as though you've been just avoiding the chance that having a bad conversation and they feel that many of them can learn from a bad conversation. - But I just don't see, like, I mean, who are we talking about? I mean, I'm gonna talk to someone like Hassan Piker, would that be fun? No, not really. I mean, I don't think anyone should be listening to this guy, right? So it just seems like-- - Well, that's a different point. I think what they're saying is there are bad conversations that they're constantly having and they can still learn how to have a good conversation and a bad conversation or how to navigate a bad conversation. And with you lately just saying, fuck it, I'm not gonna have bad conversations anymore because it's just not the best. best use of my time or not going to spend two hours on this. I think that a lot of people are saying, well, even from those bad conversations, I don't think they mean the Omar Z's conversation examples. Well, I mean, so I'm going to talk to Ben Shapiro. I anticipate that being a potentially bad conversation, at least for half of it. I mean, half of it will agree about certain things, but part of it will be exposing a fair amount of daylight between us around Trump and current American politics. So I'm going to go into that thinking we both might get somewhat uptight in this conversation, at least for part of it. And I'm not avoiding it. I think it's useful because Ben is a serious enough person with a big enough audience that it's useful to try to make some sense in his direction. What I talk to Candace Owens, I don't think so. I mean, she's got a even larger audience, but she's a total lunatic. And I'm not sure. I mean, I could approach it the way I approached the conversation with Doug Wilson, the pastor who I knew just how far out he was as a fundamentalist, but I approached that differently than I might have. I mean, I was not looking for conflict. I was looking, in that case, I trusted my audience to understand what's wrong with a pastor who will sign off on maybe one day bringing chatty slavery back because it's in the Bible. And so that's obvious enough that I don't have to dunk on that point. I don't have to say, "Oh, well, I just hope it's clear that I'm against chatty slavery." So it's just, you can just be more of an anthropologist there, rather than somebody who's going to dig in and really have a debate. My conversation with Ross Douth, that we did not agree. That was the quality of a debate about religion. I think he's more of a religious extremist than people appreciate. And I feel some of that came out in our conversation. He's surprisingly extreme in his claims to his faith claims, given that he's also trying to function as a normal journalist at the New York Times. So those are not totally, those are somewhat adversarial conversations, but they're not to talk to someone like, I don't know, again, I just brought up Hassan Pekr, random, someone like him. He's just kind of a performance artist. He's a deeply confused, I think, fairly a moral, fairly juvenile person in his ethics. He's just a bit of a nutcase and dishonest. So it's such a mess. There's so much bad faith that you have to anticipate going into a conversation like that. My first question is, why do it? Because it can stand the chance of being genuinely confusing, certainly to anyone who's sort of in his audience, because there's just so much asymmetric warfare. It's so much easier to make a mess than to clean it up. That's why I wouldn't talk to someone like RFK Jr. RFK Jr. is basically a nutcase. There's something wrong with the guy. He's a liar, absolutely a liar, but he's also a kind of a confabulator. He's a bullshit artist. And also I just think a little crazy. So you're dealing with all of that. It's very hard to do in real time. Again, for the kinds of things he's crazy about, what you want is someone who's deep in the weeds on the science of vaccines and immunology and just, you know, virology and all of it, right? So I'm the wrong guy to have that conversation. I've always said that. It's not to say I couldn't take a month of my life and get up to speed on some of that, but it's just not worth a month of my life to do that. So all of it is just, at this point, you have to have a life as too short module in your brain and consult it occasionally. And for many of these conversations that people seem to want me to have, I have to say life is too short for many of them. And it's not to say, I mean, given the right candidate, you know, I might jump at the chance. Again, I mean, you know, the monk debates, I think, they asked me to debate Tucker Carlson and I was surprised to find myself saying, yes, without any reservation, really, because Tucker has become such a fixture in our politics, but that seems to have evaporated. So I don't know what happened there. I'm sure he said, no, but so I would do that. I would do something like that. But again, it really has to be worth it. Well, Rogan has said he doesn't want to talk to you publicly until you've debated Brett Weinstein. Is that something you consider doing? Oh, well, no. I mean, for the same reasons I wouldn't debate RFK Jr. I mean, it's just, it's very disconcerting not to know whether someone has lost their mind, right? Like, when you look at someone like Brett speak, he just seems to be the picture of reasonableness, right? He's not getting blown around by his emotional life, or really, it's certainly not in any obvious way when he's, certainly not on a podcast with Rogan. So he's not, he's not an Alex Jones, like character where he's, you look at the way he's delivering the lines and you think, okay, this is kind of a case study in, you know, chemical imbalance or something, right? Like what we need is a psychopharmacologist before anything else happens here so that we can, we can try to get this guy back to some physiological baseline. That's not happening with Brett at all. And yet the things he says are equivalently crazy and the certitude with which he says them, it's totally indefensible, right? So you take his reasonabearance on Rogan and you stick what his claims into any else LLM and what you get is just a litany of obvious errors. And I did that for Joe. I sent him a link to my chat GPT session like Joe, just, here's a sanity check. Listen to what the robots say about what Brett was giving you on this most recent podcast. And he didn't seem to want to do that. So he's still convinced that Brett was right about everything though Brett thinks that 17 million people were killed outright by the vaccines and that I've remected is still worth taking. I don't know how to interact with that. But what requires is if we're going to be done at all, I mean Brett is just the, you know, Brett is not someone to take seriously on this topic. But you know, if you were forced to take him seriously because he's made so much noise about it, what you want is someone who's deeper in the weeds on the relevant science than either of us are and let that guy or gal have the debate. And that's what I urged Joe to do. I mean Joe was wrong there. That wasn't urging that I do a postmortem on COVID about RFK Jr. or Brett or anyone else, any other lunatic he's had on his podcast. I was urging that he have the relevant experts do it. I mean, it's not my wheelhouse, right? It should, you know, I'm not going to, unlike many of these guys, I'm not going to pretend it's my wheelhouse knowing that I can be a quick study and sound like I know what I'm talking about. I'm not an immunologist. I'm not a virologist. I'm not an epidemiologist. I want to be all three of those things. Like everyone else on the internet? Yeah, yeah, to have this conversation responsibly. But I know enough of what mainstream science thinks about what happened during COVID to know that Brett doesn't make any sense on the topic. Yeah, not the question while we're on Rogan. You've been critical of Rogan's responsibility and the spread of misinformation, but he's taken basically the same approach since he was bullshitting stone in his living room with an audience of a few thousand. But his fault, his audience has become huge. Isn't the real problem that the epistemic institutions have trashed their credibility and the audience is lacking discernment? Well, it's both, but I think I sent you this clip of the algorithm, served me of Joe talking to Theo Vaughn. And Theo was, you know, just kind of melting down around his anxiety about everything that seemed super worried about the war in Iran and worried about Israel, like I guess. I mean, I was, I forget about some of the specifics of the clip, but they went on for like 10 minutes, kind of casting down on everything and then they had it seemed to have a lot of time for some, I think, was CIA conspiracy theory, which was getting delivered to them on, look like a short YouTube clip or a TikTok video by someone they liked and, you know, it was probably a rehash of MK Ultra or some old story about the CIA putting LSD in the water or something they did in the 1950s or something. But, you know, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, they need to do again now. Yeah, but it was a completely paranoid story about the CIA trying to make us all dumb so we will be more bovine and, and compliant. And I mean, the image I got is just two kind of pyromaniacs just lighting matches on a landscape that they had spent years soaking in gasoline, right? It's like there's, I mean, the, and this really is, it's relevant how large the audience is for this is relevant. It just, how much cultural damage is being done every time these guys basically play the just asking questions routine on, you know, socially combustible topics with tens of millions of people listening, right? It's just, it's completely irresponsible. It is genuinely dangerous. It's genuinely corrosive of our culture. It's genuinely misleading of their audience. And they, because they're not journalists, they had, they feel no responsibility to get their facts straight. They certainly don't correct their errors. And I mean, they don't have, they don't have the mechanism by which to correct their errors. It's just not, they'll even admit, they'll even admit that they'll, you know, this might be some tin, tin foil. I think Theo said that in the middle of this clip. Yeah, like this might be tin foil hat time. But, but still it's just, there's still just flicking matches at everything, right? And the worst thing about all of this is their addiction to a conspiratorial framing of everything. That is, if you could extract any lesson from what's happened to our politics in the last decade and the role that people like Rogan have played in the unraveling of everything and you know, and the way in which social media has weaponized all this and the rise of people like Tucker and Candace and Nick Fuentes and the fact that we've got Trump a second time around and central to all of it is this addiction to conspiracy. thinking and contrairing as him. And you know what I've called the pornography of doubt, right? And Joe has been as addicted as anyone and has brought it to scale perhaps more than anyone. And it's totally unprincipled. It is genuinely confusing to millions of people. I mean, you got young people getting raised on a diet of this bullshit. It's divisive. It's amplifies the worst in us. And it's undermining of, you know, yes, our institutions have done something to lose credibility, right? They have become politicized in ways that they shouldn't have become politicized. Yes, all of us true. The remedy for that is not a torrent of bullshit from podcasts and the platforming of proper lunatics and people who think they were denied the Nobel Prize when they have almost no scientific reputations to protect. No, the remedy is more good science and good journalism and real intellectual integrity and holding institutions to account in serious ways, not spreading lies and half truths and, you know, cockamé me conspiracy theories. And I mean, really, like you look at that clip of Joe and Theo who are both good guys. I mean, the paradox here for me ethically is that what I'm talking about is a species of evil, right? Given its consequences, it's a species of evil, right? It's it's like at the top of the list of what ails us in our society. It is the thing that is preventing us from solving real problems in this world. There's no question it is getting people killed and will continue to get people killed. It is absolutely toxic. And yet many of the people participated in this are just good guys who are just having fun and who are just entertaining. You just they think there's no stakes, right? This is just, they're just like athletes, right? They're just having fun. There's playing a game. Joe's just playing a game, but it has real, it's a game with real consequences, right? It's just it's like, you know, how would you play tennis? If you knew that every time you, you know, lost a point, people would die, right? I mean, like that's that's the kind of game that's being played with information now. And so people like Joe and Elon and, you know, people who have audiences in the tens and even hundreds of millions have a real responsibility to get their heads out of their asses. And they're not showing any aptitude for doing that. I'm going to move to another question. I don't like that you seem to use the term woke in the same pejorative way that those on the right do. Members can hear the full conversation by subscribing at samharris.org. Subscribers get a private RSS feed. You can use with your favorite podcast player.