Sam Harris

And we've been worrying about that on both sides of the aisle for a very long time.

I mean, that phrase came from Eisenhower.

It's... I mean, so much of...

what ails us is a story of bad incentives, right?

And bad incentives are so powerful that they corrupt even good people, right?

How much more do they corrupt bad people, right?

So it's like, at minimum you want reasonably good people, at least non-pathological people in the system trying to navigate against the grain of bad incentives and better still,

all of us can get together and try to diagnose those incentives and change them, right?

And we will really succeed when we have a system of incentives where the good incentives are so strong that even bad people are effortlessly behaving as though they're good people because they're so successfully incentivized to behave that way, right?

So it's almost the inversion of our current situation.

So yes,

And you say I changed my mind about the war.

Not quite.

I mean, I was never a supporter of the war in Iraq.

I was always worried that it was a distraction from the war in Afghanistan.

I was a supporter of the war in Afghanistan.

And I will admit, in hindsight, that looks like...

you know, at best a highly ambiguous and painful exercise, you know, more likely a fool's errand, right?

It's like that, you know, it did not turn out well.

It wasn't for want of trying.