Sam Harris

But beyond that initial period,

when we had a sense of what we were dealing with and we had every hope that the vaccines are actually gonna work and we knew we were getting those vaccines in short order, right?

Beyond that, and we knew just how dangerous the illness was and how dangerous it wasn't,

for years now, I've just been worrying about this as a failed dress rehearsal for something much worse.

I think what we prove to ourselves at this moment in history is that we have built informational tools that we do not know how to use, and we have made ourselves, we've basically enrolled all of human society into a psychological experiment that is deranging us and making it

virtually impossible to solve coordination problems that we absolutely have to solve next time when things are worse.

So much blame to go around, but so much of it is not a matter of bad people conspiring to do bad things.

It's a matter of, uh,

incompetence and misaligned incentives and just ordinary, plain vanilla dysfunction.

I would agree with some of that.

I'm not sure how much to read into the nanny state concept.

My fear is that there was going to be that complete distrust anyway, given the nature of the information space, given the level of conspiracy thinking, given the gaming of these tools by an anti-vax cult.

I mean, there really is an anti-vax cult that just ramped up its energy during this moment.

But it's a small one.

It's not to say that everything, every concern about vaccines is a species of

It was born of misinformation or born of this cult.

But there is a cult that is just... And the core of Trumpism is a cult.

I mean, QAnon is a cult.

And so there's a lot of lying and there's a lot of confusion.

There are...