Sam Harris

It's just gumming up everyone's cognitive bandwidth with bullshit, right?

I get that that's fun if you're a teenager and you just want to vandalize our noosphere, but...

At a certain point, we have to recognize that real questions of human welfare are in play.

There are wars getting fought or not fought, and there's a pandemic raging.

There's medicine to take or not take.

But I mean, to come back to this issue of COVID, I don't think I got so out of balance around COVID.

I think people are quite confused about what I was concerned about.

I mean, yes, there was a period where

I was crazy because anyone who was taking it seriously was crazy because they had no idea what was going on.

And so it's like, yes, I was wiping down packages with alcohol wipes, right?

Because people thought it was transmissible by touch, right?

And then when we realized that was no longer the case, I stopped doing that.

But so again, it was a moving target.

And a lot of things we did in hindsight around masking and school closures,

fairly dysfunctional, right?

I understand that people have that sense.

I'll tell you how I thought about it and think about it.

One, again, it was a moving target.

So there was a point in the timeline where it was totally rational to expect that the vaccines were both working, both they were reasonably safe and that COVID was reasonably dangerous and that the trade-off for basically everyone was it was rational to get vaccinated.

given the level of testing and how many people had been vaccinated before you, given what we were seeing with COVID, right?