Sam Harris

And again, things change

when they're for public consumption, you know, when you're, it's like, I mean, the cut for me that, you know, has just the use case I keep stumbling upon is the kinds of things that I will say on a podcast like this, or if I'm giving a public lecture versus the kinds of things I will say at dinner with strangers or with friends.

Like if you're in an elevator, like if I'm in an elevator with strangers, I do not feel, and I hear someone say something stupid,

I don't feel an intellectual responsibility to turn around in the confines of that space with them and say, listen, that thing you just said about X, Y, or Z is completely false and here's why, right?

But if somebody says it in front of me on some public dais where I'm actually talking about ideas, that's when there's a different responsibility that comes online.

The question is how you say it, how you say it.

Or even whether you say anything.

I mean, there are definitely moments to privilege civility or just to pick your battles.

I mean, sometimes it's just not worth it to get into it with somebody out in real life.

Yeah, but until it doesn't.

Because you can extend charity too far.

It can be absolutely obvious what someone's motives really are.

And they're dissembling about that.

And so then you're taking at face value their representations.

It begins to look like you're just being duped and you're not actually doing the work of...

of putting pressure on a bad actor, you know, so it's, it's, and again, the whole, the mental illness component here makes, makes it very difficult to think about what you should or shouldn't have said to Kanye.

Well, I think we have an uncanny valley problem with respect to this issue of whether or not to speak to bad people, right?

So if a person is sufficiently bad, right?

If they're all the way out of the valley, then you can talk to them and it's just, it's totally unproblematic.

to talk to them because you don't have to spend any time signaling to your audience that you don't agree with them.