Sam Harris

their views, you're just trying to, if they're sufficiently evil, you can go into it very much as an anthropologist would, you just wanna understand the nature of evil, right?

You just wanna understand this phenomenon, like how is this person who they are, right?

And that strikes me as a intellectually interesting and morally necessary thing to do, right?

So yes, I think you always interview Hitler,

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Well, when you know, once he's Hitler.

No, no, no.

If you're on the cusp of it where it's just, he's someone who's gaining power and you don't want to help facilitate that,

then there's a question of whether you can undermine him while pushing back against him in that interview.

So there are people I wouldn't talk to just because I don't want to give them oxygen.

And I don't think that in the context of my interviewing them,

I'm gonna be able to take the wind out of their sails at all, right?

So it's like, for whatever, either because an asymmetric advantage, because I just know that they can do something within the span of an hour that I can't correct for.

It's like they can light many small fires and it just takes too much time to put them out.

Yeah.

It's not that I don't think sunlight is usually the best disinfectant.

I think it is.

Even these asymmetries aside, I mean, it is true that a person can always make a mess faster than you can clean it up, right?

But still, there are debates worth having, even given that limitation.

And they're the right people to have those specific debates.