Sam Harris

And, and not like,

to actually run anything to ground, right?

You have to actually do the work journalistically and scientifically and run it to ground, right?

So for some of these questions, you actually have to be a statistician to say, okay, they used the wrong statistics in this experiment, right?

Now, yes, we could take all the time to do that, or we could at every stage along the way

in a context where we have experts we can trust, go with what 97% of the experts are saying about X, about the safety of mRNA, about the transmissibility of COVID, about whether to wear masks or not wear masks.

And I completely agree that that broke down

unacceptably over the last few years.

But I think that's largely social media and blogs and the efforts of podcasters and Substack writers were not just a response to that.

I think it was a symptom of that and a cause of that.

And I think we're living in an environment where

people, we've basically, we have trained ourselves not to be able to agree about facts on any topic, no matter how urgent, right?

What's flying in our sky?

You know, what is, you know, what is, what's happening in Ukraine?

Is Putin just denazifying Ukraine?

I mean, like, there are people who we respect who are spending time down that particular rabbit hole.

Like, this is

This is, you know, maybe there are a lot of Nazis in Ukraine and that's the real problem, right?

Maybe Putin's not the bad actor here, right?

How much time do I have to spend empathizing with Putin to the point of thinking, well, maybe Putin's got a point and it's like, what about the polonium and the nerve agents and the killing of journalists and the, you know, Navalny and like...