Sam Harris

Yeah.

I mean, we'll talk about AI.

There are reasons to be very concerned about taking this out of human hands, but that suggests that the whole thing is totally untenable.

And even the ethics of it, when you think about a retaliation in response to a perceived first strike, that is something I spoke about, I believe, with William Perry when he was on the podcast

I mean, I just I don't think it feels like we haven't thought through the psychology of the moment.

I mean, imagine you're the president of the United States and you have information that your enemy, let's say it's Russia, has just launched a full first strike seeking to destroy American society.

The idea is that given that information and given the 15 or 30 minutes you have left to respond, that it's the policy of the United States and it's actually possible that someone's going to follow this policy.

to just unleash our own genocidal retaliation, just get the missiles out of the silos before they get destroyed, so that we can kill 100 or 200 million people on the other side, quite pointlessly, right?

Nothing is accomplished.

You have not protected anyone on your side by doing this.

And yet it's imagined that a U.S.

president is going to feel that that is what he or she wants to do in their last minutes of life.

It really is out of Dr. Strangelove that we got into this situation.

So let's talk about proliferation and why it hasn't proceeded further than it has.

We've got nine countries now that have nuclear weapons.

If I'm not mistaken, that's the US, Russia, China, the UK, France, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea.

But many others have toyed with developing them.

And South Africa even had a stockpile at one point and then dismantled it in 89.

And then obviously Ukraine and Belarus and Kazakhstan had weapons that were Soviet weapons that they...

gave back when the Soviet system collapsed.