Sam Harris vs Bret Weinstein on COVID vaccines | Lex Fridman Podcast Clips

I think the criticism that people woulduh would say about your uh talking aboutcovet and maybe you can correct me butyou were skeptical or you were againstskepticism of the safety and efficacy ofthe vaccineso people who get nervous aboutthe vaccine but don't fall into theusual anti-vax Camp which I think therewas a significant yeah enough number ohyeah they're asking they're gettingnervous I mean I especially after thewarn of Afghanistan and Iraq I too wasnervous about anything where a lot ofmoney could be madeand you start you just see how thepeople who are greedy who come they cometo the surface all of a sudden and a lotof them that run institutions actuallyreally good human beings and I know alot of them but it's hard to knowhow those two combined together whenthere's hundreds of billions trillionsof dollars to be made and so that'sskepticism I I guess you this the sensewas that you weren't open enough to theskepticism I understand that people havethat sense I'll tell you how I thoughtabout it and think about it one again itwas a moving Target so there was a pointin the timeline whereit was totally rational to expect thatthe vaccineswere were both working but both theywerethey were reasonably safe and that andthat covid was reasonably dangerous andthat the trade-off for basicallyeveryone was it was rational to getvaccinated given how many given thelevel of testing and how many people hadbeen vaccinated before you given what wewere seeing with covid rightum that that was a forced choice you'reeither gonna you're eventually going toget coveted and the question is do youwant to be vaccinated when you do rightthere was a period where that forcedchoice where it was just obviouslyreasonable to get vaccinatedin especially because there was everyreason to expect that while it wasn't aperfectly sterilizing vaccine it wasgoing to knock down transmission a lotand that matters and so it wasn't just apersonal choice you were actually beinga good citizen when you decided to runwhatever risk you you were going to runto get vaccinated because there arepeople in our society who can't actuallycan't get vaccinated I mean I knowpeople who can't take any vaccinesthey're so they're so allergic to I meanthey they in their own person seem tojustify all of the fears of theanti-vaxx cult I mean it's like they'rethe kind of person who Robert Kennedy Jrcan point to and say see vaccines arewill [ __ ] kill you right becausebecause of the experience it and theyand were still they I know people whohave kids who fit that description rightsoum we should all feel a civicresponsibility to be vaccinated againstegregiously awful and transmittransmissible diseases for which we haverelatively safe vaccinesto keep those sorts of people safe andthere was a period of time when it wasthought that the vaccine could stoptransmission yes and so again all ofthis is it has begun to shiftum I don't think it has shifted as muchas Brett Weinstein thinks it's shiftedbut yes there are safety concerns aroundthe MRNA vaccinesespecially for young men right as far asI know that's the that's the purview ofthe of of actual heightened concernum but alsothere's there's now a lot of naturalimmunity out there a lot of basicallyeveryone who was going to get vaccinatedhas gotten vaccinated the virus hasevolved to the point in in in thiscontext whereit seems less uh dangerous you knowagain I don't I I I'm going more on onthe Siemens than on on Research thatI've done it at this point but I'mcertainly less worried about gettingcovet I've had it once I've beenvaccinated I feel like it's like so youask me now how do I feel about gettingthe next boosterI don't know that I'm going to get thenext booster right so so I I wassomebody who was waiting in line at fourin the morning you know hoping to getget a some overflow vaccine when it wasfirst available and I that was at thatpoint given what we knewor given what I thought I knew based onthe best sources I could consult andbased onyou know based on anecdotes that weretoo Vivid to ignore you know both dataand and personal experienceumit was totally rational for me to towant to get that vaccine as as soon as Icouldand now I think it's totally rationalfor me to to do a a different kind ofcost benefit analysis and wonder listendo I really need to get a booster rightyou know like how many of the how manyof these boosters am I going to get forthe rest of my life really and how safeis the MRNA vaccine for a man of my ageright and do I need to be worried aboutmyocarditis for you know all of that iscompletely rational to talk about nowmy concern is thatat every point along the wayI was the wrong person and and BrettWeinstein was the wrong person andthere's many other people I could add tothis list to have strong opinions aboutany of this stuff I just disagree withthat I thinkyes in theory I agree 100 but I feellike experts failed at communicating notat doing they did I I and I just feellike you and Brett Weinstein actuallyhave the tools with the internet giventhe engine you have in your brain ofthinking for months at a time deeplyabout the problems that face our worldthat you actually have the tools to dopretty good thinking here it's theproblem I have with that but there wouldbe deference to experts and pseudoexperts behind all of that well thepapers you would stand on the shouldersof giants but you can surf thoseshoulders better than the Giantsthemselves but I knew we were going todisagree about that like I I I saw hispodcast where he brought on theseexperts who had many of them had theright credentials but for a variety ofreasons they didn't pass the smell testfor Me Maybe One larger problem thisgoes back to the the problem of of howwe rely on Authority and science is thatyou can always find a PhD or an MDto to Champion any crackpot idea rightyou could I mean it is amazing but youcould find phds and MDS who would sit upthere in front of Congress and say thatthey thought smoking was not addictiveyou know or that it was not harmful toyou know there was no direct linkbetween smoking and lung cancer youcould always find those people and youcould end so but you know some of thepeople Brett found were people who hadobvious tells to my point of view to myeye I mean and I saw them on some of thesame people were on Rogan's podcastright andumand it's hard because if a person doeshave the right credentials and they'renot and they're not saying somethingfloridally mistaken and we're talkingabout something whereit's they're genuine unknowns right likehow how much do we know about the safetyof these vaccines right it's it's atthat point not a whole hell of a lot Imean we have no long-term data on mRNAvaccinesbut to confidently say that millions ofpeople are going to die because of thesevaccines and to confidently say thatIvermectin is a Panacea right Ivermectinis the thing that prevents covet rightthere was no good reason to say eitherof those things at that moment andthat's and then and so given that that'swhere Brett wasI felt like there was there was just nothere was nothing to debate we were boththe wrong people to get be getting intothe Weeds on this we're both going todefer to ourchosen experts his experts look likecrackpots to me andumor at least the ones who are mostvociferous on those most on thoseedgiest points it seemed most and yourexperts seem like what is the term Masshysteria I forgot that well no but it'slike it's like with you know climatescience I mean this this old uh it'sreceived as a Canard for for in half ofour society now but the claim that 97 ofclimate scientists agree that humancause climate change is a thing right sodo you go with the 97 most of the timeor do you go with the three percent mostof the timeit's obvious you go with the 97 most ofthe time for anything that matters it'snot to say that the three percent arealways wrong again the the there arethings get overturned and yesas you say I've spent much more timeworrying about this on my podcast thanI've spent worrying about covid areinstitutions have lost Trustfor good reason right and and it's itit's an open question whetherwe can actually get things done withthis level of transparency and andpseudo-transparency given ourinformation ecosystems like can we fighta warreally fight a war that we may have tofight like the next Nazis can we fightthat war when everyone with an iPhone isshowing just how awful it is that thatlittle girls get blown up when we dropour bombs right it's like could we couldwe as a society do what we might have todoto get actually get necessary thingsdone when we're living in this thispanopticon of just you know everyone's ajournalist right everyone's a scientistEveryone's an expert everyone's gotdirect contact with the facts or or someor a semblance of the facts I don't knowI think yes and I think voices likeyours are exceptionally important and Ithink there's certain signals you sendin your ability to steal me on the otherside in your empathy essentiallyso that's the fight that's the mechanismby which you resist uhthe dogmatism of these this binarythinking and then if you become atrusted person that's able to considerthe other side then people will listento you as as the aggregators thecommunicator of expertise because thevirologists haven't been able to be goodcommunicators I still to this day don'treally knowwhat is the what am I supposed to thinkabout theum safety and efficacy of the vaccinestoday as it stands today right what arewe supposed to think what are wesupposed to think about testing what arewe supposed to think about theeffectiveness of masks or lockdownswhere's the great communicators on thistopic that consider all the otherconspiracy theories all the other allthe communication that's out thereand actually aggregating it together andbe able to say this is actually what'smost likely the truth and also some ofthat has to do with humilityepistemic humility knowing that youcan't really know for surejust like with depression you can'treally know for sure yeah where is theI'm not seeing those Communicationsbeing effectively done even still todaywell I mean the jury is still out onsome of it and again it's a movingTarget and and some of it I mean it'scomplicated some of it's aself-fulfillinguh Dynamic where like so like lockdownsin theory lockdowns a lockdown wouldworkif we could only do it but we can'treally do it and there's a lot of peoplewho won't do it because they'reconvinced that it's a this is thetotalitarian boot you know on finally onthe neck of the of of ofthe good people who umuh are always having their interestsintroduced by the elites right so likethis is if you have enough people whothink the lockdown for any reason in theface of any conceivable illness right isjust code for the new world order comingto [ __ ] you over and take your gunsright okay you have a society that isnow immune to reason right becausethey're they're absolutely certainpathogens that we should lock down fornext time right and and and it wascompletely rational in the beginning ofthis thing to lock down given to attemptto lock down we never really locked downto attempt some semblance of lockdownjust to quote bend the curve to spareour health care Systemgiven what we were seeing happen inItaly right like that moment was it wasnot hard to navigate at least in in myview it was obvious at the time inretrospect my views on that haven'tchanged except for the fact that Irecognize maybe it's it's justimpossible given the nature of people'sresponse to that kind ofDemand right we live in a society that'sjust not going to lock down unless thepandemic is much more deadly right sothat's a point I made which you know wasmaliciously clipped out from some otherpodcast where someone's trying to makeit look like I want to see children dielook there's a Pity more children didn'tdie from covet rightum this is uh it was actually the sameperson who who uh and that's the otherthing that got so umpoisoned here it's like that person thisthis psychopath or effective psychopathwho's creating these clips of me onpodcasts the second clip of meuh seeming to say that I wish morechildren died during covet which but itwas it was so I was so it was so clearin context what I was saying that eventhe clip betrayed the context so itdidn't actually work this psycho andagain I don't know whether he actuallyis a psychopath but he's behaving likeone because of the incentives of Twitterthis is somebody who Brett signalboosted as a as a very reliable sourceof information right he he keptretweeting this guy at me against meright and this guy at one glance I knewhow unreliable this guy was right but Ithink II'm not at all set one thing I think Idid wrong one thing that I do regret onething I have not sorted out for myselfis how to navigate the theprofessional and personal pressurethat getsapplied at this moment where you have afriend or an acquaintance or someone youknowwho's behaving badly in public or orBehaving Badly behaving in a way thatyou think is bad in publicand they have a public platform wherethey're influencing a lot of people andyou have your own public platform whereyou're constantly getting asked tocomment on what this this friend or oracquaintance or colleague is doingI haven't known what I think isethically right about the choices thatseem forced on us and at moments likethis so like I've criticized you inpublic about your interview with Kanyenow in the case in in that case Ireached out to you in private first andtold you exactly what I thought and thenwhen I was going to get asked in publicor when I was touching that topic on myuh podcast I more or less said the samething that I said to you in privateright now that was how I navigated thatmomentum I did the same thing with you withElon uh at least on at the beginningumyou know this we have we have maintainedGood Vibes that was just which is notwhat another Elon but I don't think I Idisagree with you because Good Vibes inthe moment there's a deep core of GoodVibes that persists through time betweenyou and Elon and I would argue probablybetween some of the other folks youmentioned I I think with Brett I failedto reach out in privateuh to the degree that I should have andwe never really had a we we had tried toset up a conversation in private thatthat never happened butum there was some communication butit would have been much better for me tohave made more of an effort in privatethan I did before it's Spilled Out intopublic and I would say that's true withother people as well