Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs | Lex Fridman Podcast #365

In his second appearance, Sam Harris and Lex Fridman dig into the most divisive topics of the pandemic era. Harris defends his harsh criticism of Donald Trump and his infamous 'Hunter Biden's laptop' remark, argues why he deleted his Twitter account, and explains the friendships with Elon Musk and Brett Weinstein that frayed over COVID. The two repeatedly clash over Lex's 'power of love' philosophy versus Harris's belief in calling out bad actors, using Lex's Kanye West interview as a test case. The conversation closes on AI alignment and existential risk, nuclear war, UFOs, and a long philosophical exploration of free will, possibility, and present-moment consciousness.

• Harris stands by his remark that Hunter Biden 'literally could have had the corpses of children in the basement' and he still wouldn't have cared, because it's Hunter, not Joe.
  00:50:39
• Calls deleting his Twitter account 'unambiguously good,' saying the platform was turning ordinary people into sociopaths and making him a worse person.
  01:00:02
• Says both he AND Brett Weinstein were 'the wrong person' to have strong opinions on vaccines, but insists Brett's reasoning was flawed regardless of who turned out right.
  01:55:11
• Reveals he privately texted Lex to criticize the Kanye interview before saying it publicly, and argues Lex shouldn't have aired it at all.
  02:05:07
• Recounts privately texting Elon Musk in March 2020 to walk back his 'panic over covid is dumb' tweet, an intervention that failed.
  03:16:24
• Confirms he and Eric Weinstein were contacted by the same mysterious person about UFO videos, who promised Zoom calls with ex-CIA heads that never materialized.
  03:40:00
• Says his concern about AGI is 'unchanged' and he buys the sci-fi notion that misaligned superintelligence is a genuine existential risk.
  03:24:50

• The 'identifiable victim' bug: we give 100% of our compassion to one girl down a well but change the channel on a genocide of 500,000.
  00:05:18
• The doctor who proved stomach ulcers come from H. pylori drank a vial of the bacteria himself to demonstrate it.
  01:33:53
• Harris estimates he averaged about one tweet a day but checked Twitter up to 100 times a day on active days.
  01:00:32
• Harris says he did only about two podcasts on COVID while Brett Weinstein did roughly 100 in a row, citing it as evidence of audience capture.
  02:56:42
• Cites the view that the US lost about 300,000 people unnecessarily due to vaccine hesitancy.
  02:53:39
• Stuart Russell's alignment idea: never specify the value function up front; keep the AI permanently uncertain about human values so it keeps deferring to us.
  03:26:23
• We may have been saved from nuclear war at least twice by Soviet submarine commanders who refused to escalate.
  03:48:54
• Harris argues worry is almost never useful: either you can act on a problem or you can't, so worrying just makes you suffer twice.
  04:11:18
• He floats a radical idea: maybe only the actual is real and 'possibility' itself is just a story we tell, extending his no-free-will view to all of physics.
  04:03:30
• Harris has lived from seeing the first Pong machine in a restaurant to potentially witnessing the arrival of superintelligence.
  04:18:34