Sam Harris: What The Hell Happened?

Kanye is a person like that... It's pretty obvious he doesn't have anything interesting to say ... There's some level of psychopathology there ... The most obnoxious thing about him is his Trumpian level of self-delusion—the fact that he thinks he's a genius to rival Shakespeare and then can go an hour without saying anything interesting.

I think Elon is a truly brilliant person who is truly committed to making the world a better place ... But what Twitter has done to his brain is not at all good, and there's a lack of intellectual and moral seriousness to how he treats issues of real societal importance on Twitter. Honestly, it's fairly Trumpian.

If you couldn't figure out who Trump was for 4 years, the 2020 election should have removed the blinders from your eyes. We had a president, a sitting president, who would not, simply would not, commit to a peaceful transfer of power ... It was obvious, he was going to try to steal the election even before the election was run.

In [Dave] Rubin's case... he got inducted into a political cult, and I couldn't get him out ... His audience is just 100% Trump ... He has no career outside of Trumpistan.

We now have the spectacle of Elon [Musk] completely misusing his opportunity to live a fulfilling life ... Here's somebody who is just the poster boy for having better things to do, and yet, he just tweeting himself into a proper fugue state.

The real Trump derangement syndrome was not to have seen how appalling and dangerous and deranging it was to have a person like this get anywhere near the Oval Office.

I can't pretend to understand what's happened with Bret [Weinstein]. I just don't understand how you do a hundred podcasts on COVID and vaccines.

The only people who think Twitter is the public square are the people who are addicted to Twitter—and that is pretty much every journalist on Earth and every person in politics. It's a special cohort of addicts.

When you're just tweeting in front of 120 million people 'My pronouns are prosecute Fauci,' forget about what you're saying to the trans community... You seem to be saying that you have inside information. You're this brilliant technologist who has inside information about the origins of COVID, and you know that Fauci's hands are not clean.

You've got Bret Weinstein doing 100 episodes of his podcast in a row, or thereabouts, on the terrors of the mRNA vaccines and the sinister shadowy cabal of people who have suppressed information about the life-saving power of ivermectin. It's completely crazy.

[Dave] Rubin became far more cynical than I would have thought possible, and it's very depressing.

You tweet something. In the current system, that is not just you freely publishing your opinion for the world to read; that is an opinion that is getting fed into an outrage machine and amplified or not based on a choice, a business choice, to promulgate the most outrage-inducing and, in many cases, misleading pieces of information.

Trust in all of these institutions has eroded so quickly ... We now have this what I'm considering a kind of new religion of contrarianism and conspiracy thinking, which again, has everyone doing their own research. And almost no one is qualified to do the research they're doing, and it's obvious.

The other thing you have to keep in view was how deranged the left got with its identitarian politics, wokeism for lack of a better word, because that was the second biggest political story of the last five years. And again, it was amplified as a reaction to Trumpism.