Sam Harris on Honesty, Compassion, and Ethical Leadership

Take COVID. We literally could not agree that we had a pandemic on our hands that was worth taking seriously. And we have something like half of our society now still that is quite sanguine about getting COVID... and quite scared to get vaccinated for COVID.

We need to get to a time where we care no more about differences in skin color than we care about differences in hair color. Differences in hair color have no moral or political significance, and they shouldn't.

There's somebody in, you know, Syria right now who has your intellectual gifts ... There's somebody in Syria who's got that but does not have the opportunities. And I'll put a finer point on it: And they're going to die today through no fault of their own.

You don't want to be the kind of person who lies to people. You don't want to be the kind of person who has to keep track of one's lies. If you know you're not going to lie ever, there's nothing to keep track of.

The whole Trump phenomenon was a confection of social media as far as I can tell ... He would not have been president and not have almost been president a second time around but for Twitter and Facebook.

To call someone black is to ignore that there's more genetic diversity on the continent of Africa than anywhere else.

Much of the media business model is predicated on keeping us in that situation where we explode over every thought crime or perceived thought crime.

I think ethics are the most important topic we ever really touch. It's the operating system for basically every attempt at cooperation and civilization really.

I think that being angry is almost never useful in the purposes of actually trying to have a conversation and trying to rectify a difference of opinion.

I do think much of my engagement on Twitter has been counterproductive.

Unless we understand how consciousness emerges or what its status is ontologically, we won't know whether we've built conscious robots.